Chad Taylor

Blue Hotel finalist in Ngaios

Blue Hotel is on the shortlist for Best Novel in the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards. The paperback can be ordered online here.

The Ngaio Marsh Awards official press release follows:

2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists plunge readers into page-turning tales about who we are

From heart-wrenching tales of families torn apart by disappearance or deportation to examinations of historic crimes, swindles, and injustices to page-whirring novels about former cops and former convicts, the finalists for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards offer a diverse array of storytelling excellence

“When we first launched New Zealand’s own annual prizes for crime, mystery, and thriller writing in 2010, we modelled our Ngaio Marsh Awards on the Hammett Prize in North America, which celebrates literary excellence in crime writing,” says Ngaio Marsh Awards founder Craig Sisterson. “The Ngaios have never been solely about detective fiction; instead highlighting and celebrating outstanding Kiwi storytellers whose tales, fictional and factual, explore the investigation of crime or the impact or effects of crime on people and society.”

The 2023 Ngaios finalists announced today across three categories, like many previous years, says Sisterson, underline that original ethos. This year’s finalists range across an array of styles, settings, and stories, exploring important topics from radical empathy and redemption in one of the world’s most notorious psychiatric facilities to familial grief, dealing with dementia, mass surveillance, and the ongoing impact of colonisation and the Dawn Raids.

“The consistent thread throughout this diverse array of Kiwi books is quality storytelling that struck a chord with our international judging panels of crime writing experts from several countries,” says Sisterson. “As the likes of Val McDermid have said, if you want to better understand a place, read its crime fiction. Crime writing is a broad church nowadays, including but going far beyond the traditional puzzling mysteries of Dames Ngaio and Agatha Christie, and can deliver insights about society and humanity alongside rollicking reads. Many of our finalists showcase something about who we are, as people and a nation.”

The finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction, a biennial prize previously won by filmmaker Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) for IN DARK PLACES, a book about the wrongful conviction of Teina Pora, by Kelly Dennett for THE SHORT LIFE AND MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF JANE FURLONG, and most recently by Martin van Beynen for BLACK HANDS: INSIDE THE BAIN FAMILY MURDERS, are:

  • A NEW DAWN by Emeli Sione (Mila’s Books)
  • THE DEVIL YOU KNOW by Dr Gwen Adshead & Eileen Horne (Faber)
  • DOWNFALL: THE DESTRUCTION OF CHARLES MACKAY by Paul Diamond (Massey University Press)
  • THE FIX by Scott Bainbridge (Bateman Books)
  • MISSING PERSONS by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)

Each of this year’s non-fiction finalists delivered compelling stories that immersed readers in a variety of subject matters, from historical figures and crimes to deeply personal stories.

“There were some stellar non-fiction reads this year,” said the international judging panel of Scottish journalist and true crime writer turned novelist Douglas Skelton, Auckland lawyer Darise Bennington, and Ngaios founder Craig Sisterson. “From well-researched and fascinating dissections of historic events to deeply informed and personal tales, to disturbing yet engrossing accounts of the humanity behind shocking acts, we have terrific finalists.”

The finalists for the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel are:

  • ONE HEART ONE SPADE by Alistair Luke
  • TOO FAR FROM ANTIBES by Bede Scott (Penguin SEA)
  • BETTER THE BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
  • SURVEILLANCE by Riley Chance (CopyPress Books)
  • THE SLOW ROLL by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)
  • PAPER CAGE by Tom Baragwanath (Text Publishing)

“There is no shortage of fresh ideas in New Zealand crime fiction, nor in breadth of style, with this year's entrants running from chilling thrillers to the cosier end of the spectrum,” says British journalist and book reviewer Louise Fairbairn, the Chair of an international judging panel for the Best First Novel category that also included South African writer Sonja van der Westhuizen, British reviewer and longtime CWA Daggers judge Ayo Onatade, and Australian podcaster and author Dani Vee. “Those debuts that particularly caught our attention were unafraid to explore difficult real-life issues and embed themselves in an authentic New Zealand of rough edges and grey areas, rather than glossy make-believe.”

Lastly, the finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel are:

  • EXIT .45 by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
  • BLUE HOTEL by Chad Taylor (Brio Books)
  • REMEMBER ME by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
  • THE DOCTOR’S WIFE by Fiona Sussman (Bateman Books)
  • BETTER THE BLOOD by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
  • BLOOD MATTERS by Renée (The Cuba Press)
  • THE SLOW ROLL by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)

“It’s a very strong group of finalists to emerge from a dazzlingly varied longlist,” says Sisterson. “This year’s entrants gave our international judging panels lots to chew over, and plenty of books judges enjoyed and loved didn’t become finalists. ‘Yeahnoir’, our local spin on some of the world’s most popular storytelling forms, is certainly in fine health.”

The winners of the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards will be announced at a special event held in association with WORD Christchurch in Spring, details and date to be confirmed soon.

For more information on any or all of our 2023 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists, or the Ngaios in general, please contact founder Craig Sisterson.

Bruce


I still love The Big Boss. The film boasts a perfect mise en scène: an ice factory in Thailand. The weather is hot and the men are trying to stay cool, Bruce Lee most of all. After a brief scuffle at the beginning he holds it in for the better part of the film before erupting into, well, Bruce Lee. He's a slow burner, like Clint's Man With No Name. He's imperfect, tested, and prevails.

This is what heroes used to be: stoic, principled, tested -- always to failure -- but coming back at the end when their true self is realised. The storyline is likewise classically simple: starting quiet and driving to a climax. Now movies start big, flounder, panic and distract with gewgaws until arriving at some legal definition of an ending: boxes ticked, pulses never raised.

The Fast And Furious series is the closest thing to a modern equivalent of the Hong Kong martial arts movies. A gallant camaraderie, tight budgets and cheap locations, a cast that can laugh at itself and shonky set pieces that work in spite of their ludicrousness because you're in the heroes' headspace and you want them to prevail. The female characters are equally noble. Maria Yi is the moral compass in The Big Boss just as Gal Gadot is in Fast 6.

Threat levels




'Pornography violates the Aesthetic Distance. What does this mean? When we see the scene of simulated sex we can think only of one of two things: 1) Lord, they're really having sex; or 2) No, I can tell they aren't really. Either of the above responses takes us right out of the film. We've been constrained to remove attention from the drama and put it on the stunt.'
-- David Mamet, Make-Believe Town (Little, Brown, 1996)
'I think that one of the functions of Art (both for the artist and for the perceiver, though not necessarily in the same way) is to furnish a false world which is an analogue of at least some of the aspects of the real world and to explore within that new behaviour patterns that might yet be too dangerous or imponderable in a real-life context.'
 -- Brian Eno (Another False World interview by Ian McDonald, NME Dec 3 1977)
'Any sort of upheaval gratified our anarchic instincts. Abnormality we found positively attractive.'
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (Libraire Gallimard, 1960)
Been thinking about how many of my favourite things have fallen foul of both official and self-appointed censors. (Including my own work.) Talk is cheap, anger is free and all threats in art are metaphorical.1

Those threats which one believes can pass from the fictional world and into reality to do real harm (computer games, pornography, modern art, hate speech, fight scenes in movies, Miley Cyrus at the VMAs) tends to be dictated by personal taste rather than empirical evidence.

I could be wrong. The only way to find out is to keep talking about it which, unfortunately, also requires one to keep listening, no matter how much you don't like what you hear. Or watch, or log into, or subscribe to, or buy to read every day, over and over...

(Pics: Existenz (David Cronenburg), Maitresse, Once Upon A Time In America, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny tease Reddit for The X-Files 20th anniversary)

  1. I think Eno said this but I can't find the quote just now. I propose a law that after being interviewed for so many years all quotes can be attributed to Brian Eno.

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?

Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?

CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?
-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.

Perfect skin: SUPERCOLLIDER out now on Kindle


Before "Mommy Porn" there was just, well, porn. My short story 'Supercollider' first appeared in String of Pearls (Allen and Unwin, Australia, 1996), an anthology of erotic fiction edited by Tony Ayres which pleased many and shocked a few. It's a tale of amour fou: objectification, fetishism, emotional displacement -- a sort of happy bookend to the more anguished 'Archie and Veronica' from The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself (1995). The story has not appeared anywhere else since then, so I've released it as a Kindle single for US 99 cents.

The cover art is by New York-based artist Victoria Munro. You can buy 'Supercollider' in all its weird offensive adult glory here.

Tales of madness


Chris Bell has a new collection of short stories out, The Concentrated Essence of Any Number of Ravens. You can read about it here and buy it here. The fifty-odd stories (some of them, very odd) are short and varied and fun. Disclosure: I wrote the foreword, because I like his stories. His other books include The Bumper Book of Lies and Liquidambar.

Authors have been a-Twitter about RJ Ellory using online pseudonyms to praise himself and criticise his 'rivals'. (In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Billingham called it 'the tip of the iceberg.') The scandal reminded me of James Frey being caught out for fabricating his autobiographical A Million Little Pieces. Writing fiction is personal and private and, above all, slow, but the online world advances publicly, 365/24/7, 140 characters at a time. If you're going to turn fiction into a competition, don't be surprised if authors start doping to keep up.

Many of the actors in the trailer for the new movie version of The Sweeney appear to be palsied: slurred speech, facial paralysis, wrecked physiques. The contrast between the actors' stasis while speaking and the action extras is extreme to the point of comedy, like a Steven Seagal flick. The Sweeney is one of a number of recent UK movies that have been produced almost exclusively for local consumption (St Georges Day is another): the sort of drama that no longer finds a natural home on British television.

The trailer preceded David Cronenberg's movie of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis which I enjoyed for the spectacle of a director sublimating all his obsessions to serve an author's voice. Claustrophobic and precise, Cosmopolis felt like a coda to the themes he explored in other films: biomechanical worlds (Videodrome), addiction (Naked Lunch), technological fetishism (Crash) and decay (The Fly, Dead Ringers).

I also finally caught up with A Dangerous Method which, like A History of Violence, is a pretty conventional narrative that suddenly pops with violence and sex before healing over again. A friend of mine remarked that you never worry about Sean Connery in a movie because you know he's really James Bond: when the monastery was burning down in Name of the Rose, you knew he had a jet pack under his cassock. Cronenberg suffers from a similar, if inverted, typecasting: sitting down to watch one of the director's movies you find yourself bracing for the very worst. When the three stern, uniformed nurses manhandled the screaming, muddied Sabina (Keira Knightley) into a room to merely bathe her, the audience slumped with relief.

Oxygen

There's a way in which a writer can do too much, over-whelming the reader with so many details that he no longer has any air to breathe. Think of a typical passage in a novel. A character walks into a room. As a writer, how much of that room do you want to talk about? The possibilities are infinite. You can give the color of the curtains, the wallpaper pattern, the objects on the coffee table, the reflection of the light in the mirror. But how much of this is really necessary? Is the novelist's job simply to reproduce physical sensations for their own sake? When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it.
-- Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?
-- David Mamet, Memo to writers of The Unit, 19 October 2005

The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself: new on Kindle


A new edition of my original 1995 short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself is out now on Amazon Kindle.

The collection features twelve short stories: 'Running Hot and Cold' (deeply offended the publisher. "Breaking her hip? Perhaps if you made it all a dream"), 'Calling Doctor Dollywell' ("A casually menacing story that has something to do with health problems and lesbians" – Steve Braunias),  'The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself', 'Fire in the Hole', 'Archie and Veronica' (S&M on the west coast, and the most popular story, to judge by the many emails I've received over the years), 'No Sun No Rain' (the first appearance of detective Ellerslie Penrose, who went on to helm Shirker), 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (SF), 'Oilskin' (upset people no end, but some of the students at the Auckland University writing course liked it, and a Waikato student went on to make it as a student film. Kids!), 'John', 'Me and Misspelt' (currently under option as a film),  'From Soup to Nuts' ("Unnecessarily violent" – Graeme Lay, Metro) and 'Another White Gown'.

All here, now, just for you, in the new digital™ format, with brand spanking new cover art by Christchurch artist Ian Dalziel. A snip at US$2.99.

Boom! There she was


I have a short story 'Here She Comes Now' in the latest edition of Landfall 223, Fantastic, edited by the poet David Eggleton. Landfall is sometimes hard to find but there is a new dedicated site here.

I've seen David Eggleton perform many times over the years, at rock concerts and live events, and always enjoyed it. If I remember correctly he was at Sweetwaters in the 80s, and maybe something in Myers Park with The Swingers, and his work always held its own. He had a dynamic stage presence and a smart, accessible approach to writing about New Zealand. In the wake of The God Boy and Owls Do Cry you felt like there had to be another way of going about it: Eggleton was one of the people who said yeah, there was.

PS: A nice piece from a crime writer who watches watches too much sport. Put him in the books column.

I've heard a rumour from Ground Control


Jonathan King and I have a new comic out. City Lights is a science-fiction story hosted at Jonathan's tomorrow-themed site The Brighter Future. I wrote the story and scribbled some thumbnails and Jonathan drew and painted all the finished art, breaking it down into frames and making it look just like a bought one. The development process consisted of me liking everything he did, although we did debate moving a word balloon on page five. A tense moment, but it passed.

The story was inspired by astrophysicists Ed Turner and Avi Loeb's proposal to search for alien life by detecting light from cities on other worlds. The idea of discovering aliens living so far away that you can't communicate with them in any normal sense is romantic and strange, and I've always been interested in scientific communities based in exotic locales such as Hawaii (they're featured in Electric). I wrote the script in three acts: a storyboarded intro and outro bracketing a long dialogue sequence. The wordless set up and conclusion meant the story would work better as a visual piece.

City Lights was conceived with Jonathan's previous comics in mind: he contrasts big empty spaces with intimate storytelling details and frames the action in a cinematic way. When he is not drawing strips he is making movies. The above still is a good example of his style. I love the way it's 3D but flattened, naturalistic yet stylised, clean but atmospheric. You can see for yourself here.

Work

Raymond Carver interviewed by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee for The Art of Fiction:
INTERVIEWER
In an article you did for The New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story "too tedious to talk about here" — about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?

CARVER

The story that was "too tedious to talk about" has to do with a number of things that aren't very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay "Fires," which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that finally, a writer is judged by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now.
Full interview here.

It was not a short fight, but it was fast

I have a new short story out on Kindle. 'Huxley' is a detective story about an Auckland ex-cop turned debt collector. The story first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (Constable, 2009). The ebook version has been revised: the opening is different and a number of details have been changed. There are more stories in the Huxley series which I might put out as ebooks later on. You can get it here.

This is part of an ongoing project to digitally convert my back-catalogue, particularly the early and hard-to-find short stories. Special thanks: Messrs Bell & Stratford. (Their new LP coming soon.)

Crime inc.

Philip Matthews' recent weekend feature article on New Zealand crime fiction is now online at Kiwicrime, thanks to the earthquake-defying efforts of Craig Sisterson.