Meet Michael Robotham, a crime writer at the top of his game

HE’S sold six million books but even his neighbours haven’t heard of him. Meet Michael Robotham.

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ON my way to meet an author at Avalon, on Sydney’s northern beaches, my ordinarily trusty Google map-maid ushers me into the wrong street.

As I’m idling, getting my bearings, a neatly pressed neighbourly chap appears at the window, eager to render assistance. He’s up for a chat. He’s lived in Avalon a long time, he explains, and knows a good deal of its folk. “Great community, like a country town. Who are you after?” The novelist Michael Robotham, I say. I tell him the street. He fixes me with a baffled stare; he knows the address, but not the name. And so, with instructions to turn right at the servo, I motor off, pondering that had Michael Robotham scored 6000 runs on foreign soils there’d likely be a brass statue of him next to the Avalon Beach Surf Life Saving Club, but sell six million books and, well, not even the local busybody’s heard of him.

I arrive at my destination, ring the doorbell and Robotham, 53, appears in a pair of Ugg boots — his winter writing attire, I figure. The man may be a bit of a dag, but the house is anything but shabby. It’s enormous — all sandstone walls and wide jarrah floorboards. Collectively, the houses of Australian writers I’ve visited could kindly be described as cosy. Books are a great insulator. The poet Les ­Murray lives in a shack that may not survive the next southerly buster. Robotham has ­chosen another path. The boy who grew up in country NSW, at Casino, Gundagai and Coffs Harbour, dreaming of being a novelist, is very pleased that he did.

He leads me into a big, open kitchen and prepares a coffee from a silver machine — across the pool I can see his writing studio, the place his family has dubbed his “Cabana of Cruelty” — and then we settle down on a couple of couches in the sun to pick over his career. He started off as a cub reporter on Sydney’s now defunct The Sun in the same cadet intake as Geraldine Brooks, and then, in his mid 20s, moved to London (with Vivien, now his wife) where he worked as a feature writer for the Mail on Sunday newspaper. “One day this guy came into the features department and he was a ghost writer who had written the stories of Falklands War heroes and polar ice walkers,” he tells me. “Up until this point I had no idea ghost writers existed. I was completely fascinated by it.” He got an agent who got him a gig. He quit his job, a huge leap given that Vivien was pregnant with their first child.

His first subject was a relatively unknown social worker called Margaret Humphreys. She had blown the lid on the British government’s program of forcibly relocating poor children to Commonwealth countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Empty Cradles was published in 1994 and became a bestseller. Robotham had a new career.

Over the next decade or so he ghost-wrote 15 books detailing the lives of SAS soldiers, Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls, Scottish singer Lulu, comedian Ricky Tomlinson, and the now notorious Rolf Harris. “I used to come home to Vivien and say, ‘He’s very dark, it seems as though he’s depressed’,” he says of Harris. He interviewed him for five weeks, but the performer’s daughter, Bindi, was nowhere to be seen during this period. It was around this time, Robotham realised during Harris’s trial this year, that Bindi discovered her father had been sexually assaulting her childhood friend. “He talked about how the most important thing was to make things right with his wife and daughter because he hadn’t been the perfect husband,” he says. Female journalists who’d interviewed the Australian entertainer told Robotham that ­Harris was “a groper, an octopus”, but he had no idea about the underage girls. He sent Harris an email, when the charges were first announced, and said he hoped it would turn out for the best. “Thankfully, he never replied.”

It was during these years of ghostwriting that Robotham met the well-known British forensic psychologist Paul Britton (the inspiration for the character Dr Edward Fitzgerald in TV’s Cracker) and advised him on the writing of his autobiography. Robotham became fascinated with criminal psychology. And then, like in a good crime novel, there was another twist of fate. He was between ghostwriting jobs and decided to spend the time on a novel, a psychological thriller. Like many of his subsequent works, the premise of the book is based on a real event — in this case a story Margaret Humphreys had told him years before, about having to take a newborn baby away from a mother with an intellectual disability. What would happen if, when that child became an adult, he or she decided to take revenge on the judges and social workers for making that ­decision to separate a mother from her child?

He was only 117 pages into the novel when he had lunch with his ghostwriting publisher and she asked him what he was working on. When he told her, she demanded to see it. “The publisher was flying to Australia for a meeting and read it on the flight. She got off the plane and phoned me immediately with an offer.” It was a stupendous amount for a first-time ­novelist with a partly completed manuscript — $450,000, and that only covered the UK and Commonwealth rights. That was late in 2001.

At the London Book Fair early the next year, word leaked about this incredible deal for a crime thriller. “It created a feeding frenzy,” Robotham says. By this stage he and his wife and family had moved back to Australia and were living in Avalon. “The phone was ringing at 3am with news that six American publishers were bidding, five French, four Germans and that the Dutch and Italians were in the mix. In the space of three hours it got sold into 21 ­languages.” For how much? “Let’s just say, when you add it all up, probably about $750,000,” he says as a grin splits his noggin from ear to ear. Not bad for an old hack from The Sun.

That book, The Suspect, went on to sell almost a million copies and Michael Robotham, novelist, was born. The Suspect was first published in 2004 and he has averaged a novel every year since. All up, he’s sold about six million books — half being the ghostwritten books and the other half his novels. It makes him one of Australia’s best-selling writers — nowhere near the shiploads sold by Bryce Courtenay and ­Colleen McCullough, but a country library ahead of famed literary authors such as Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan.

Jennifer Byrne, the ABC’s resident bookworm, first met Robotham at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival in the mid Noughties, two or three novels into his career. “He was telling me the premise of the book he was working on and I was absolutely enthralled — I spoke to him for three hours about it,” Byrne says.

The book was Shatter. “The premise for the book was an actual person called Peter Morris Donnelly, a bank teller from Gladesville,” Robotham explains. Donnelly would go through the Manly Daily and look for stories about teenage girls who had been selected in local sports or debating teams. There would be ­mention of what school she went to and what suburb she lived in. Donnelly would wait until Monday, when the girl was at school. Armed with a small amount of information he’d then phone the mother at home.

Robotham’s voice becomes hushed, and a ­little creepy, as he leans in to retell the evil deeds of Donnelly. “‘Is that Susie’s mum? Susie’s had a little accident at school. I thought she might need an X-ray. She’s a bit upset, I think something is broken.’ ‘Where’s Susie?’ ‘Well, her ­uniform is a bit muddy so I took it off and popped it in the washing machine.’ ‘I want to talk to Susie, I want to talk to her now.’ ‘Well, she’s wearing a gag and she’s lying on the bed. I will put the phone to her ear and you can tell her to relax.’ ” Donnelly perpetrated this cruel hoax on hundreds of women over six years before he was finally charged and jailed in the late 1990s. “I wanted to create a character who unlocked ­people’s minds, pried them apart, and listened to them breaking,” Robotham says. The result is a chilling, beautifully crafted ­psychological thriller.

Byrne reckons that among the current crop of international crime writers, Robotham “is at the top of his game”. But while he is huge in Europe, particularly Germany and the ­Netherlands, and big in the US, he is not so well known here, where his books sell in the tens of thousands. “It is a bit like what Richard ­Flanagan said about Tom Keneally recently — that he is so close that it is hard to see how big he is from Australia.” Robotham is up there, she says, with the well-known crime writers such as Ian Rankin, John Connolly and Val McDermid. “And the thing I love about him is that he doesn’t bang on about it,” she says.

And, he’s a lot of fun. “You know, in the old days, it was the smoking people who were the best fun to hang out with,” Byrne says. “Well, the crime writers are like that.” They don’t take themselves too seriously, she says; and besides, they have the sales that literary types can only dream of. “Crime is all about the sales. If you want to go into being a fancy writer in crime, well that is good, and that is what Michael has done, but it’s about the sales and he has been phenomenally successful. For theatre actors it’s all about the applause — for crime writers it’s the cha-ching of cash registers.”

Over lunch in a Japanese restaurant, a stroll from his house in Avalon, Robotham tells me he’s completely content with where he sits in the literary world. He wrote a more literary novel once, but nobody wanted it and it sits in a drawer. He might come back to it one day but he writes for a living. “I write entertainment,” he says. “There are some books you read but don’t inhale. There are books that will change your life. I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear and hopefully they’ll resonate with you for a few days, where you’ll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine, I am happy with that.”

He tells me that at high school, in Coffs ­Harbour, he was among the top students but one of his teachers told him he’d never be a great student because, the teacher reckoned, he always gave the answers that the examiners wanted to hear. “Maybe,” he says with a rueful smile, “I am still doing the same thing.”

Robotham’s latest novel is Life or Death (Hachette)