REVIEW | A gentle hero for our times

The Detective

Matthew Reilly, Orion

Matthew Reilly is famous, and justly so, for his high-octane, action-packed thrillers. International bestselling thrillers, some 22 in total, have now been translated into 20 languages with worldwide sales of more than eight million copies.

But the 52-year-old Sydney-born, Los Angeles-based author is also renowned for his utter fearlessness in probing dark themes in his novels. Arguably, none more so than in his latest novel, The Detective, which is a cleverly conceived, turbo-charged crime novel set in the darkest reaches of the American South. It is a significant departure from his previous works in that it is his first in the detective genre. But most notably, its protagonist and narrator, Sam Speedman, a private detective based in Houston, Texas, is a far cry from, say, the outsized hero of his Scarecrow series, a Marine, or the super soldier hero of his Jack West novels. Reilly himself describes Speedman as “this sweet, gentle, absolutely ingenuous detective”.

Indeed, early in the novel, Speedman confides that his therapist says he has “Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1 with aspects of Level 2”. He also reveals that he wears thick spectacles as he is extremely near-sighted, thrives on routine, is obsessive about detail and, above all, is always prepared. Part of his routine is dining regularly at the Hooters restaurant chain, where he always orders the same thing and is unfailingly courteous to the female waitstaff, who adore him. In fact, it’s hard not to be utterly beguiled by this fictional creation who serves as the lens through which Reilly probes the lingering dark legacy of slavery and racism in the US. Reilly says: “Speedman’s niceness was the plan from the start. He had to be this super nice, super genuine guy who would uncover this horrible conspiracy going back 150 years.”

Speedman’s niceness was the plan from the start. He had to be this super nice, super genuine guy who would uncover this horrible conspiracy going back 150 years.

Speedman starts pulling on the first nigh-on invisible threads in this exceptionally heinous conspiracy while working on two separate cases for two distinct clients; one is a corporate client who’d hired him to rescue a petroleum geologist from a Saudi hit squad. The other, from the parents of a missing black prostitute. But the roller-coaster road to the eventual unravelling of all is encased, rather like the proverbial Matryoshka nesting doll, in one of the most complex, thrilling, and confronting plots ever conceived, and one far, far too canny to divulge. As one reviewer put it: “The pages turn themselves.”

For Reilly, the idea for both the conspiracy and the novel itself was seeded in his mind some years ago when he first read about the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organisation founded in the 1890s, and its habit of initiating lawsuits against the removal of Confederate monuments. “I ended up going down this rabbit hole of finding out just how vigorously they fought for these monuments, which are offensive to a large portion of the population. It ultimately led me to this thing called the ‘Lost Cause’ theory, which is basically the people from the South saying: ‘Hey, we didn’t lose. Our way of life was actually perfectly fine’ — and this is the galling part, ‘Everybody was actually better off back then’. The idea of the ‘Lost Cause’ is that they’re still fighting this quiet war over 150 years later."

He goes on to say: “Actually it culminates in the Florida education standard, saying that enslaved people actually learnt beneficial things while they were enslaved.” In the novel, he weaves text from Florida’s State Academic Standards-Social Studies (2023) into the heading of a chapter set in Florida — which used to be a slave state. He even includes in his narrative the infamous reply of 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, to a journalist asking her about the cause of the Civil War. ”She bent over backwards not to say the word ‘slavery’ in that answer, and the conclusion, I think, is that the people whose vote she wanted didn’t want to hear that.”

He reminds me now of the accuracy of that quote, urges me to look it up, and says it underlines his point about the Civil War and the ‘Lost Cause’ mentality — and dovetails with the idea that the voting patterns today reflect the old delineation of North and South. “The racial issues that underlay the American Civil War really do still resonate in America now. You see it in every election, where the South is ruby red; these are the most ardent right-wing voters. Honestly, the map lines for the Civil War can still basically draw the voting lines in America right now. And what I do in The Detective is, I really just take that to the nth degree,“ he says.

He points out that when he first relocated to Los Angeles, it was the end of the Barack Obama presidency, and says: “I thought Obama was fantastic. I thought he was transformational, as a lot of people said. And I got here and met people who disliked him intensely and you could only come to the conclusion they didn’t like him because he was black. And for somebody at the extreme ends of, say, the ‘Lost Cause’ philosophy, having an African American man as president would be their biggest nightmare.”

He maintains that, “you’ve got to be very careful how you put these things, especially living here in the States, but I can back up everything that I write about, and I think if somebody wants to defend the side of the villains in this book, then it’s not a very defensible position to be in.” But he also concedes that “there is a danger. There are always unstable people out there, so there is a risk, but it’s a risk I’m prepared to take. I think being able to shine a light on things like this in fiction is one of the advantages of my position.”

Reilly is, of course, no stranger to risk. He wrote his first novel Contest aged 19 while at university and took a rather different kind of risk when, after being rejected, he self-published 1,000 copies and sold them to Sydney bookshops one at a time. A copy was later purchased by a commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan who tracked him down to offer him a two-book deal based on Contest and the first few chapters of his second Ice Station novel. An instant hit, Ice Station was snapped up by major publishers in the US, UK and Germany, and he has never looked back.

He relocated to the US in 2015, partly to start afresh after the tragic sudden death of his first wife aged 36, in 2011, which left him bereft and unable to write for a long period. He also wanted to be closer to the US film industry. Many of his novels have been optioned for film but not made, so in 2022 he co-wrote and directed the Netflix Interceptor — starring Elsa Pataky with her husband Chris Hemsworth as executive producer. Deeply in thrall to film, he is also an avid collector of film memorabilia, all of which, including his Back to the Future sneakers and a life-sized Han Solo (from Star Wars) in carbonite, is housed in his writing cottage. ”Han Solo is standing right behind me when I write,” he says.

A stickler for accuracy who always travels to all the settings for his novels, Reilly admits to being a lot like Speedman: “My wife can tell you I can be very literal and I often don’t get jokes. And I’m either obsessive about writing or on the spectrum. It just makes me happier at the end of the day to have worked on something, created something. If I don’t, I feel a little miserable. It’s an addiction, a legal addiction.” Unsurprisingly, he has already written a sequel to The Detective and is currently working on a screenplay. He gets countless emails from readers revealing they forget the passage of time while reading one of his books. He says: “That gives me great joy. I want to write books that make people forget the passage of time, that allow them almost perfect escape. That’s literally my goal.”

He adds softly: “I’m in the joy business.”

MATTHEW REILLY ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

It was that mix of propulsive readability, and just a colossally original idea. Using DNA to bring dinosaurs into our world, making it a commercial venture, which was realistic, and then having people running and screaming and having dinosaurs eating them. I could not put Jurassic Park down.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

One of the scariest books you’ll ever read, and an amazing movie as well, but the movie was very true to the book and it is not a long book. The Silence of the Lambs is a great example of a book with the most economy of prose you’ll ever read. It moves like a rocket and scares you senseless. So if ever I want to create fear in the reader, I think back to what The Silence of the Lambs did to me.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

The first 25 or 30 pages of that book are the best introduction to about 15 characters that you’ll ever read. It is a stunning piece of writing. That opening wedding scene, which they did very well in the movie as well, that is just amazingly done in The Godfather. If you want to know how to introduce characters, read it.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

This is a science fiction novel about a little boy who is sent in the future to Battle School, which is in space, to defend humanity against an alien threat. He is a gifted and talented young boy and he has to learn to fight these battles against bullies and classmates with the ultimate view that the army wants to make him the best commander in human history. It also had one of the greatest twists you’ll ever read, it’s just a wonderful book. This is a book I can pick up and read any time, and once I start I cannot stop.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I read Outliers very early, on and again it presented the notion very well that doing 10,000 hours of deep practice into something to become expert at it. And I definitely fall into that category with writing, in that I did my 10,000 hours of reading lots and lots of fiction, whether it was Clancy or Crichton or Thomas Harris. I was immersed in movies, watching Aliens, Die Hard and the Star Wars movies. I watched The Empire Strikes Back every afternoon for six months before Return of the Jedi came out. Before I wrote Contest I knew thrillers, and before I made Interceptor I had read every book I could about directing. I believe in that 10,000-hour rule.