Award-winning crime writer Paul Cleave is on his way to Queenstown to share a few tips on how to pursue a life of crime writing.
Hosted by the Queenstown Writers Festival, the event is aimed at budding and experienced writers who want to know more about the crime writing industry.
Based in Christchurch, Paul’s thriller and crime novels are well-known around the world. But he says he never intended a life of crime writing:
“Writing was always what I wanted to do. I never wanted to be Batman or Spiderman or anything like that, I wanted to be a writer. Not that I ever thought I would be. When you’re at school and you’re asked what you want to do when you leave, you’re not going to say: I want to be a novelist. That’s not realistic. No English teacher is going to encourage that.
“I was 19 when I first started trying to be a writer. I thought it would be a cool way to travel and meet people.
“As far as crime writing goes, I started writing crime because I couldn’t write horror. I really wanted to be a horror writer, but I wasn’t very good at it.”
Becoming a crime writer
Paul converted to crime writing after wandering into a Whitcoulls book shop in his early 20s and finding Obsession by John Douglas. Douglas is a legendary former criminal profiler for the FBI and an expert in unravelling the motives and mindsets of criminals. Netflix’s Mindhunter is based on Douglas, as is the Jack Crawford character in The Silence of the Lambs.
“As I read this book about real-life serial killers (the data in this book is still used to help police create criminal profiles), I thought: holy shit. This is horror. This is real-life horror. And that’s when I decided to make that switch. I decided to scare people with real-life human beings and real-life situations rather than monsters.
“I think if I hadn’t walked into that shop and picked up that book, I might never have switched to writing crime. Because what I took from that book were the elements of a serial killer, and then I created my own serial killer.”
Many of the elements of Paul’s character Joe (a janitor-turned-serial-killer) were inspired by the data and information found in Douglas’ book.
“Douglas’ books are very, very difficult to read. Real children, real people have been murdered, so it’s a heart-breaking experience to read. I don’t think I could read them again, but I took a lot out of them in terms of research that I still use.”
Paul admits that he has a strong imagination. Research, particularly on the internet, can be uncomfortable.
“Once I see something, it’s locked in my mind forever. So I’m very careful. When I do my research I particularly don’t want to see the images that go with it. […] I will say that I’m lucky; I’m 90% blind in one eye so when I’m researching stuff and there are images, I’ll cover my good eye and look at it with my bad eye so I don’t really have to see it and I can navigate beyond them!”
The crime writing process
Crime writing is an imaginative and fictional process, reminds Paul. When a writer creates astonishingly three-dimensional serial killers, some readers mistakenly begin to blur the realistic with the real.
Paul explores this topic in his latest book, The Quiet People. In it, a husband-and-wife crime writing duo ends up in the police spotlight when their 7-year-old son goes missing. Previous jokes about knowing enough to commit the perfect crime don’t help the couple’s case.
“It’s tough when you see an article that says you’re fascinated by crime or something like that. A radio station once asked if I would comment on a crime that had happened here in Christchurch as the ‘resident crime writer’. I’m uncomfortable about that. I don’t want to be a poster boy for real crime in Christchurch.
“[…] I know a lot of really nice crime writers. We’re all really nice people. You’re not thinking about dark things unless you’re thinking about the book. We’re all pretty sane. But I decided in my new book that it would be cool for the characters to have some of these experiences too – but to crank the tension up.”
Solving the Mystery of Crime Writing with Paul Cleave is on 31st October at Sherwood Queenstown. Tickets are $23 via Eventfinda.
This article is by Bethany Rogers and was originally published in the Lakes Weekly Bulletin. It has been republished with permission.
