Death and Detail - Kathryn Fox
- Nick Terrell
Blood Born by Kathryn Fox
Pan Macmillan Australia, 327 pages, $Au 29.99.
Kathryn Fox has written four forensic thrillers with a strong moral agenda and a clear focus on social justice and the rights of victims. Her most recent novel, Blood Born, contains an implicit denunciation of violence against women and of the procedural failings of our legal system. Fox admits that the strong moral and ethical agendas in her work give a fair indication of her motivation as a writer. Fox’s fiction – reality fiction as she calls it – is genre writing with a very direct, almost polemical, intention to force the reader to engage with the moral and social implications of the realities she depicts. Fox refuses to glorify violence or trade on the charismatic charge of the outlaw or sociopath. She is more interested in the victims of crime, the impact on their families, and the broader social effects of violence and criminal transgression. Fox’s thrillers are crime writing in the social realist tradition. At the same time, the forensic skills of her heroine Dr Anya Crichton, allow Fox to indulge the enlightenment fantasy that chaos can be counterbalanced by reason, and that mysteries and malevolence can be defused by clear thinking, sane values and evidence.
Fox spoke to me of her scepticism about the Dalai Lama’s static energy, about growing up in the shadow of the Beaumont children (Part 1), about reality fiction and its capacity to influence a reader (Part 2), and about society’s tacit tolerance of violence against women (Part 3) - among other things.
Part 1 – Chaos, Evidence and Scepticism
How did you come to writing?
I was a GP, a family doctor for 10 or 12 years and I’d always wanted to write, well not professionally, but in year 11 and year 12 I just found I could write essays, and creative writing options for English were lovely - I just loved doing them. But I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to cure autism from the age of five, I was a funny child – but I still had that ideal, but I had nothing to write about and I didn’t think writing was really a career. My dad had worked for the ABC and had seen so many unemployed – part-timers and freelancers weren’t really big in those days. So, I wanted a job that involved people, communication and science and that’s medicine. But after years of doing that, on the day I sat my fellowship exam to become a GP, I also enrolled in a writers course to write Malicious Intent.
With your fiction, you mentioned that initially you didn’t feel you had something to write about, how did crime become your subject?
Well, I did a course in year 11 and 12 called People, Beliefs and Society and we studied different religions and we also studied cults and how people are drawn to different religions or groups or whatever. The whole idea of behavioural modification and manipulation - how to manipulate a vulnerable person - was pretty much covered in that. That pretty much piqued my interest. And one day during that course I met the Dalai Lama, he came to our school because of this course, and he crossed a roomful of people and shook my hand, and there was this static electricity which I thought was from his slippers and the carpet, the nylon carpet. And he believes that he can see all your past and future lives when he makes contact, but I thought I was just getting a static electricity shock. Then he said “I’m so glad to have finally met you” and someone in the background said “oh, maybe his holiness likes the book you haven’t written yet.” And I thought, no, I’m going to go and do medicine. And it was really funny – my first response was to think what a fabulous line if you were a charismatic person trying to recruit people to a cult, and you had malice in your mind. I just thought that is a fantastic way to recruit vulnerable people, “I’m so glad to have finally met you.” I’m not suggesting the Dalai Lama is evil in any way, but I think it was pretty inevitable that I was going to be a crime writer from my response to a greeting like that. And actually that was the idea behind Malicious Intent, that happened at sixteen when I was doing that course, and it was only after years of general practice and seeing all sorts of behaviour and what people do to each other through medicine, that I just sort of, this plot just grew and grew and I knew I had to write it.
So with the crime aspect there’s that element of scepticism, the critical attitude.
Yeah critical thinking was, I also did a course - it was a fabulous school - one of the English courses was syllogistic logic, for thinking, and it was absolutely brilliant. Analysing the media analysing articles, analysing writing - that was fantastic. And I had this great sponge like mind and I think that was a fabulous time for me because it showed the world was out there. And then, I got such a shock in medicine, because I’d been very sheltered, and just the amount of crime I saw through the community and through medicine was enormous. That whole ripple effect of crime - one person may be the victim of a violent crime, but an awful lot of people suffer. Friends, family, grandparents, whole communities suffer as the result of violent crime.
I ended up seeing a lot of sexual assault victims, a lot of domestic violence victims, and even the perpetrators. Often the actual perpetrator was in my practice as well because they were known to the victim. You’re more likely to be raped by someone you know, someone you go out with, or the husband’s boss, or a friend of a friend, and in a small community everyone goes to the same doctor. So often I’d be in that situation where I’d have to see the wife who’d been beaten or abused and then keep it confidential when I saw the husband, for his blood pressure checks or whatever else he came for. And I just found that really, really difficult. Again, why people do this to each other was intriguing, and I ended up learning a lot more about forensic medicine so that I could be a better doctor and give better service to those patients. That’s why I think I sort of got into more forensic medicine. I write very much from a victim’s viewpoint, that’s from so much of what I’ve seen and sat and listened to over the years - untold stories of people who feel they have no voice. That was my slant. And that process of manipulating people and modifying behaviours, it works in religion, but it’s the same in domestic violence too, and it happens in relationships as well. For me, this path from treating specific effects of domestic violence say, to writing about its forensic and social context and speaking up for victims was a natural progression.
So would you say the interest in crime was coming from that direct experience more than say the influence of other writers you admire?
Yeah I think so - I think we’re all products of our experience, I probably should mention that I grew up in Adelaide and the Beaumont children had just gone missing when we moved there. I was born three weeks after the Beaumont kids went missing. And I just remember my childhood, their photos were on the front of the newspaper all the time. And there were other children missing as well, it wasn’t just the Beaumonts in Adelaide, so their photos were constantly on the front page of the newspapers and in the news, and I just could never understand why people would do this. And those crimes have sort of stayed with me. In fact the first time I ever looked on the internet I wanted to see if they’d been solved, that was the very first thing I looked up. That had a big impact on our childhood as well, the whole fear factor – we were never allowed out without parents, we were never allowed to play in the street, we were never allowed to ride bikes even because we could have gotten out of our parents’ sight. And other kids were just like us, we all grew up in that fearful environment and stranger danger so we were indirectly effected by the Beaumont children going missing because we were brought up differently from kids in other places.
And that maybe gives you a kind of approach to things that you want to gather evidence, come to grips with malicious currents?
Closure – I think for those families it’s hideous, and a lot of the journalists. At a book signing I met one of the doctors that was on duty the day the Beaumont kids disappeared and she and the staff stayed on all night hoping the kids would be found, so that they would be there to revive them or do whatever was necessary. So even the doctor at the local hospital stayed on duty a day past her usual shift, just in case they were found. It’s interesting, that profound effect on so many people.
I think I’m drawn to writers who have experience in the field they write about as well - Linda Fairstein and Kathy Reichs intrigue me as people, and with their wealth of experience as well. Jeffrey Deaver has some fantastic insight into human nature, and that comes across in his book, and he has a law background, not criminal law, but I just see it in his writing, I think it’s really interesting there. They’re some of the writers I admire and coincidentally they have real life experience.
Hearing what you say about the doctor that didn’t want to leave, and the engagement with these events – working through these same kinds of things in your books do you think there’s any kind of wish fulfilment involved in that you actually get to see things through and resolve things?
I think so. I tried to resuscitate a little boy once, a toddler, and as it turned out his mother’s background strongly suggested – I didn’t know the background of course – and I was just there in casualty and another young doctor and we were it, and we were trying to resuscitate this 18 month old for as long as we possibly could, and we believed the mother’s story, that he’d only just stopped breathing a few minutes before she came in, but there was a long history of abuse and as it turns out, she probably murdered him, but because of my resuscitation attempts, I pretty much disturbed the crime scene, if you like, the body, And so the cause of death had to be inconclusive. I broke ribs, and even my cardiac massage could have caused haemorrhaging. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, Blood Born opens with Anya trying to resuscitate a person, and the stakes are high anyway. So I suppose I bring that experience with me, and the adrenalin of trying to save this person because the stakes were so high, But instead of being ‘true crime,’ it’s almost like reality fiction, that’s what I call it, because it’s realistic but its fictitious.
Part 2. – “Reality Fiction”
Your term ‘reality fiction’ struck me, I wondered what you really mean - you say it’s not like ‘real crime’, which is something quite specific, so if you think of realism, or realistic fiction, how is ‘reality fiction’ different?
OK - people often see fiction as almost a sub form of writing and, “books, oh they’re just fiction” and dismiss them as fanciful tales. But reality fiction, and one of the reasons crime has become so popular is that when people with experience and real knowledge write, and with real passion, you’ve got to be true to people, but also you can’t be true to people to the extent that you would disclose confidential things. So it’s fiction in that they’re fictionalised characters, but it’s reality as to how that case would play out in real life. And the emotions and the quandaries and the problems faced by the investigators, and the behaviour of the perpetrators if you like, is generally just like what happens in real life. And I suppose it’s realistic, but with real experience and real passion and emotion, which makes it just like reality. If that makes any sense. You could have a realistic sculpture, but to make it real it has to have something animated about it, if you like.
You mentioned Jeffrey Deaver, and how you admire the knowledge he brings from his professional experience. Blood Born, like most of your writing, generates a strong element of suspense - there’s that same thrill that a lot of crime-based entertainment also thrives on. Does professional detail and experience bring a different aspect of reality to this kind of entertainment, or is that element of authenticity simply making the thrill more compelling?
I think all of those, I think it is making the risk more potent, because you do suspend disbelief. If something’s implausible, it makes it a lot more difficult, you’ve always got that safety mechanism in your mind when you’re reading, ‘oh look this is on planet Zeon, I don’t go to planet Zeon’ so you’ve got that sort of safety net, or, this is set somewhere else, that doesn’t happen here. But I think when something is written to engage the reader so effectively, and you really can suspend disbelief, then that becomes scarier and the whole experience is more suspenseful: “it could be me,” or, “this could really be happening to someone right now.”
You mentioned that some people dismiss fiction as a kind of sub-form of writing. You’ve worked to include those wider ripple effects of crime, the realities you experienced from your medical practice say, does the suspense and the suspension of disbelief allow the reader to register that factual side of things a bit more vividly?
I think so – a lot of crime readers now are so well educated. You can watch CSI - CSI is not a suspenseful show, Law and Order I think is, because with the twists and the turns in Law & Order, often you’re sitting there thinking oh my gosh, where is this going to go? and that’s where the suspense is. But in CSI it’s pretty much, we found this, we did this, you go from A to B to C to D to solve the crime. And I think you can get the scientific information from CSI, but you don’t get that emotional investment and that roller coaster ride that you get with a book. Sometimes you can get that fabulous suspense from a movie as well, because it’s longer, you put more effort in to get to know characters better. Crime readers, I find, are desperate to absorb any information about how science works and how the process works, I think there’s this absolute fascination, especially with death now too. But they’ve read a lot before, and you can’t try and con people, and have coincidence – I think that readers are becoming far more savvy, and the bar’s been set a lot higher, by writers like Jeffrey Deaver and Kathy Reichs and Linda Fairstein, people who write with authenticity and phenomenal research backgrounds. You know that the research they’ve done for those books is genuine, and you’re actually getting an educational experience as well. And it’s interesting, just the effect that the books have on people. I get people emailing me and writing to me saying “I would no longer hesitate to go along to a sexual assault unit now I understand there is compassion and people are kind.” And “I never thought about the victim’s point of view.” I’ve had lawyers say “I’ve done cross-examinations with sexual assault victims and it’s never once occurred to me what the person goes through during the collection of that rape kit, and why it would be difficult to make a false allegation.” And a friend who’s a physician in the UK actually changed the way they did examinations in her unit because she just saw the conviction through the eyes of the character. We’d discussed protocols before, but it’s interesting seeing how the different stays of consent in Australia empower the victim - she took that back to England. And it’s really interesting the effect that reading something with authenticity can have, you get so absorbed in it, we’re talking even experts in the field.
You said before in relation to the popularity of crime as a genre that there is a fascination with death.
Yeah I think there is. Death has been taken away from the home and often people want to know what happens to the bodies after. A couple of generations ago people died at home and were cleaned by the family, and lay in state and people visited the home to pay their respects. In some cultures that still happens, here often it’s more like when people buy a house they don’t want to buy a house if someone died in it, someone had a heart attack in that room, I don’t want it, and it’s almost as if it’s contaminated. So people are sent to hospital to die. It doesn’t mean hospitals are killing people, or more people, it’s just that more old people are sent to hospital to die. So all of that has been taken away, and very few people have ever seen a body. Recently I know someone who lost a seven year old and they had an open casket, and oh, the scuttlebutt was – “How could you do that? Why would you go and view the body the afternoon before?” I understood completely, but it was just such a shock to even friends of the family that they were going to have an open casket. And that’s a big thing - this is something, this great mystery, human death and because we don’t know if there’s an afterlife we want to know what happens to our bodies.
So it’s more physical and practical, the interest?
Yeah, we’ve sterilised death and removed it from consciousness.
And made it very bureaucratic?
Yeah it is, it is - for hygiene reasons you can’t leave a body around the house, for other reasons as well, but I think people want to know that someone cares about their body afterwards, and the whole idea of a post-mortem after death is even feeling violated after death, people imagine death is a violation of themselves, and the whole thing with a violent sudden death, I think people are desperate to know that something’s going on behind the scenes, something that will help the people left behind to stop people doing it again. It’s almost like a fairy tale.
That reassurance again of some counterbalance to violent disruption.
Yeah I think - well also so many of our lives are full of chaos and we distrust the legal system, I’m a bit cynical about the legal system, and I think if you take on a story where there’s chaos and bad things happen, but then through diligence and logic and persistence justice prevails. I think that’s why it’s almost like a fairy tale, it offers hope and order is restored as well as it can be, but justice is done and I think that restores our sort of hope. So in some ways crime stories are almost fairy tales. Particularly in a chaotic world where things aren’t always going to plan, in a crime book you really hope that the good guys win, and justice is served. And so you see why we’re all doing what we do in the world because there is purpose in the world.
Some of that cynicism about the legal system is played out in Blood Born in the eventual fate of the murder suspect Gary Harbourn. It’s not the ideal end-game but pragmatically it achieves the same end.
Outsmarting the lawyers - through playing their own game, through the legal system.
Is that from that cynicism, is that you?
Yes it is. There’s got to be a way. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. I suppose I’m an obstinate person in that respect – don’t tell me it’s impossible. If there’s a wall I go through or around it, hello, or you climb over it, you don’t just stop, just because someone put a wall there. Which seems really obvious to me, but it doesn’t seem obvious to other people apparently. So yeah, I try to find a way around it - for me it’s an intellectual game as well: how do I beat a lawyer? There’s something incredibly satisfying about that I should say.
Part 3 - Violence against women.
Another strong theme in Blood Born is violence against women. There’s this level of pervasive violence which is the undertone of the whole book, there’s this implication of widespread and unspoken, tacitly accepted hostility towards women.
The dirty little secret. That comes from reality – one in five women are going to be sexually assaulted, one in five are in a violent relationship. And of that, I think if you look at the kids, I think one in four kids in Australia have watched either their father or their step-father beat their mother. That’s a lot of kids, and monkey see, monkey do. And it’s interesting I think thedaughter of an absued mother is five to eight times more likely to have a partner that is abusive, and more likely to be killed. So the girl, it’s condemning the girl to a life of violence and your condemning the boys to discover that’s the only way to treat a woman. And we’re wondering about violence in playgrounds and everything else, where does it it all come from. Well the more kids you have, and one in four suddenly becomes an awful lot of kids, That’s a horrible statistic.
There’s a sense in the book, with that corrupting influence, that the legal system is negligent but also, for instance, that the corruption is not just confined to any one area of society.
No. I’ve actually met judges’ wives who’ve been abused, and their husbands are sitting in judgment on other men for doing the same thing, thinking it’s perfectly fine. That’s one of the things, that it is such a secret but it does cross demographics and races, cultures, anything. And yet you don’t find any cultures in which the men are routinely beaten or sold as husbands, or – Woman seems to be a commodity or a possession in just about every culture in the world, it’s not just an Australian unique phenomenon.
There’s a kind of parallel that you talk about, Anya and Brodie senior are listening to a program about Catherine Hamlin, the Australian surgeon who repaired trauma suffered by women in sexual assault – so you’re bringing that conceptually quarantined level of abuse and trauma into the lives of the Australian characters, but registering the similarity too?
That’s exactly right.
It’s as present in Australia in the book – that was a deliberate parallel?
It was, it was. I knew it was a bit out there to put it in, because I really wanted to – and I thought it was really important, something for him and Anya to actually bond with - on the sense of outrage about that. And ‘it happens in Africa’ – there’s an Australian woman who lives over there doing it, and she’s absolutely amazing, and I can’t remember her being Australian of the year. And we think Russel Crowe and Nicole Kidman are really interesting. … The Hospital by the River. Her husband died, he was a gynaecologist as well over there, she’s just so unsung - they’ve dedicated their whole lives to this, she just can’t stop, there’s no one else to do it.
This is about one of the characters in Blood Born – again coming back to that undercurrent of violence against women, Natasha Ryder’s fate troubled me a bit - there’s a heroic quality, but she’s vulnerable and targeted because of her profile, her skill. Without that exposure some of the pathos, the emotional pang from her unjust punishment, being taken down…
So easily, yeah.
So easily but so misguidedly – there’s that sense that without the mix of heroism and vulnerability you wouldn’t have that pathos.
Yes – if Rambo got killed you’d just go ‘well why didn’t he fight back.
He should expect it. You feel that she shouldn’t be vulnerable but if she wasn’t the things that happen to her wouldn’t have the same dramatic effect.
But you can’t make her invulnerable either, because she’s still a person and the reality is she isn’t working for the victim, she works for society and she’s not representing the victim’s family, she’s representing the department of prosecution, if they have to drop a case, they drop a case, if they don’t think they can win they don’t waste the money on the trial. And it’s these sort of decisions too that the family don’t understand: that the prosecution don’t work for them. And that’s one of the even more frustrating things for a family, they think the prosecution is on their side, but nobody’s on their side, in a sense.
The agenda changes and they’re left behind.
Yeah, the family are definitely the least important in the whole process. And that’s just the way it is really, because the prosecutor’s not representing the victim, they’re representing society and trying the person from doing it again, And that’s what happens once someone is charged, it’s out of the victim’s hands in a sense and I think that’s one of the most frustrating things.
This is a quote from Blood Born, it’s about gang rape – “violence from the pack mentality had been rapidly escalating”. Is that true?
Yes, yes. Well, god, Phillip Island last week sixteen blokes, two girls. Did you hear about that one? Wardrobe’s across the doors so the girls couldn’t get out – yes that sounds like consent to me.
I hadn’t really been thinking about it in terms of those things that hit the media, the sporting teams, though I guess that’s the same thing really as the roaming, lower-profile gang rapists.
Yeah, what’s the difference? Some are more likely to get reported than others.
And in those larger groups on an organised activity, there’s a sense that it’s been condoned.
It’s part of the culture.
That has been more present in the media – is that a fair reflection that it’s happening more?
It is happening more. Just think - there’s a culture through football, and actually Death Mask is about that, my next book, but it’s not just here, it’s England, America, anywhere where there is a group of males and there’s a sport involved, it’s very sad, there’s a pack mentality. What’s even sadder is that the women are even less likely to be believed. The lawyers are playing the media just as effectively as they did with the OJ Simpson case. Claiming the race card, people picking on OJ because he’s black, well these people are claiming that the star players are accused of rape because they’re famous, and how are they supposed to deal with it, they’ve got bodies like gods and women flock to them, how are they supposed to know the difference, a woman wants it or she doesn’t. They think every woman wants it because many women do - how is that successful?
Going back to the increase in pack mentality violence against women, could you speculate as to why that’s been happening?
I think it’s partly the celebrity culture. I actually wrote a piece on Hollywood stars and how men who abuse women are actually doing better now than ever, in their careers anyway. There are documented cases of Sean Connery, Sean Penn … Sean Connery actually openly admitted in an interview that it’s OK, you know, some women just are asking for a slap. And he’s not opposed to it, his first wife accused … and he says that, and repeated it when re-interviewed, and his first wife accused him of abusing her, and beating her and no one believed her. Because this was Sir Sean Connery, and after he came out with that view, he won an academy award. And then you have Sean Penn, he was, in Madonna’s marriage to him, there were charges of abuse, and at one stage she apparently went into a police station and she was unrecognisable because she claimed he’d beaten her for nine hours, tied her to a chair and beaten her. This guy has two academy awards and is lauded in Hollywood as the actor of his generation. Charlie Sheen, the highest paid actor in Hollywood, highest paid television actor, has also pleaded no contest to batter charges and abuse charges. His ex-wife is now saying he was abusive, and everyone’s saying ‘what a top bloke.’
No distaste or detrimental effect.
And the Matthew Johns affair - 2000 people are on Facebook saying the most vile things about the girl, just because they think Matty’s a hero. I’m sorry how does that … I don’t understand.
People justify what they already believe.
I know, Well even in juries, they did studies of juries in NSW, prospective jurors, and 50 percent of them thought that if a man goes to a certain point he physically can’t stop, and there’s nothing he can do. And that victims contribute in the way they’re dressed and whether they’ve been drinking.
A lag in default attitudes?
Condemnation of women – blame the victim, always blame the victim, and if in doubt you blame the victim’s parents if they’re a child. But it’s a strategy defence lawyers have done, and the media’s promoted it, fallen for it hook line and sinker. And I think that’s a big part of it, these guys now think they’re invincible, untouchable, and in a lot of cases they are untouchable and they get away with it. And it’s a reinforcement, and they’re teaching the younger guys. Why did bastardisation go so long in the armed forces? Because they get away with it and there’s no negative reinforcement, it’s not punished. You look at a lot of the American players who are charged with things, they’re not even suspended from games.
Thank you, Kathryn, for your time.
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