Chris Hammer tells Bron Sibree what inspires his award-winning, best-selling thrillers.
is set in the fictional mining town of Finnigans Gap, not so far from the real life mining town of Lightning Ridge. It begins in the dead of night with thieves breaking into an opal mine where, instead of rich pickings, they find the owner crucified in the depths of his mine.Scrublands, Silver, journalist Martin Scarsden, giving centre stage instead to Sydney homicide detective Ivan Lucic, a minor character in the previous novels, and Lucic’s assistant Nell Buchanan, a young local detective.
Another reaches back to Sydney where Lucic’s old boss, Morris Montefiore, is under internal investigation, and as Lucic soon discovers, so is he. Yet another revolves around the way big corporate miners get away with things smaller miners don’t. For Hammer, who famously never plots his novels as “they evolve as I’m writing”,is the result of stymied plans and a fortuitous sighting or two.
But during a routine foray to the local shops soon after his plans were foiled, he spied a woman walking past wearing an opal pendant. “It was just this light bulb moment, oh, an opal mining town! That could be interesting!'” recalls Hammer. “I knew next to nothing about opal mining, but I did know one thing — that opal miners are typically one-man bands, smallholdings. If you stake an opal claim you can only stake a claim 50m by 50m. That’s why the big global corporations aren’t in there.
Hammer relishes too, the task of working out what drives his characters, just as he relishes everything about his relatively newly minted life as a fiction writer. He’d been writingin his spare time when, in 2017, he became one of the thousands of journalists to be retrenched from a declining industry. But the success of— which paved the way to his new career and is still walking off bookshop shelves — is, he admits, “still hard to believe.
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