AustLit
Hades, Candice Fox’s first novel, won the Ned Kelly Award for best debut in 2014 from the Australian Crime Writers Association. The sequel, Eden, won the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel in 2015, making Candice only the second author to win these accolades back-to-back. She is also the author of the bestselling Fall, Crimson Lake and Redemption Point, all shortlisted for Ned Kelly and Davitt Awards.
In 2015 Candice began collaborating with James Patterson. Their first novel together, Never Never, set in the vast Australian outback, was a huge bestseller in Australia and went straight to number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in the US and also to the top of the charts in the UK. Since then they have written Black & Blue, Fifty Fifty, Liar Liar, Hush Hush in the Harriet Blue series. Her books are printed in fifteen languages.
This conversation took place between Beth Driscoll and Candice Fox on 7th October, 2016.
(I: Interviewer. CF: Candice Fox.)
I: Can you talk to me about your writing career leading up to the publication of Never Never?
CF: I was published for the first time in 2013, I believe, because I won a 2014 debut Neddy [Ned Kelly Award] for Hades. I had written Hades a couple of years earlier, and it had been rejected in all my usual places where I send novels, but was actually picked up by an independent publisher in the Isle of Man, which was very odd, because it was sort of exactly opposite in the world to where I was. He was the first person who had ever said ‘yes’ to anything that I’d written. I was like, ‘Fine, I don’t care where you are, I’m getting published!’ He had the book for 18 months and then just ran out of money. I was heartbroken.
I asked my new PhD supervisor at the University of Notre Dame, if she knew anyone in publishing, and she said she knew Gaby Naher because they’d been friends when they were in their 20s. I’d never really tried that hard for agents, because I thought it would be as hard to get an agent as it would be to get a publisher. I’d focused most of my efforts on publishers, and Gaby was the only agent I tried for at that time. She agreed to a meeting, and I was actually so nervous about meeting her, because she was one of the first people I’d ever interacted with, face-to-face, in publishing.
I: Did you present the manuscript to Hachette and Random House before you had an agent?
CF: I hadn’t sent it to Random House, because Random House has a very scary ‘We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts’ warning on their website. But for Hachette, it would have just gone straight into their slush pile.
I: So, Hades was published, and did really well, and then, can you tell me about how things went from there, up to the collaboration with James Patterson?
CF: I actually, again, was so nervous about the idea that maybe they wouldn’t want more books from me that I didn’t ask them if they wanted any more books from me for a few months. Then I sort of piped up and said, ‘What if I wrote a Hades II …?’ and they said, ‘We thought you’d already been doing that!’
They asked for another one, and then [my second book] Eden won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction, so I wrote a third. Then I got an invitation for a cocktail party that James Patterson was going to be at, and I was very excited about going. That surprised my publisher. I went to lunch with her for some reason and I said, ‘Oh my god! James Patterson. I’ve been reading James Patterson since I was a little kid.’ She said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to be one of those people who collaborates with him. I know he collaborates with different authors.’ And she said, ‘Oh really? Would you do something like that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! I’d do that in a heartbeat, oh my god!’
At the cocktail party, I sort of forced my way over there to meet him, because I thought he was never going to come over and get introduced to me. The whole thing was very staged. He had an entourage of 10 people, and then he made a speech, and then he was being introduced to all the most important people in the room. I wanted to tell him how much I loved his books, so I just sort of forced my way over there and tapped him on the shoulder. I was like, ‘Oh! I love your books and I’ve been reading them since I was a little kid.’
I said, ‘I’m a writer, too,’ and he said, ‘What sort of stuff do you write?’ I said, ‘I write crime; I’ve got one that I’m writing right now, set in Cairns …’ and this sort of stuff. I wanted to keep it short; I didn’t want to take up his time, so I just sort of dashed away. My publisher grabbed me and said, ‘Were you just talking to James?’
She didn’t say anything about me collaborating with him, but she put a copy of my book in his—they give him a pack of books, like, ‘Thanks for coming to Australia, here are some books!’ He read Hades on the plane home, and just really loved it.
I learned that he was actually looking around for another author to start fresh with. They’d done Private Oz and they’d done Private Sydney and he just said, ‘I’m phasing out this Private thing, I want to start fresh.’ And, for some reason, starting fresh for him meant starting fresh with another author.
I: How did the experience of writing Never Never differ from your first novel?
CF: Writing Hades was different to writing Eden and Fall and Crimson Lake (which is my next one) and then they were different to writing Never Never. Hades I wrote completely by myself, from start to finish, with no-one looking in. So, the writing process was very organic; I did it by feel and I didn’t consider readers, or the market or anything like that. I just wrote it. Then when I wrote Eden, my agent and publisher had a look in and I also had readers giving me feedback from Hades, saying what they liked and what they didn’t like.
I: Was that feedback through Goodreads, or emails, or …?
CF: Facebook. Also, people I would meet at book talks and things, who were saying, ‘This is what I liked.’ That would have influenced how I wrote it and even more of that when I wrote Fall. The confidence level, as well, grew a little bit when I won the Ned Kelly Award for Hades. Then there was also the pressure, so I was scared, and then there’s the book two drama of ‘Can I do the same thing again, or was it a fluke?’
When I wrote Never Never, all of those stakeholders were looking in even more. I had my agent and my publisher looking in on the whole process of working with James, and then all James’s people, his assistants and all that sort of thing, were CC’d in on the emails. So, when we assembled Never Never we had all of these people watching us do it, and also my publisher and my agent, privately saying, ‘Before you send that off to James, make sure that it’s got this, make sure that it’s got that. ’ That sort of thing. So, the whole experience of writing Never Never was very mediated.
As I get higher up in my career, what I do becomes less and less solitary; it becomes sort of a mediated experience. It’s not that I don’t come up with the ideas myself; it’s just I come up with them and I tell everybody what they are, and they tell me their concerns and I make sure that I’m not concerning them, I suppose.
I’d never planned to write Crimson Lake II. I had just wanted to have a break from the Bennett Archer series, with Crimson Lake, and then they said, ‘No, we want a Crimson Lake II now.’ So, I called my publisher and said, ‘What do you want in Crimson Lake II?’ And she said, ‘We still want it to be set in Cairns, but we want some interactions down in Sydney. We want a really twisty ending, that’s very clever, and genius, and shocking.’ That’s the first time I’ve ever written a book to demand, I suppose.
I: You mentioned winning the first Ned Kelly was important for your confidence. Do you think winning those prizes has helped your career, as well?
CF: Certainly. I mean, you slap it on the cover of every book, so that must help sales. I sold the TV rights to Hades to a woman who had only read the book because she had been reading through the Neddys list .
I: I’ve got a few questions now about learning to write crime fiction . I thought I’d start off that set by asking you what you think makes a great crime novel.
CF: Relatable characters. Not only the protagonist, but also the killer; someone is always doing some killing, or being killed, in my novels. I find, if I have a killer who is very real and you can understand why they’ve done what they’ve done, that’s even a little bit scarier .
I: Do you think that you write crime differently to the way that you would write if you were writing a different genre of fiction?
CF: I do, because one of my main concerns when I try to plot a new novel is who has killed who, and why? I sort of decide on the crime and then I work backwards. So, if I was going to write another genre, I suppose I would have to find out what that central plot point is. I think if it was romance, it’d be something like, ‘Are they going to get together or not?’
I: How did you learn to write crime fiction this way?
CF: I have been reading true crime since I was a little kid. Not so much crime fiction. I’ve read crime fiction and I’ve moved away from crime fiction, then I’ve come back again. The narrative of true crime is like the narrative of crime fiction, but without all the wonderful looking into the life of the protagonists. I used to watch a lot of 80s and 90s true crime documentaries, and they all start the same way: a guy is walking his dog and the dog runs off into the bush and won’t come back, so he goes in to get the dog and he finds the body. They go through all the clues and the red herrings, and then they catch the person.
I: Can you think of any aspects of your writing craft in Never Never that came directly from another person in the crime fiction or publishing community?
CF: Only, I suppose, James Patterson! I had to write in his style, simply because most people will buy James Patterson collaboration books because they want the James Patterson part. So, all of his collaborators write in his style. I had read James Patterson back when I was a kid, but I had to re-introduce myself to his style, so that I could imitate him, his style, in the writing.
I: And did you find that difficult to do?
CF: Yeah. One of the things that I do is I always have a ‘b’ plot that interweaves through, like a braided narrative. There’s none of that in Never Never. And also, we try to avoid mixed perspectives, though he likes to have the perspective of the killer, sometimes.
It has been a shock for all my fans, who have never read James Patterson. So that was something that I had to be trained into, really. Before I would send James my bits, that I wrote, my publisher had a look at them, and then she was like, ‘No, we need a cliff-hanger here, we need a cliff-hanger there ….’ She just sort of trained me back into them. I knew what I was supposed to do, but sometimes my cliff-hanger wasn’t as explicit as it could be, so she was, like, ‘No, it needs to be tighter.’
I: When you say you knew what you were supposed to do, was there like a sort of a style guide?
CF: I got kind of a brief. James and I had had email conversations about what he wanted, so I knew it had to be a James Patterson sort of book. It had to be very tense the whole way through, lots of action. Initially, he had said a strong male protagonist, and a setting within Australia that’s not necessarily a metropolitan setting. He was a bit over the whole glittering Sydney Harbour business. I pitched some ideas back to him, because my main concern was containing the suspects.
We had that as conversations, and then he said, ‘People who write with me, first thing we do is we make an outline.’ We sort of divided it up in the usual crime fiction structure. So: person is killed, investigator is assigned to the case, red herring, red herring, bit of action, love story section, climax. And then we started filling in the different chapters.
I: Just to jump back, I asked you if it was difficult changing styles. Did you enjoy it, by the end, working in different styles?
CF: Yeah. I was writing Crimson Lake at the same time, and my character in Crimson Lake, his name is Ted, and he’s a big, gentle, lovable man, and he does a lot of reminiscing about his time in prison. Writing with Ted was like driving a big old truck, but then I jump into Harry [the protagonist of Never Never] and she’s so squirrelly, fast and unpredictable, and snappy. The two books are so different.
I: If you weren’t doing more James Patterson collaborations, do you think you would take that style or that approach to structure into your sole authored books?
CF: No! It’s too fast for me, and it’s too structured and I like to just wander. With my own work, I’ll just wander around. I won’t even put chapters in, and it’s my publishers who come along and put in chapter, chapter, chapter.
I: We’re interested in the communities of the crime genre world. Do you have other writing friends ? Do you offer feedback on other writers’ work?
CF: I don’t have time, really, to read other people’s work, and I know a lot of other writers, but I mainly interact with them on Facebook. [There’s] this place called the ‘Whine Cellar’ where we go in there and whinge about things, but already I’m finding that, even inside there, there are things that you can whinge about and things that you can’t. You can’t say, ‘I sold the TV rights to this woman, and I wanted to sell them to someone else, and now I can’t for three years.’ There would be other writers in there that would be like, ‘I DREAM of selling TV rights, or having someone interested ….’ So, I’m very careful to not sound like I’m bragging or like I’m whingeing about things that other people would desperately want.
I: This is a bit of a random jump, but do you think you’d like to do more co-authored books, or do you think you prefer writing on your own?
CF: I’ll keep the dual career happening for as long as I possibly can because it’s good for my brand, and it’s fun, and that sort of thing. I’m not sure I would like to collaborate with anyone else, because James has a whole system set up of how you collaborate and it’s very much me doing what he says in how we work, which is fine. I understand that he’s the boss and I’m working with him. And we’ve already decided to work in his style, and that sort of thing. Whereas I think if I collaborated with somebody less powerful, the whole thing would be messier, the whole process, negotiations and so on. This whole system is just perfect, because all the hard work is done.
I: The copy of Never Never that I bought at Dymocks in Brisbane is published by Random House. Was it published internationally all at once, or is this an Australian edition?
CF: It went simultaneously to Australia, the UK, and certain other territories. It’s in Italy and Spain. But it does not come out in the US until January. I didn’t really get consulted on that, or told about that, and I didn’t ask. I try not to bother my publishers too much with things that I’m just curious about. It’s selling really well, which is great. I got sent a graph the other day, and it sort of had Private Sydney, the latest Michael Bennett one from James Patterson, the latest of James Patterson’s own ones, and I could see Never Never was out-performing them, which was great. So, they send me things to cheer me on now and then, but they don’t tell me things that I don’t need to know.
I: Do you identify as an Australian writer?
CF: I feel like an Australian author because I don’t feel qualified to write things set overseas, yet. There was some discussion from my publisher and my agent about me writing something set in the US, just so that I can show people that I can, I suppose, and then also maybe to help kick up my sales in the US. I said to them that I would have to go over there.
This interview was undertaken as part of the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.
For more information on the project, go to the home page.