The ability to write great crime fiction – and enjoy writing it – is the equivalent to winning the lottery in the writing world. After all, popular culture has a perverse love affair with the sordid underside, the forensic realm, the darker half of the human mind. Countless crime shows cater to this love affair, and many of the televised fictions have their start in books.
For Tom Rob Smith, who has just turned 30, crime fiction is a means to an end. That’s not to say he doesn’t like writing crime fiction – he loves it. But the young gay writer, who studied at Cambridge, has more of an affinity with scriptwriting. For him, his award winning crime fiction was a way of getting there, albeit in a way that was ingenious and in part challenged the genre.
Smith’s two novels – Child 44 and The Secret Speech – are both set in the cold stark world of Stalinist Russia… not your typical crime fiction setting. But it’s a setting that lends a unique set of rules, these being the crux of what Smith explores in compelling measure in both his novels.
‘Child 44 is about a hunt for a serial killer,’ Smith said on the phone from Melbourne where he had just appeared at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. He’s incredibly soft-spoken for such an intense writer, so much one has to almost lean in to the phone to listen to him. ‘In some ways (Child 44 is) a story we’ve seen many times before, but it’s based on the real life case of Andre Chikatilo back in the 1980’s.
‘Rather than identify the killer and try and go after him, the way the state reacted was to deny that he even existed because crime wasn’t meant to exist in Russia. Crime was meant to be a product of decadent Western society. So the police force were under immense pressure to try and cover these crimes up and blame people who were anti-Soviet rather than admit the system was flawed and produced serial killers.’
The book went on to win The Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, The Waverton Good Read Award plus was long listed for the The Man Booker Prize. It’s sequel, The Secret Speech, continues Smith’s exploration of Stalinist Russia, this time making the notion of criminality a volatile force by posing the question as to who is the criminal, bringing the police force in particular into question.
‘I think it’s just interesting to see how different social structures react,’ Smith says of the unique setting of these novels. ‘What’s so useful about the crime genre is that we all seem to have a handle on it. We have a killer and we try and go after them in the normal way, which is by collecting evidence to find out their identity.
‘(Russians) react to crime in a completely different way and it was that completely different, alien reaction which I found attractive, in the sense that it adheres to this very specific political agenda that has nothing to do with logic or police procedure as we understand it. That’s what I thought would be interesting to explore.’
What makes Smith such an interesting young writer is that more than anything he’s a writer first and foremost. His books touch on homosexuality and how it manifests itself in an oppressive regime, but Smith isn’t necessarily a gay writer. Still, it hasn’t stopped the gay British glossy magazines from picking him up as one of England’s new darlings, with Attitude Magazine in particular pinning him as one of the hottest young queer talents coming out of the British Isles.
‘When I came out when I was 23 it never crossed my mind at that point that there was ever going to be any question of being anything other than a gay man or a gay writer. I wanted it to be irrelevant and it sort of has been in a weird way. It hasn’t ever had any kind of influence in terms of being involved in a project purely because of my sexuality.
‘I can’t imagine that ever happening really. It feels like we’re moving toward a time where it can sort of become something that is of no particular consequence directly. It can be if you want it to be but it doesn’t have to be.
‘But in some ways I like the fact that I get asked to appear in (gay) magazines. In a recent edition they asked about giving advice on coming out. And it was fun to explain my experiences, which were pretty messy. So all that stuff is quite fun to have a profile, and that’s a nice side of it I think, because then you can bring these things forward. So, yes, that side of it I like.’
But ultimately Smith’s love of writing returns to scriptwriting. He’s currently working on a screen adaptation of Japanese anime series Robotech, the Hollywood version featuring Tobey Maguire as producer. It’s a project soon to hit our screens, and sure to launch Smith into a whole new stratosphere of writing.
But his advice for aspiring novelists is humble and direct: maintain focus! ‘You need to distill a central idea down and focus,’ Smith concluded. ‘I did a workshop recently at the Melbourne Writers Festival with 11 participants and all of them were aspiring writers all working on these various projects. And they had all done a little bit of this and a little bit of that and I think it’s important to get something finished and to concentrate on one idea.
‘You need to go through very carefully to discover which idea is the best, chose that one and then make sure you focus on it rather than digging into lots of different ones and not actually finishing any.’
Child 44 and The Secret Speech are available now through Simon & Schuster in Australia.
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