We chat to Michéle Rowe about her debut novel, What Hidden Lies

This entry was posted on 06 August 2013.
The title refers to how lies and rumours can cause untold damage, even incite violence. It’s also about what lies hidden beneath the surface of our society, like the covering up of the fate of people who were removed and displaced. It also alludes to things hidden or buried in the characters’ past histories. Hopefully, once the reader finishes the book, the title will make perfect sense.
 
Conflict and the resolution of it (or lack thereof) is something that occurs throughout the novel. Is this an element of human nature that intrigues you and if so, why? 
 
I think narrative without conflict lacks drama, and therefore suspense. People are always trying to exert their will on others and that creates conflict. This sounds very Darwinian, and certainly I do not mean it in that sense, just that we are always trying to control our anti-social impulses. We all have different ideas, our cultural or religious values clash, our desires and needs rub up uncomfortably against other’s desires and needs. Invariably there will be conflict. 
 
There are quite a few crime novels coming out of the Western Cape. Why would readers of these novels enjoy yours and what makes What Hidden Lies different?
 
I think the Western Cape lends itself to writing generally, not specifically crime writing. It invites introspection, maybe because of its extraordinary geography, and complex and compelling history that is still tangible in its streets and culture. It’s also a temperamental environment with the winds and storms and heat, is ugly and beautiful, violent yet unnervingly transcendental, simultaneously inhabited by the hedonists and the desperate. It is also a divided city and crime goes to the heart of this inequality.  These contrasts make rich material for a writer. What Hidden Lies is a crime novel that has the investigation of a crime as its motor, but it’s also an examination of a social milieu, of a settlement of unlikely people cohabiting the same geography but miles apart culturally, economically and historically.  I love Wharton and Updike, writers who bring the microscope to bear on a suburb or area of a city, who look at class and snobbery and social mores. 
 
Your three top tips for budding crime writers? 
 
I recommend going back to the earliest crime and mystery fiction, Bleak House, Jane Eyre, writers like Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe. We have not really moved past them, and they have a lot to teach us. There is this theory that crime books are the new social novels, much like nineteenth century novels. I think that’s pretentious but many crime novels by nature of their subject matter explore moral issues and social problems in a way that could seem rather weighty in literary fiction. So I think if you want to write crime fiction it helps to keep abreast of politics and the issues affecting people’s lives. One of the great things about being a writer of crime fiction is that you can punish people and social structures that make you angry.
 
 
 

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