Author Michael Robotham has launched his latest in a series of books, Storm Child. Photo: Supplied.
Bestselling author Michael Robotham will launch his latest book Storm Child, while marking 20 years since his debut thriller The Suspect during an author talk at the Shellharbour City Library on 3 July.
Storm Child was released on 26 June and is book number four in a series that tells the story of forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven and Evie Cormac.
During the Shellharbour event, the NSW author will share stories from the new book, along with books like The Suspect, which sold more than a million copies around the world and was adapted into an ITV series starring Aidan Turner, and thriller The Secrets She Keeps, which was the basis of two BBC TV series.
Robotham will also share stories of interesting fan interactions, his best and worst research moments, and being a writer.
“For this trip, I’m really doing a highlights reel of 20 years,” Robotham said.
“I try to make it entertaining by giving people the best stories I’ve collected over that period of time about the most mortifying moments I’ve had as a writer, and then the best ones.”
Robotham said it was also a chance to talk about new novel Storm Child which, like many of his books, can be read as a standalone or part of a series.
He said through the previous three books, the full creation story of character Evie had never been revealed.
“She began in the first book as a teenager who can tell when someone is lying,” he said.
“Her true identity has never really been revealed because she was found as a child hiding in a house where a man had been tortured to death, and she refused to reveal her name or her age.
“In this book, you finally get all the answers to her background.
“The trigger is at the very beginning of this book; she watches bodies wash ashore on a beach – there’s been a tragedy in the North Sea – and that triggers something in Evie, so you get a sense that her past has come roaring back.”
Robotham said he never plotted his books, but at the end of the first book Good Girl Bad Girl he left questions unanswered, prompting a second book to fill in the missing pieces.
“I had to live with the clues I planted, because there was no other overarching storyline,” he said.
“I can tell you at the end of that second book, I didn’t know who put her in that room – it was a bigger mystery to me.”
He said he loved writing books that way.
“It’s like writing without a safety net but when I come in from my writing room – the ‘Cabana of Cruelty’ – I say to my wife, ‘You would not believe what just happened,'” he said.
“I’m genuinely surprised.
“Evie genuinely surprises me and makes me laugh, which is one of the reasons she’s probably the best character I’ve ever written, and the one that completely fascinates me most.”
Robotham’s Cabana of Cruelty is his writing room in his garden in Sydney’s Northern Beaches – named by his children after calling his basement office in their previous house his ‘Pit of Despair’.
“It’s such a beautiful office and a beautiful outlook; most people wonder how I could conjure up the mean streets when I look out to this view,” he said.
Robotham honed his writing skills as a journalist for The Sydney Morning Herald and British tabloid The Mail on Sunday, and as a ghostwriter for the likes of Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, British comedy actor Ricky Tomlinson and 60s musical legend Lulu.
He said it was ghostwriting that helped him capture a narrator’s voice, with Cyrus and Evie both narrating through the series.
“Cyrus and Evie live and breathe in my mind as though they are real people and I create voices I hope will live and breathe in the reader’s mind as well,” he said.
The author event will also celebrate 20 years since The Suspect, which was regarded as a contemporary crime novel at the time.
“Now it’s an historic crime novel, because it’s set 20 years ago, and technology has changed, fashions have changed and popular culture has changed,” he said.
“There are probably things I would edit out or wouldn’t put in the book now, because the world has moved on.”
Another of his novels, The Secrets She Keeps, was also made into a television series, starring Downtown Abbey’s Laura Carmichael.
While The Suspect was auctioned soon after writing it 20 years ago and took 17 years to make, The Secrets She Keeps was brought to screen much faster.
He said despite the TV success, he rarely thinks of the screen as he writes.
“The only thing that occurs to me at times is when I write a scene and think, well, that’s going to be expensive to film,” he said, laughing.
“Because I know now what the expensive things to film are. If something happens on a rainy day, that makes it very expensive.”
Michael Robotham’s author talk will be held at Shellharbour City Library on 3 July at 6 pm. Book via the library website.
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