Elizabeth Heritage
Blood Matters by Renée (The Cuba Press, 2023), 318pp, $40
I read Blood Matters not knowing that it would be Renée’s final pukapuka. Renée (Ngāti Kahungunu) died in December 2023. She took up playwriting in her fifties and writing crime novels in her nineties, among other artforms. Her death is a great loss to the literary and theatrical communities of Aotearoa.
Blood Matters is Renée’s second crime novel in an international two-book deal. The first in the series was The Wild Card, and both are set in the imaginary but recognisable small town of Porohiwi. Blood Matters features Māori protagonist Puti Derrell, a ‘known lesbian’, who is forced to look into the murder of her unpleasant grandfather, Matthew Derrell, from whom she has long been estranged. Puti is grieving for her beloved sister Ana, who died just before Blood Matters begins, leaving Puti as the kaitiaki of Ana’s ten-year-old daughter, Bella Rose, and her second-hand bookshop, Mainly Crime.
One of the first things we learn about Puti and Bella Rose is that they bake bread together. The bug (that is, the starter for the rēwena that they keep alive by feeding and splitting) came from Nan Mary, who in turn had it from someone else and who left it to Bella Rose along with a note:
there’s something about making bread that’s all encompassing … They say bread is the staff of life, Bella Rose, but that’s like saying bread makes itself. Yes, we should be grateful to the kneaders and bakers, but remember it’s the rēwena feeders who maintain the life.
The bread is returned to every now and again throughout Blood Matters as a regular household task until it comes into its own in a truly surprising way right at the very end. This inherited rēwena bug is a symbol of what, to me, is the main theme of the pukapuka, namely the way the present is created by the past and how our inheritance can be at once sacred and life-giving and also an unremarkable daily chore.
Inheritance, whānau, whakapapa—as well as being both holy and tedious, these can also be sites of conflict and trauma. Partway through the story, Puti is accosted by Tess Grey, who has just learned that her son is Bella Rose’s biological father. She is angry that her grandchild is living with a takatāpui person and threatens to sue for custody.
‘Blood,’ said Tess Grey, her face gaunt and furious, still staring at Bella Rose, ‘there’s a blood connection. I have rights. I know all about you and your lifestyle. … Bad blood.’…
‘Blood,’ said Bella Rose, ‘she said blood. Did she mean whakapapa? Because if she’s part of my whakapapa I’m deleting her.’…
‘Sorry, Bella Rose,’ said Puti, ‘but that’s the thing about whakapapa. We can ignore them, pretend they’re not there, never mention their name, but we can’t delete them. Once they’re there, that’s it.
‘Forever?’
‘Forever,’ said Puti, thinking if that had not been so she’d have deleted her father and grandfather thirty years ago.
Another word that gets thrown around a lot by the Tess Grey crowd is ‘heritage’. It drives me nuts to see my own name weaponised in defence of the kinds of projects that seek to, for example, preserve colonial buildings in order to keep working-class and Indigenous people away. Early on in Blood Matters, Puti responds to a call from a woman who has books to sell to the shop. She reflects that where you choose to ‘start’ history says a lot:
Puti approached the front porch of the grand entrance to what would be dubbed a wonderfully true-to-character old New Zealand homestead. A place the committee that kept a grip on old houses would fight tooth and nail to preserve, a house whose inhabitants would boast proudly that it had been lived in by four, maybe five, generations.
She always wanted to ask: who was this land taken from those five generations ago? People who’d lived there for eight generations before you came? Another one of good old Governor Grey’s shady deals, helped along by the military? Or maybe it was yet another get-the-guy-drunk-get-him-to-sign-the-paper-judge-won’t-worry-about-any-communal-consent …
The sale of these pukapuka does not go through because upon realising Puti is Māori, the woman says, ‘I didn’t know you people were interested in books.’ It’s a sneering statement but also patently ridiculous, inviting antagonism.
Some of the funniest scenes take place in the toa pukapuka Ana created and bequeathed to Puti, Mainly Crime. Renée herself used to run a second-hand bookshop, and I get the feeling that some of these stories come from real life. Timewise, Blood Matters is set very specifically in the first Covid Level 2 of 2020 when people were even more desperate than usual for the comforting predictability that crime fiction offers. Much like Puti, Blood Matters is very aware of its own whakapapa in all of the genre’s strengths and weaknesses. Making Puti a bookseller gives Renée a chance to comment on the enduring popularity of the works of the Queens of Crime despite their classist and racist kaupapa:
The very first readers of Agatha and her contemporaries had come out of a savage and brutal war followed by the influenza epidemic that had seen millions die … Who could blame readers for liking the settled world of those books, where good triumphed over evil, all the baddies were caught by the upper-class detective … and everyone in the manor and village knew their place?
Who was Puti to criticise those attitudes? … You can admire their work and the impact they made very much, thought Puti, and you can see their influence still and occasionally reread a Marsh who, once you got inside that adoration of the British upper classes and the rather stiff language, was good on theatre and puzzles.
Ngaio Marsh was ‘good on theatre’ because, like Renée, she also wrote and directed plays—as does Puti. To help herself come to terms with having to organise her hated grandfather’s tangi—that undeletable ancestor—Puti thinks of it in terms of directing a performance:
Title? The Funeral Service. The cast of one had already been chosen so she simply had to direct this last act … The organist, the choir and the mourners (yeah, right) would provide the music. Puti would organise the props, the set, front of house, lighting, speakers … And that would be that.
Writing-about-writing and all that genre-commenting and metafictional stuff is difficult to do well without patronising the reader, but Renée manages it with a deft touch. Blood Matters is often comic—for example, each chapter opens with a humorous excerpt from the fictitious Porohiwi Star newspaper in a way that reminded me of Jessica Kany’s novel A Runner’s Guide to Rakiura. Blood Matters also contains lots of local literary in-jokes—such as the bookshop Mainly Crime being on Frame Street—but these neither overshadow nor slow down the narrative. Blood Matters can easily be read on the beach as a straightforward murder mystery while also providing a lot of extra entertainment to booky types, many of whom are affectionately poked fun at.
It does seem unsettling to find murder so entertaining. In this case, the death of Puti’s grandfather is not particularly distressing since it seems clear that he won’t be missed. Instead, the horror is in the gradual revelations of the betrayal and cruelty that led up to the killing. Renée weaves together the ongoing presence of traumas past with the everydayness of life continuing as only one who lived a long life can do:
[Puti] didn’t want to bloody cope. She didn’t want to be brave, and no way in hell did she want to be resilient. What she wanted to do was sit in a corner and scream and cry and moan, but there just wasn’t time.
Puti is our point-of-view character throughout, and she is a delight with her daggy shorts, hatred of cream buns, and staunch takatāpuitanga. Renée was takatāpui herself, and, as a queer reader, I really appreciated the way that Puti’s gayness is always present without being the main plot. We learn that Puti’s sister Ana initially had a homophobic reaction when Puti came out to her as a teen a couple of decades ago and that one of Puti’s main regrets is not having truly forgiven her despite saying that she had. At one point Puti reflects on the effects of other people’s cruel words and the grudges she’s been keeping:
Did [they] ever think of the cumulative effect of such words on the lifetime of people they were directed at?
Now Puti realised that, contrary to what she thought, she was a collector—she collected words. She didn’t need a lot of money because they came free. Her collection was extensive and she didn’t even need to check it because she knew all the words off by heart.
In her wonderful and curmudgeonly queerness Puti reminds me of Keri Hulme’s iconic character Kerewin Holmes, who lives on in the literature of our country. While I was reading Blood Matters, the first ever Keri Hulme Award was presented to takatāpui poet essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Takatāpui, Clan Gunn, Horwood). Recently, ranapiri co-edited with Michelle Rahurahu (Ngāti Tahu-Ngāti Whaoa, Te Arawa, Rangitāne) the first issue of the new literary journal Kupu Toi Takatāpui, dedicated to Hulme and called Spiral, possibly after the Spiral Collective that first published the bone people. The issue features a poem by ranapiri that includes the lines:
Keri’s work is everything
… I wish she had all of us
curly haired takataa in the 80s
to show her she wasn’t an eighth of all she was
she was all of it
her voice now moving through all of our words
like a longline with a jawbone attached
Something Renée, Hulme and ranapiri all have in common is their expert weaving together of Māori and Western storytelling traditions. In her review of the work of another kaituhi Māori, Rahurahu spoke of the Māori realist literary style, which she describes as letting metaphor take shape on the page in a tangible way whereby anything can happen. Renée uses this right at the end of Blood Matters in a way that functions beautifully within the narrative. As well as giving the story a satisfying ending in a murder-mystery way, this use of Māori realism coalesces the theme of the tangible presence of whakapapa in a form of catharsis: the pakimaero ends on a profound exhale, given an extra sense of conclusiveness through being Renée’s final pukapuka. I warmly recommend this novel.
ELIZABETH HERITAGE is a queer Pākehā book reviewer and freelance publishing professional. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in the rohe of Te Ātiawa Taranaki Whānui.
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