Readings' Elke Power interrogates former Readings Monthly ‘Dead Write’ columnist and current Readings bookseller, reviewer and award-winning writer Fiona Hardy about her debut crime novel, Unbury the Dead.
Elke: Like most booksellers, you are widely read and have more than one favourite genre/topic/style. You take that even further by being a gifted writer in more than one area! What has it been like writing and publishing a crime novel after publishing several acclaimed middle grade novels?
Fiona: It’s been wild! I’ve been lucky to stay with the same publisher – Affirm Press – and I knew I was in good hands with them. Their crime stable includes the likes of Christian White, Anna Downes, and Kate Solly, among MANY others, so they know what makes a good crime book.
Much is the same – editors scolding me about excessive word count and reminding me to make terrible things happen to my characters when I just want them to have a nice time hanging out. A big difference is that some of my always-supportive friends who are resolutely not children’s book readers have said, ‘Oh, I might read this one!’ Also, I appreciate that it has a much shorter title, which is way easier to remember.
Elke: For those who have not yet read Lian’s rave review, can you briefly introduce Unbury the Dead?
Fiona: Alice and Teddy are sometime private detectives, sometime hooligans for hire, and always have each other’s backs. At the start of Unbury, Alice is driving the coffin of a very wealthy man to his final resting place in regional Victoria before the rest of Australia finds out he’s dead, and Teddy is hunting a missing man in Melbourne’s suburbs. The two cases collide (as cases tend to do), and the violent fallout changes everything for them.
Elke: When you were the crime reviewer for the Readings Monthly, we used to talk about the kinds of characters who frequently appeared in the investigative roles, and those that were most commonly put in the victim-of-crime roles. When you were writing Unbury the Dead, were there conventions or tropes you wanted to honour in your novel, or any you particularly wanted to avoid?
Fiona: A great question! It’s interesting, because for readers, there are always tropes one person will love that other people roll their eyes at. All crime fiction is good crime fiction, of course, but for me, I really love stories with protagonists that aren’t necessarily cops, but still have a lot of parallel skills, and work in that fascinating grey area outside the constraints of police investigation. (Though, of course, any police procedural worth its salt will have cops throwing the rule book at their superiors at some point anyway.) I remember being back in my 20s, reading crime, and feeling vastly underrepresented – so I made my characters in their late 20s, but with a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in the field in Teddy’s case, at least, thanks to her criminal upbringing. I deliberately avoided any sexual assault in the book, so nobody has to be shaken by an unexpected reference to it. And as you say, I love partners in crime that support and adoringly antagonise each other – Teddy and Alice’s relationship was a dream to write, and I loved every moment of it.
Elke: One of the most immediately compelling aspects of Unbury the Dead is the superb characterisation. I already feel like Teddy and Alice are old friends and I cannot wait to go on more adventures with them. I definitely need to know more about Choker’s backstory, too! How did these multidimensional characters and their relationships come to you?
Fiona: Thank you so much! Teddy and Alice’s story has been building for years and years – the first spark of them began with an unfinished idea I had that involved Teddy, who wasn’t quite complete until I wrote Alice in as her partner – then they became real people, essentially, in my mind.
I wrote much more about the two of them and their history than will ever see the light of day, thanks to my editor, Laura Franks, who is unfortunately of the opinion that quality is superior to quantity when it comes to word count. Every word I’ve written of Teddy and Alice speaking has fed into their relationship, and made their interactions easier to predict. Mostly I’m in control of what they do; sometimes they change the plot’s trajectory because they would never do what would conveniently work more easily for me. I’ve always loved books where every side character has their own story and life worth hearing, and one of the hardest things for me is paring that back for sensible readability reasons.
Elke: For women whose jobs routinely involve acting as unsubtle messengers, Teddy and Alice really care about the missing teenager and the dead rich guy they’ve been allocated, as well as the important people in their lives. Is the tension between their jobs and their capacity for compassion or warmth something you were keen to explore?
Fiona: It really was. Victims often become faceless, nameless, reduced to how they died – in both news stories and fiction. I know it’s because of space constraints, but I really wanted to expand on both of the people related to their cases, and the lengths Alice and Teddy go to trying to figure these people out. While there’s a certain distance between investigators and the people they’ve never met and are trying to find, sometimes that can help them look at a big picture that the people near them can no longer see; that aspect was hard but also worthwhile to write (I hope!). And it seemed necessary to make Teddy and Alice warm and compassionate when their jobs put them squarely in a very seedy grey area, narrator-wise – how sympathetic can you be to characters that have kicked someone’s teeth in before the book even starts? Hopefully, the answer is ‘very’.
Elke: Were there other issues you wanted to tackle in a crime novel, or that arose in the writing of this specific tale?
Fiona: Writing is such a living beast at times – ideas change, plotlines get evicted, whole characters disappear. On a surface level, it’s a little bit about Melbourne’s food scene, and a bit about car chases, and partly about what a criminal enterprise might look like if it was run like a small business with a chipper attitude and also, occasionally, had to deal with dead bodies. On a deeper level, it’s about who you can trust in an untrustworthy career, or a little about recovering from bone-wrenching guilt. Then there’s also the larger question that Teddy and Alice face: what makes somebody a good person, and worth other people’s time?
Elke: There are consequences for a few characters after a lawn-mowing episode goes awry. Do you have strong feelings about roses, or gardens generally?
Fiona: Ha, I would have said ‘no’ but when I think about my first middle grade book – where kids make a horror movie about a killer rosebush – I can’t help but think that maybe I have more of an issue with roses than I thought? As an apartment-dweller with a sorry garden situation (I’m in an ongoing legal dispute with the hungry neighbourhood possum), I think imagining a beautiful rose garden seems like fiction; maybe that’s why I keep writing them, and then unthinkingly roughing them up.
Elke: Please tell me this is just the first of many, many Teddy and Alice stories to come? And are there any more books for middle grade or other young readers in the pipeline?
Fiona: Fingers crossed this isn’t the only Teddy and Alice story – I have so many more plans for them that I’m already working on, and a short story I wrote about the two of them called ‘Green Thumbs’ won the Scarlet Stiletto Prize HQ Fiction Award for Best Thriller in 2024, which was a huge honour. I’ve also been writing some school readers recently that primary school kids might find in their reading tubs soon, and I’m never far away from working on another kids’ book – I’m always working on about three things at the same time as ideas are rarely a problem for me, but making time for them sure is!
Elke: And one last question: what are you reading at the moment? Any recommendations?
Fiona: Crime-wise, I recently loved Lainie Anderson’s historical novel The Death of Dora Black, Mark Mupotsa-Russell’s gritty and local (to me) The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt, and the new twisty book by Christian White, The Ledge. I’m also attempting to read Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital, which is beautiful and visceral, but I want to take my time with it.
Fiona Hardy is one of our very own Readings booksellers, as well as a writer and reviewer from Melbourne.
Unbury the Dead will be available from 25 February, and you can join us to celebrate the launch at Readings Carlton on Wednesday 5 March!
