MEET THE AUTHOR

Marele Day lives in Balmain, Sydney, and is a full-time writer. Like many writers today, Day attempts to challenge traditions and attempt new ways of writing. The detective thriller has a long-established tradition of storytelling with very clear rules and conventions. Many of these conventions don't make much sense in the 1990s because attitudes have changed towards the roles of women and men. Our society is very different from the world in which the early detective thrillers were set. You need to be aware, then, that Day deliberately sets out to reverse or disobey some of the traditions of character, setting and story ideas that are typical of the detective story.

One of the reasons that Day overturns some of the conventions we normally find in detective fiction is that she is approaching this genre from a feminist viewpoint. In fact, Day has called her book a 'feminist detective novel'. Feminist fiction attempts to counteract unfair or inappropriate descriptions of women by presenting them as capable, strong and independent people. This is not to say that Day is the first or only female author of detective fiction. Writers such as Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie were pioneers in this genre who produced countless detective stories. What makes contemporary writers like Day different from these early women detective writers, though, is that modern women writers challenge and extend the style and characterisation of the detective genre (whereas earlier female writers kept largely within these conventions).

The detective thriller is traditionally a male genre. The women in these stories traditionally are secondary characters. They are often the victims or are portrayed as 'dumb blondes' who are more ornamental than functional: they are there to look good rather than achieve anything. Often the female character provides the love interest in the storyline or is a femme fatale who uses her sexuality to seduce the hero into trouble.

Obviously, for women readers and writers, portraying women in this way is both offensive and one-sided. Day challenges this in many ways.

Day also tries to make her characters more realistic than traditional detective heroes and villains. A typical detective is an independent male. Claudia, however, is a woman who has attachments: her children, her ex-husband and her father. She is portrayed as real women, capable of strength in her professional life, but who also has personal weaknesses and is open to love. (Claudia says that she is often amazed at how other fictional detectives like the famous Marlowe seemed never to need to sleep or do any normal human functions).

As a feminist writer, Day also tries to avoid violence in the story where possible because it could be considered an inappropriate male means of solving problems. In the traditional detective thriller, the detective hero is mostly a tough, hard-living male who breaks the rules and who solves problems by resorting to violence. He 'fights fire with fire' in the sense that he will use violent means to arrive at a worthwhile result. Trying to leave out violence in a story about criminals' evil deeds is not an easy aim to achieve in a tough detective story.

Day revealed that originally she had not intended to write a detective thriller. After extensive travelling, Day had become interested in cities and she wanted to write a novel which allowed her to describe Sydney in all its moods. She finally chose the detective thriller because it allowed her to show us the whole city from the beaches to the back alleys. Because of this original intention, the city is a very important, almost living, aspect of the novel.