Today I'm delighted to welcome
FELICITY McLEAN
to share her BEST OF CRIME ...
... AUTHORS
Who could go past that god of Gothic literature, Edgar Allen Poe? Poe is variously credited with inventing: the psychological thriller/the detective genre/science fiction/the name of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team. For my money you can’t go past Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’, which is an elegy of undying devotion to those lost. Poe is the reason I exiled my pining protagonist, Tikka, to Baltimore.
... FILMS/MOVIES
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, based on the 1938 novel by Dame Daphne du Maurier, and starring Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter. Tense, suspenseful; it’s everything Hitchcock does best. Intriguingly, the film deviates from the book in a major way (spoiler alert) when Rebecca’s death is revealed to be an accident, rather than murder at the hands of her husband. At the time, the Hollywood Production Code required murderers to be punished and so the murder plot was, ahem, killed off.
... TV DRAMAS
Stranger Things. Don’t think Netflix’s blockbuster sci-fi/horror/supernatural series constitutes crime? You tell that to the Demogorgons who are abducting children and imprisoning them in the Upside Down.
Stranger Things. Don’t think Netflix’s blockbuster sci-fi/horror/supernatural series constitutes crime? You tell that to the Demogorgons who are abducting children and imprisoning them in the Upside Down.
... FICTIONAL KILLERS
We first meet Agnes Magnúsdóttir in northern Iceland in 1829, when she is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men. While she’s not entirely fictional (this true criminal is fictionalised in Hannah Kent’s brilliant debut novel, Burial Rites), she’s most certainly a killer, and for that she must die.
Based on the last public execution in Iceland.
... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES
Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. Rankin is the UK’s number-one selling crime writer for good reason, and his hard-drinking, deep-thinking maverick Inspector Rebus is a perennial favourite. Linguistically, a ‘rebus’ is an enigmatic puzzle – the perfect moniker for Rankin’s inscrutable detective.
... MURDER WEAPONS
Few are better than the Bard when it comes to murder weapons, but even Shakespeare outdoes himself in Titus Andronicus when he has the titular Titus bake his enemies into a pie before serving them up to their mother. Bon appétit.
... DEATH SCENE
Is it cheating to say my favourite death scene is a scene where there are no deaths?
The all-important ‘disappearance scene’ in the iconic Aussie novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, describes four Victorian-era schoolgirls vanishing into the sun-saturated scrub, their petticoats flouncing as they go. Accident? Murder? Suicide? Three of the four girls are never seen again, and the riddle of their disappearance is never solved.
Joan Lindsay’s beguiling mystery is something of a national obsession in Australia, with many readers believing the story to be true. It was the starting point when I wrote my own unsolved mystery novel, and the vanishing Van Apfel sisters owe much to those missing girls at Hanging Rock.
... BLOGS/WEBSITES
My local indie bookshop introduced me to Story Grid which is a website, blog, book, podcast, in fact, it’s an entire bookish universe designed to guide a first time novelist through the process of writing their book. I wish I’d known about it when I started writing.
... WRITING TIPS
Read, read, and read some more. Almost everything I’ve ever learned about writing I discovered through reading.
... WRITING SNACKS
From 5am to 5pm, I’m fuelled by espresso. After that I switch to scotch.
About FELICITY McLEAN
Felicity McLean is an Australian author and journalist. Her debut novel The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is out now. She has ghostwritten six books, most recently Body Lengths, co-written with Australian Olympic swimmer, Leisel Jones. Her children’s picture book This is a Book! (no wifi needed) was published in 2017.
Find Felicity McLean on her website and on Twitter - @FelicityMcLean
About THE VAN APFEL GIRLS ARE GONE
Publisher's description
Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992, growing up in an isolated suburb in Australia surrounded by encroaching bushland. That summer, the hottest on record, was when the Van Apfel sisters - Hannah, the beautiful Cordelia and Ruth - mysteriously disappeared during the school's Showstopper concert, held at the outdoor amphitheatre by the river. Did they run away? Were they taken? While the search for the sisters unites the small community, the mystery of their disappearance has never been solved.
Now, years later, Tikka has returned home and is beginning to make sense of that strange moment in time. The summer that shaped her. The girls that she never forgot.
Brilliantly observed, spiky, sharp, funny and unexpectedly endearing, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is part mystery, part coming-of-age story - with a dark shimmering unexplained absence at its heart.
The Van Apfel Girls are Gone was published by Point Blank Books on 6 June 2019.
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