Stephanie Johnson
The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin, 2024), 304pp, $36.99
Even readers with only a passing interest in contemporary crime fiction may have the impression that female detectives now vastly overwhelm their male counterparts. Smilla Jaspersen, Phryne Fisher and Miss Marple are possibly the best-known of these crime fighters, and women readers generally celebrate this long-evolving change. ‘Why do they all have to be women?’ a keen crime reader asked me, recently, possibly unaware of the domination of the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Maigret and the many other fictional detectives that went before.
Here in New Zealand in the last two years or so, two male writers have produced winning female cops. Michael Bennett’s recent best-selling Better The Blood centred on determined sleuth Hana Westerman on the trail of utu-like murders with roots in the nineteenth century. Now, in Gavin Strawhan’s debut novel The Call, we have the courageous, risk-all Detective Honey Chalmers.
Strawhan comes to writing prose after a long and successful career in television, mostly as a series screenwriter for South Pacific. Writing for television, as most writers sadly know, is more remunerative than writing books, especially for our tiny population. Some of us will wonder if The Call has its genesis in an unsuccessful pitch for production and if that is why he was suddenly seized by literary inspiration.
Crime genre fiction or noir fiction, as has often been remarked by academics and crime writers themselves, has not historically been subjected to the same scrutiny and rigour applied to literary fiction. As recently as 2015 British writer and biographer Richard Bradford headed a chapter in his book Crime Fiction: A very short introduction with the question, ‘Can crime fiction be taken seriously?’. It seems, over the past decade as genres have blurred and shifted, that indeed, it can be. No longer do crime writers have to choose between the possibility of making lots of money or winning the Booker: as the success of Eleanor Catton’s artfully-crafted whodunit The Luminaries exemplifies, there’s always a very real chance that a literary crime novel could carry away the prize. Other high-end contemporary writers such as Kate Atkinson and our own Catherine Chidgey are also enjoying this recent elevation, where their well-written crime fiction is accepted as a means of exploring and reflecting real societal concerns. At the other extreme, there are those formulaic pulp-fiction writers who churn out what used to be known as ‘penny dreadfuls’ at thousands of words a day using hackneyed storylines and cardboard cut-out characters.
With The Call Gavin Strawhan is seeking that more literary vein of crime writing. And to an extent he finds it, coming up with original metaphors and employing elegant sentence structure that bring his story to life. Careful attention has been paid to language as much as to the plot. Honey’s mother Rachel, afflicted with Alzheimer’s, has the ‘crinkle-cut skin’ of a life-long smoker, Honey as a child had ‘mandarin hair’, a pictured female body-builder has ‘an abdomen that looked like it was made up of two rows of hard little apples’, a young man’s sparse beard is excellently described as looking ‘like a cat had coughed up fur-balls all over his face’. However, the casual reader might quickly gloss over stumbles that I found jarring, such as the clumsy final sentence of a mid-novel chapter: ‘For some reason Honey felt a chill.’ This follows Honey’s observation that she is being trailed by gang heavies: it is unnecessary.
The fictitious seaside setting of the North Island town of Waitutū is clearly and economically evoked, as are Honey’s Sandringham villa do-up, Kloe’s impoverished household, the gang headquarters of her deadshit partner and his associates, and Auckland’s muggy February nights ‘where you didn’t so much breathe the air as drink it’.
No doubt, when the novel reaches bookshops and libraries, it will be classified and placed on the crime-book shelf. It also has a strong streak of sensual romance. On Honey’s return to her hometown of Waitutū she meets up with a childhood friend. As teenagers their relationship was only ever platonic, but it blossoms tender and sexy on their reacquaintance. The erotic scenes spare no detail, which is refreshing since so many New Zealand authors abandon their characters at the bedroom door.
Strawhan is Australian and it could be that his birthplace assists with his keen ear for New Zealand idioms. He notes how we talk about being ‘off to the bach’, for example, which may not warrant mention in the work of a New Zealand-born author. Australian-born Māori, colloquially known as ‘Mozzies’, make an appearance carefully spelt ‘Maozzies’. There is a lot of swearing from all the characters, which these days is normal from all echelons of society, but the constant ‘fuck(s)’ do become a little wearisome.
It could also be that the author’s links with Australia assisted in inspiring the plot to include gangs of origin in that country, fictionalised as the Knights and the Reapers. Peter Dutton’s infamous quote about sending 501s home as being like ‘taking out the trash’ is revisited. These gangs, new to our shores, are notoriously better armed and more internationally connected than those home-grown, which has boosted their success in the local drug trade. At first glance, such trade seems motivation for Kloe, a gang wife, to contact Detective Chalmers during the early couple of chapters.
In reviewing crime fiction it is difficult not to include spoilers but comment must be made about a problem with the novel’s structure. The narrative moves around in time before and after a gang attack on Honey, in which she is badly damaged. This is her motivation for moving home, so that she and her mother can endeavour to look after one another. Too often the storyline moves forward haltingly, with too many chunks of backstory. An event happens and the reader rides that narrative wave, only to be pulled back to revisit the event from the closed third-person perspective of another (and often minor) character. This drags at narrative tension and creates a temptation to leaf forward. This is most apparent at the novel’s close after a devastating event. The character who is most affected is at a remove from the reader’s first knowledge of it, which lessens the desired emotional punch.
Honey is a likeable, admirable central character. Her newfound love for Marshall is real and tangible. Marshall is himself a delectable, complex romantic hero. Not only is he dark and handsome, but he is a fantastic gardener and cook and has a library that includes classics, philosophy, and ‘almost an entire row dedicated to Māori culture, history and language’. He is, as Honey describes him, ‘a real renaissance man’. Tough, ill-treated Kloe tugs at the heartstrings as she ricochets from one disaster to another but earns admiration for her courage and resilience. Even the ne’er-do-well gangbangers, the villains of the tale, are treated with relative sympathy. Strawhan brings a warm, mature and encompassing understanding to all his characters.
My only further comment on the plot would be that the discovery of Honey’s late sister’s journals is perhaps a little too convenient, but with the willing suspension of disbelief afforded more readily to genre novels that require a neat tidying-up of loose ends, most readers will go with it. It is necessary for Scarlett to be able to speak from the grave.
One of the most attractive aspects of the novel is the inclusion of contemporary concerns. Strawhan writes:
Bubbling away like the toxic dairy waste that filled the rivers and lakes, hiding behind the clean, green, natural beauty served up with a hearty “kia ora” for the tourists, rural New Zealand was rife with gang turf wars, hidden dope plantations, methamphetamine manufacturing, guns and extortion rackets. There had been Wild West-type shootouts on the main streets of numerous country towns.
Elsewhere he remarks on graft and corruption that reaches upper socioeconomic levels, even to associates of leading parliamentarians.
The Call won the Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize for 2023, following Josie Shapiro’s win with her novel Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts in the inaugural competition in 2022. The judges of this award ask specifically for ‘commercial fiction’, which The Call certainly is. Some might sneer at ‘commercial work’ as easily produced, but it can be hard to write, as I discovered with my novels written under my pseudonym Lily Woodhouse. Gavin Stawhan’s debut does not disappoint. Muscular, convoluted and compelling, the novel is a valuable addition to the burgeoning crime-fiction writing set on the mean streets of New Zealand.
STEPHANIE JOHNSON’s published work includes novels, non-fiction and volumes of short stories and poetry. She has also written for the stage and screen. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Achievement (Fiction).
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