Sulari Gentill is fascinated by what drives every day people to kill.
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“Generally publishers like to have a dead body on the first page,” historical crime fiction writer Sulari Gentill said over the phone from her Tumut home.
Ms Gentill will be joining a swathe of fellow female crime writers at this weekend’s Sisters in Crime: Cobargo Crime Convention.
“There’s an unwritten rule in crime writing that the protagonist has to bleed in every book,” Ms Gentill said.
“The wonderful thing is it’s a puzzle, a game the reader plays.
“You want the reader to solve the crime a page before or a page after the protagonist does.”
Born in Sri Lanka, the 45-year-old learnt English in Zambia as a child after her family was blocked entry to Australia due to the White Australia policy, studied mathematics and astrophysics, and became a corporate lawyer in Brisbane, before abandoning it all to write novels.
She doesn’t plan her plots, creating the story as she types.
“When I’m writing I go into a zombie type state,” she said with a laugh.
“My process of writing is organic and disorganised in a way.”
Contrary to what many readers would believe, Ms Gentill said crime writers more often than not have a finely tuned sense of humour.
“Because we work in such a dark area we are actually quite funny,” she said.
“We can be talking about torture and start laughing because the black humour comes out.”
Ms Gentill feels their is more to crime writing than the solving of brutal murders.
“We’re never just writing fiction we are holding a mirror to society,” she said.
“We are passing insight on about social issues.”
I’m very interested in sociopaths because they are manipulative, clever killers.
- Crime writer Candice Fox
Candice Fox is the daughter of a NSW parole officer and a prolific foster-carer who spent her childhood eavesdropping on tales of violence.
“I always knew the world was a dark and scary place,” she said from Melbourne while promoting her latest book Never Never, written with American author James Patterson.
“I’m very interested in sociopaths because they are manipulative, clever killers.
“They are dangerous because they are cunning, and they don’t just make good criminals but also good business people because they step over everyone.”
The avid true crime fan read her first book on child murderers at the age of seven, getting in trouble at school for sharing the macabre stories with her friends.
She studies copious amounts of true crime stories in order to make her narratives as real and relatable as possible to her readers.
“If you push someone too far into rage they can feel murderous yet not act on it, but some people do,” she said.
“A lot of killers my father dealt with were people who were just pushed too far.”
On top of her prolific writing work, Ms Fox is also slowly chipping away at a a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism through Sydney’s University of Notre Dame.
“I discovered there are only two books banned in Australia and they are both written by Abdullah Azzam who was blown up by a car bomb in Afghanistan in 1989,” she said.
Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan were both banned following an application from then Attorney-General, Phillip Ruddock, to review the classification of eight Islamic books and a film – making Australia the the only western nation to do on security grounds.
After gaining access to the books via the rare books collection at the University of Melbourne, Ms Cox can’t see a valid reason for the censorship.
“There’s no reason at all,” she said.
“They’re just short, badly written books of only about 1200 words, I think it was just due to the high profile of Abdullah Azzam.
“Nobody even knew if I could publish excerpts from the books in my papers.”
The authors convention runs from Friday, October 7 to Sunday, October 9.
