Eric Trump
The Valley: Crime and punishment in a New Zealand city by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books, 2026), 476pp, $40
As I read The Valley, New Zealand writer and lawyer Asher Emanuel’s extraordinary debut, I also returned to Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Like Emanuel’s book, these works from the last century concern men who commit crimes and face the consequences. All three combine techniques of narrative fiction—dialogue, scene-setting, characterisation—with the factual reportage of journalism. Reading Emanuel’s book with Mailer and Capote riding shotgun was a useful exercise. It revealed how well he achieves or surpasses the goals of those earlier innovators, namely, as Capote described his ideal, to write a journalistic narrative with the ‘credibility of fact’, the ‘depth and freedom of prose’ and the ‘immediacy of film’.
Mailer and Capote belong to a tradition born in the 1960s that is still called the New Journalism. It was immersive, dramatic, occasionally over-punctuated, usually long. Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism’s founding father and most prolific dispenser of exclamation marks, reflected that no one knew what to do with ‘stylish reporting’, since ‘no one was used to thinking of reporting as having an esthetic dimension’. No one was used to Capote observing that a murderer in court looks ‘as lonely and inappropriate as a seagull in a wheat field’. Or Mailer reporting, ‘He stood naked with her, gave her the attention she needed’.
Detractors couldn’t quite trust the New Journalism. Dwight Macdonald, an early critic, clutched his outrage and decried what he called ‘parajournalism’. It was a mongrel genre that exploited ‘the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction’, producing ‘entertainment rather than information’. Capote didn’t help matters by foregoing any recording devices, arguing his memory was 90 percent sound, ‘and who cares about the other ten percent?’
As though to provoke Macdonald, Capote called his book about the crimes and executions of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two men who murdered the Clutter family, a ‘non-fiction novel’. And, as though to provoke him even more, Mailer packaged his book about the murderer Gary Gilmore and his execution as a ‘true life novel’. Mailer explains in his afterword that ‘this book does its best to be a factual account’. That same book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980—for fiction.
After decades of genre-bending podcasts, memoir, autofiction, creative nonfiction and literary and gonzo journalism, it might be hard to see what all the fuss was about. Still, it remains an implacable fact that reading audiences generally prefer to know where nonfiction ends and fiction begins. A year after Mailer won his Pulitzer, journalist Janet Cooke lost hers and her job at the Washington Post after admitting to fabricating the story of ‘Jimmy’, an eight-year-old heroin addict. Later casualties of fabulating while reporting were the New Republic’s Stephen Glass (who invented a 15-year-old) and the New York Times’ Jayson Blair, whose four-year career of fraud the newspaper called a ‘low point’ in its history.
Emanuel seems acutely aware of this journalistic background radiation and is eager to tell a great story while also rendering his methods transparent. Unlike Capote, whose book has no back matter, or Mailer, who never met Gary Gilmore and relied almost entirely on a collaborator’s research and interviews, Emanuel includes 29 pages of footnotes, a helpful glossary of legal terms, a list of names for his sprawling cast of primary and secondary characters and a final chapter titled ‘About the Research’. In this chapter, we learn he carried a notebook and dictaphone wherever he went and ‘wrote and recorded as much as I could’ for almost two years. He sought consent for interviews and paid no one for participation, though he occasionally bought lunch or gave someone a lift. Any time he intervened in the lives of those he was tracking or relied on transcripts or recordings, he meticulously recorded it in the footnotes. When he describes people’s thoughts or feelings, these ‘are things that person said to me or another person in my presence’.
Emanuel also took time to review the manuscript with the major players for accuracy, even reading it aloud over five days to one of his protagonists. He has the refreshing humility to admit that ‘A different author would have written a different book’ and ‘As with any observation, my presence undoubtedly affected events I observed’, thus dispensing with the myth of the objective journalist. By the end of The Valley, you sense Emanuel’s is the ‘best obtainable version of the truth possible’, as Bob Woodward, Janet Cooke’s more truthful colleague at the Washington Post, formulated journalism’s goal.
Still, this version necessarily remains incomplete. Emanuel’s attempts to gain full access to every force that shapes the justice system, including police, Crown prosecutors and the Department of Corrections, ended in frustration. This is why his perspective can feel narrow at times. I often wondered about the victims. How terrified was the mother whose son allegedly chainsawed through the door she was behind and then smashed an axe into the windscreen of the car she was fleeing in? How were supermarket managers affected when confronting a shoplifter who steals meat for resale? What about the witness who is warned by an apparent burglar during an active crime, ‘I will hurt you and your family’? True crime narratives tend to muffle victims’ voices. Not until 2017, for example, with the TV documentary series Cold-Blooded: The Clutter family murders, did the focus of In Cold Blood shift from the murderers to their victims. This is unfortunate. Anyone who has had even a bicycle stolen knows the offence might be ‘minor’ from the defence’s perspective, rarely the victim’s.
This is one unavoidable gap in an otherwise gripping and enlightening account that unscrolls as a complicated tapestry of New Zealand’s criminal justice system. Not since Hell is a Very Small Place, a searing collection of first-hand accounts of life in solitary confinement in US prisons, have I read an account that makes the penal experience this immediate and intimate. At the time Emanuel was writing his reportage, New Zealand’s 18 prisons held 8528 prisoners, a number that’s now at 11,255 and projected to rise to 15,200 by 2036, in part because of stiffer sentencing guidelines, according to the Ministry of Justice. As Emanuel notes, this population is part of a much wider halo that includes 23,000 people ‘under the supervision of the Department of Corrections outside the wire, either on community-based sentences or post-prison release conditions’. Unlike Capote’s and Mailer’s subjects, who were executed, most prisoners in New Zealand will one day be released. We’d like them to come out rehabilitated, but after a book replete with evidence, Emanuel writes in his epilogue, ‘In many cases, incarceration probably makes things worse’.
To transfuse life into these statistics, Emanuel follows three pseudonymous men in the Hutt Valley, ‘through courts, prison, and everyday life’ for 18 months. These three protagonists are Lewis Skerrett, a lawyer with the Public Defence Service, and his frequently litigated clients, Nathan Morley and Rikihana Wallace. Skerrett’s clients have had traumatic lives, experiencing neglect and violence when young, struggling with mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment and homelessness as adults. A duty lawyer supervisor says, ‘If I had a magic wand. Just to get rid of some of the pain … But I can’t.’ Wallace and Morley break the law often. Morley steals everything from railway sleepers to an air conditioner remote. He’s not very good at it and gets nabbed often, once while wearing high-vis to a burglary. Wallace also bumbles through his crimes, shoplifting while high and then resisting arrest. Morley has 22 sentences of imprisonment, Wallace 137 convictions.
Despite their ample criminal records, Emanuel writes, ‘they are typical of the people who make up New Zealand’s prison population’. What’s changed, he says in the epilogue, is the ‘neoliberal’ society they inhabit, one marked by changes made or under way, including ‘the construction of more prisons … a reduction in mental health and addiction services … the reintroduction of a three-strikes sentencing regime’ Morley’s and Wallace’s problems, he says, are also exacerbated by a nationwide crisis in health care, education and the economy. Finding a job in New Zealand is tough even if you’re not an ex-con.
The constant in both their lives is Lewis Skerrett, a hard-working public defender whom a judge calls ‘lugubrious’, a man poised between resolve and hopelessness: ‘harried—unshaven, slightly sweaty and wearing a creased suit’; slurping soup; vaping out a cracked car window while listening to a skipping CD. Skerrett’s two not-so-Artful Dodgers are among dozens of his clients. He also acts the part of devoted social worker, giving them rides and collecting Morley’s medicine from a pharmacy. Sometimes he’s jubilant, freeing a client on bail with time to spare for his flight to a holiday destination. At others, he despairs: ‘It was the nonsense that really got to him. At times like this, he thought his was the worst possible job.’ Nonsense, like rehab waiting for Morley to stop drinking before admission.
Emanuel’s book has no plot in the classical sense, with a beginning, middle and end. We enter in medias res, late November 2020, with Skerrett drinking coffee and waiting for court to begin, and end there, too, June 2022, with Wallace thinking, ‘People just didn’t know what it was like … to be abandoned and then to try to be good’. Crime yields inexorably to punishment, with both Wallace and Morley in and out of prison. We are right there, listening to conversations between lawyer and client, as Skerrett tries to get to the truth of what happened this time: was Wallace going to use those scissors to cut his own hair or stab Clinton, his drinking companion? Did Clinton break a window or not? And the nitty-gritty negotiations with judges, prosecution and clients about securing bail, whether to enter a guilty plea and elect a jury trial or to be tried by a judge, whether prison is preferable to residential therapy at Moana House in Dunedin. Throughout, Emanuel’s voice, without a single note of judgement (‘It’s not about me,’ he writes), guides us through the weeds.
Emanuel’s neutrality is important, for it allows readers to make up their own minds. Some, I imagine, will say the system is not doing enough to help Wallace and Morley. Their lives are violent and traumatic. They need to be fixed with rehabilitation and therapy, not stiffer prison sentences. Others will roll their eyes in exasperation and point out all the effort lavished on these two men, from devoted defence lawyers to probation officers to bail to rehab to housing and food to cultural reports to the Special Circumstances Court, a specialist problem-solving court that one judge refers to as ‘the airy-fairy therapeutic court’—and still they attract charges.
Emanuel’s reporting, writing and precise recording of dialogue are wonders of concision and restraint. Whereas Mailer, like a humpback whale lunge feeding on swarms of krill, chooses to absorb seemingly every detail into his lumpy beast of a book, from the colour of the motel-room curtains to how many sides an ashtray has, Emanuel selects and sifts his details, no skipping or skimming of pages necessary. Unlike Tom Wolfe, Emanuel hoses his sentences clean of editorialising and snark—and exclamation marks. And unlike Capote, whose prose style sometimes gets in the way of his reporting—the blown-apart faces of the Clutter family are wrapped in cotton that ‘twinkled like Christmas-tree snow’—Emanuel resists the urge to aestheticise.
His exquisitely balanced tone derives in part from what he sees as the media’s role in distorting how the criminal justice system works. ‘Fixation on the sensational has obscured what most justice actually looks like’, he writes, noting the yawning disparity between what happens in the courtroom and how and what it is reported. This is why he wanted to get away from the caricatures of popular journalism and TV crime procedurals and write a book about ‘day-to-day life in the system’. In doing so, he shows us that journalism doesn’t have to be all celebrities and listicles and giant pumpkins, as on the cover of the Otago Daily Times. He shows us what power journalism can have, if given the chance.
ERIC TRUMP is a writer and reviewer who lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. He teaches medical humanities at the University of Otago.
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