Over the past couple of years, I have been attempting to manoeuvre Murray Whelan through the plot of his next scrape. As always, one of my biggest creative challenges is to get the poor sod into the vicinity of a crime and then give him compelling reasons to sink ever deeper into the mire. This would be relatively easy if he was a cop or a private eye - the customary jobs for a sleuth. Had I known that he'd outlive 'Stiff', I might have given him the sort of job where a corpse appears on the doorstep as a matter of daily business. Instead, Murray has stumbled from one deadly fuck-up to another while holding down a day job in politics. But now, older and comfortably situated as a member of parliament, he is naturally getting more risk-adverse. He has been burned a number of times and it is increasingly difficult to get him to go off half-cocked.
So far, the novels have tracked Murray's progress from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, presenting in passing a kind of broad history of Melbourne during that period. The current work-in-progress takes up the story in 1997, a couple of years after his holiday-in-hell experience in 'Something Fishy'. Murray has a secure and comfortable berth in the upper house of state parliament and his domestic life has settled to a comfortable two-bachelors existence with son Red, now in his final year of high school. The Labor party looks to be out of government for the foreseeable future. So what would compel Murray to put himself at risk?
For much of last year, I explored scenarios which might arise from Murray's role as an MP. What I had in mind was a constituent coming to him with a problem which he felt duty-bound to help solve and which turned out to be more hair-raising than anticipated. To that end, I spent a fair bit of time sniffing around the vicinity of Murray's fictional seat of Melbourne Upper. A number of possibilites presented themselves - one involving a dispute among the Fletchers, a lumpen-crim family which loomed large in Murray's memory in 'The Brush-Off'. (as this constituted 'back-story', it didn't feature in the telemovie of the book). Another, possibly intertwining, involved Melbourne's Somali community - some 5000 of whom live in the old Housing Commission estate in West Heidelberg, part of Melbourne Upper. My research led me down some fascinating byways, I learned some very interesting stuff and met some great real-life character, and came up with a suitably serpentine plot. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, Murray was unwilling to be wrangled along the routes I devised for him.
So I put myself back in Murray's shoes and waited. In time, a situation presented itself which did not require any artificial device to set his wheels in motion. (shoes/wheels - mixed metaphor or compacted cliche ??)
These things usually start with a body. So let's imagine that a politician dies. Not violently but of natural causes, a heart attack. He's a generation older than Murray, a political colleague, but also a personal friend and something of a mentor. Even before the body is cold, the internecine manouevring begins over who gets the deceased's vacant seat. And then, to compound the issue, it emerges that a dark secret lurks in the dead man's past - one that would have dire consequences if revealed. And who, by happenstance, finds himself the custodian of that secret? None other than our Murray, of course.
So far, Murray is going along with this scenario. Lured inexorably down the path of least resistance, he is loping steadily and blindly towards those dire consequences. For my part, I'm doing my best to stay one step ahead of him. The game is afoot. In the meantime, my publisher remains firm in the view that they won't publish the book until it is finished. Bastards.
In between attempting to second guess Murray Whelan, I have spent the past few months reading, travelling and blathering at literary chatfests.
In February I hurtled through Rajasthan, my first trip back to India in nearly 25 years. Last time it was Calcutta on $5 a day. This time, I decided to skip the amoebic dysentry and go straight for the maharajahs' palaces. My impressions will appear in due course in a travel section near you.