Emma Viskic leads charge for Aussie noir at Edinburgh book festival

Emma Viskic is doing her part to put Australian crime fiction alongside Nordic noir in the minds of readers.

Emma Viskic will spread the word on Australia’s wealth of talent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Picture: Aaron Francis

Homegrown Australian crime novels — sometimes dubbed “sunburnt noir” or “Southern Cross crime” — are enjoying growing international recognition and are feeding the lust of thriller fans worldwide.

Among the native authors driving the popularity of Australian crime fiction is Emma Viskic, who will spread the word further at next month’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, one of the largest in the world. There she will rub shoulders with Scottish giants of the genre, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin.

Viskic recently has finished her second book, And Fire Came Down, and is writing her third.

Her debut novel, Resurrection Bay, won the 2016 Ned Kelly Award for best first fiction and three Davitt awards for Australian crime fiction by female authors. Viskic says Australian crime fiction is having a moment in the sun, thanks to years of excellent writing by the likes of Michael Robotham and the late Peter Temple.

“There seems to be interest whereas in previous decades and years it has been perceived as a bit of a strange thing,” she says. “People like Peter Temple and more recently Jane Harper have really opened the way for people to have more of an interest in it.”

Harper burst on to the international scene last year, winning the coveted Gold Dagger award in Britain for her debut The Dry. She is the third Australian to win the prize since 2007, after Temple and Robotham. Viskic says the wave of Aussie crime novels follows the well-worn footsteps of Nordic or Scandinavian noir and Scottish or “tartan” noir.

It has even led to the search for a catchy title, with sunburnt noir, Southern Cross crime or (less popular with Viskic) kanga crime offered up as suggestions.

Australian crime writing is comparable in quality with Scandinavian writing, Viskic says, but does not yet have the same international exposure.

“People still love the Scandinavian crime but are maybe looking for something a bit different,” she says. “I think because Australia is such an enormous country with so many different socio-economic backgrounds, you can get pretty much anything you want here.”

The central character in Viskic’s books is Caleb Zelic, a deaf man who uses years of noticing and interpreting subtleties in human behaviour to track down a killer.

Viskic, who lives in suburban Melbourne, learned Australian Sign Language to write the books and has walked around with earplugs to help her to understand life from Zelic’s perspective.

She had read of plenty of deaf characters in novels, but “they all tended to be victims or secondary characters”.

“I like to twist things on their head a little bit,” she says. “Getting into the mindset of someone who is deaf was a challenge of its own.”

It will be Viskic’s first appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where she will join a panel discussion with Britain’s Eva Dolan (author of This is How It Ends) and will read from And Fire Came Down.

She plans to speak with as many readers and authors as possible. “I think one of the great things about festivals is it gives you an opportunity to connect with readers who might not otherwise know your work and also connect with those who do know your work,” she says.

The writing process has changed for Viskic since her debut as personal and outside expectations create another level of pressure. “One of the hardest things about writing your first novel is convincing yourself that people will read it, despite the fact that it probably won’t get published,” she says. “For the second and subsequent novels you’ve got to convince yourself that no one is going to read it so that you can have that quiet space in your brain and write.”

A classically trained clarinetist, Viskic has described writing a book as like performing a piece of music, with attention given to rhythm, structure, melody, pace, silence, instrumentation and cadence.

She begins with some ideas but doesn’t work out the plot in advance. “I don’t pre-plot anything,” she says. “There are a few scenes that I know will be in the novel — they are my road signs. I start off not knowing how I’m going to get to them, but it is the journey of getting to those things that makes it interesting.”

Writing a deaf protagonist may seem like a strange choice for a musician who built her first career around sound, but she says there was no changing the Caleb Zelic who had formed in her mind. While in Edinburgh, Viskic says she hopes to take in more of the festival city, with the Edinburgh Military Tattoo and the Edinburgh International Festival high on the to-do list.

Other Australian authors attending the book festival include fiction writer Shaun Prescott, philosophy writer Damon Young and indigenous author Bruce Pascoe.