AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER TEMPLE
The two books in The Jack Irish Quinella have a special place in my heart. Before them, I'd never had what I felt was a proper job. Sad, really. I'd been in reasonably gainful employment without the feeling of having a career. I was just waiting for my vocation to announce itself. Then one day I began writing Bad Debts and it dawned on me that this was what I should be doing. Four Jack Irish books later, I’m delighted to say that Jack has struck a chord in some readers. People talk to me about him in terms usually reserved for discussing close friends. I’m not saying that writing comes easily to me. Being stuck is the rule, not the exception. In fact, for me writing is one long attempt to become unstuck. I move from impasse to impasse. I've also found that inspiration isn't something that lasts beyond than a paragraph or two. Creative rushes are also to be distrusted. My ideas for books are also much too vague to be called inspirations. They take the form of images and the feelings that come with them, scenes seen and imagined, usually unconnected, isolated. I've usually forgotten them by chapter three. Bad Debts was inspired by seeing two lawyers drinking in a backstreets pub in Fitzroy, Melbourne, worldly men in dark suits talking shop and laughing a lot. Then I created the Irish family history. It fills pages and pages. Most of it I've never used but it enabled me to see Jack whole — a man in his place, in his time, in his history. It think it gives a certain depth and complexity to the character. People somethimes ask me how I plot. I must confess to doing as little as possible. I much prefer to travel without a map, falling into holes, straying down dark alleys into cul-de-sacs, waiting for the electrifying moment when the story wants to tell itself to me, when characters turn their faces to me and speak. Black Tide was the book where that first happened to me. I sometimes think that writing decent crime novels is a higher calling. People will read the most boring and pointless literary novels because they seem somehow improving. They expect to emerge as better human beings. Crime receives no such indulgence. So, even in portraying the world at its darkest, the crime writer has to be aware of what the punters have come for. And, the genre limitation aside, I think there is as much good prose in crime as in any other fiction — possibly more. But I would say that, wouldn't I?