A mind full of characters with Michael Robotham

The White Crow

Michael Robotham, Little Brown

5 stars

To read Michael Robotham’s latest and 19th crime novel The White Crow is to be reminded that Stephen King once said of this Australian crime writer: “This guy can’t write a bad book.” And given that the 64-year-old Robotham has sold 8.5-million copies globally and garnered a swag of prestigious awards — including two Gold Daggers, an Edgar Award and an Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award — it should come as no surprise that The White Crow also lives up to King’s comment about this book in particular, that “no-one does suspense better”. Yet even as Robotham concedes The White Crow may well be one of his most intricately plotted, suspenseful novels yet, and acknowledges it has many, many working parts, he is quick to quip: “They just came together so beautifully which, given that I don’t plot in advance, was almost miraculous.”

Robotham is quick, too, to tell you: “The plotting is the part I hate most. What I love most is creating characters that live and breathe on the page. Characters that people fall in love with.” Indeed, having clocked up more than two decades in his career as an international bestselling crime writer — and another two decades as a journalist and ghostwriter before that — he’s also quick to declare “Plot is important, don’t get me wrong, but it is the characters that bring readers back to the same writers again and again; it is the reader’s desire to immerse themselves in the lives of these characters.”

In the case of The White Crow it was Robotham’s desire to revisit the character of Philomena “Phil” McCarthy, the young policewoman protagonist of his 2021 novel When You Are Mine that helped seed it. When You Are Mine has since been snapped up for a TV series in the UK: “It was a book in which I wanted to tackle, not just the issue of domestic violence, but the issue when it’s perpetrated by police officers who are notoriously bad at investigating their own. And I created Phil to explore that and because I made her father a notorious crime figure, I almost unwittingly created this dynamic where she was also going to walk this very thin line keeping her two worlds apart. In writing The White Crow, I wanted to find out when would the two halves of Philomena’s world collide.”

Set in London, The White Crow’s complex, suspense-fuelled plot revolves around a home invasion and a jewellery store robbery gone terribly wrong. It opens as McCarthy and her partner are making a 3am breakfast run towards Hampstead late into their routine patrol when they are summoned to attend an emergency in Hatton Garden. But Phil, having glimpsed a barefoot child in pyjamas in the rear vision window, disobeys orders, instead sending her partner on while she searches for the child on foot. Peering under cars and over hedges, she enters an open gate and, following a rustling sound, she gradually coaxes five-year-old Daisy out of the hedge by entering into some of the most enchanting child-savvy dialogue to grace a narrative.

Daisy says she is unable to wake her mother and noticing she has blood on her pyjamas, Phil gains permission to enter the child’s home, but is promptly ordered to get out and wait for the armed response unit who are responding to a report of a home invasion. She again disobeys orders and enters the kitchen to find a dead woman in a chair. Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector Brendan Keegan is inside a ransacked jewellery store in Hatton Garden, waiting for the bomb squad to defuse a bomb strapped to the chest of its owner. It becomes clear that the two cases are connected, and having established a relationship with Daisy who is the only witness, Phil inveigles herself into the investigation.

But when Keegan discovers that her father, Edward McCarthy and his brothers had previously visited the jewellery store, Philomena’s two worlds collide spectacularly. She is deemed “a rat in the ranks”, taken off the case and suspended from the force that she has striven so hard to join. Not that Phil is about to stop investigating, instead her growing dilemma over who to trust, her family or the law she’s sworn to uphold, drives her to take dangerous risks.

Yet unbeknown to Phil or the police, the McCarthy brothers — who have turned themselves into ‘ property developers and facilitators’ — are contending with sabotage of their development sites by a hostile new breed of criminals, led by a mysterious one-eyed man known only as “the Wrestler”. Unlike the McCarthy brothers, this brutal gang has no moral code and no boundaries whatsoever. Again one can’t help but marvel at Robotham’s ability to create credible, arresting, often humorous dialogue between Phil’s father and her uncles, old school East End gangsters whom he describes as “lovable psychopaths”. He cheerily admits: “As much as I love Philomena, I adore the brothers because I love their humour. They’re dangerous men, but there’s something about them that you just think, ‘I’d like to have a beer with them’.”

While attributing his ability to write believable nigh-on magical dialogue with children to the fact that he has three daughters, Robotham credits his deft characterisation of the McCarthy brothers to the years he spent ghostwriting a book for Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind of the Great Train Robbery. “He was a true East Ender, born within earshot of the Bow Bells and that sort of thing. I ghostwrote all about the Great Train Robbery and his career, all the gangsters he brushed up against and knew, and spent time with in prison. So the voices of the McCarthy brothers come from listening to Bruce talk.”

Its perhaps not surprising that, for all its potent suspense, The White Crow reads at times like a love letter to London given Robotham spent so many years living and working there as a journalist and ghostwriter. He saw those years as a kind of apprenticeship to becoming a novelist, which he’d wanted to be since the age of 12. Elements of both earlier careers often inform his fiction. Indeed, many of the professional skills he gave his brilliant fictional clinical psychologist, Joe O’Loughlin, protagonist of his debut novel The Suspect — now a TV series starring Aiden Turner — were those of Britain’s top profiler, Paul Britton, whom he came to know while ghostwriting Britton’s two books, The Jigsaw Man and Picking Up the Pieces. “Paul Britton had the most brilliant mind of anyone I’ve ever met. He wasn’t a professional profiler, but he was a pioneer of profiling.”

While adamant that his O’Louglin character is nothing like Paul Britton as a person, he notes that what Britton does share with his fictional creation is that he wasn’t a headline hunter. “Each time the police phoned him and asked him to help he felt sick in the stomach and thought ‘do I really want to go down into the mire?’ But then his sense of humanity was such that he thought ‘if I could stop this man killing again, I have to try’.” Since then Robotham has penned eight Joe O’Loughlin novels, as well as created his Cyrus Haven character, a criminal forensic psychologist who stars alongside Evie Cormac in four more, and says: “So much of both characters and what they do comes from having spent several years working with Paul to produce those two books.”

It was The Suspect which triggered a bidding war at the London Book Fair in 2002 as an unfinished manuscript and sold into more than 20 languages within three hours — that turned his dream of a becoming a writer into a reality. “It literally changed my life,” says Robotham. Yet until it was published in 2004, he had never conceived of being a crime writer. “I imagined I was going to write all different things. It was only when I was told ‘no, no, you’re contracted to write something similar to what you’ve already written,’ that I realised I had become a crime writer. And I’ve completely embraced it since then, because it does allow me to not only look at so many social issues, but to shine a light into the darkest corners of the human mind.”

MICHAEL ROBOTHAM ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

As a 21-year-old I used that as my tour guide to Paris, because I had dreamed of being a writer since I was 12, and so I went to all the places that Hemingway wrote in, drank in, and lived in, and I thought if I could live the Hemingway life, I could somehow become a writer. It is also full of incredibly good writerly advice as well, because he’s obviously writing his first novel when he’s living in Paris in 1920s; that’s what it’s all about, so that was very influential.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

I think that even though it has got a dodgy ending, that character, Miss Smilla Jasperson, is one of the great literary creations. Høeg showed how you can create a character who just lives and breathes and that you can just fall madly in love with, not because she’s lovable, but because she is just so real. So I love that book.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Again a book like Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, which you aspire to as a writer. These are books that people regard as being as crime novels, but are literary novels as well. One aspires to maybe one day create a book that can live in that company and you just strive to keep trying. I think The Secret History is one of the great mystery novels. It’s the story of a death within a small group of university students which comes back to haunt all of them. The setting is beautiful, the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is spot on. It’s a beautifully written book.’’

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

I was huge Irving fan when I was in my teens and early 20s and A Prayer for Own Meany is one that I absolutely adored. It is one of my favourite ever novels. The character of Owen Meany is a heartbreaking character. Irving has the ability to make me laugh and cry on the same page, and there’s no greater compliment because he’ll have something happen and you will just be in a flood of tears.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I could choose any of Ray Bradbury’s titles because Bradbury is the reason I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12. I was living in a small country town and I wrote a letter to Bradbury because there were three of his short stories collections that you couldn’t get in Australia. So I wrote a letter to him addressed to Random House, New York, and I don’t recall putting a stamp on the envelope, but I put it in the postbox at the end of our road. And I came home from primary school about three months later and there was a package on the kitchen table containing the three books and a letter from Bradbury saying how thrilled he was to have a young reader and fan on the far side of the world. And that generosity is one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer.