Stuart Black's The Signatory - Q&A

Witness our in-depth interview with author Stuart Black, the founding partner and CEO of South-East Asia's leading healthcare communications groups, Ward6. We discover Stuart Black's inner workings as he speaks of his life, career and newly released book The Signatory!

Q: What motivated you to write in the crime and murder genre?

A: The crime genre is built around a type of storytelling that appeals to me. And, for me, a novel is always about storytelling. I like the genre because it’s entertaining, it packs a punch, and it still allows you to deliver a powerful message.

Q: As a CEO of a major company, how do you balance the responsibilities of that role with your interests as an author? 

A: As many authors before me have said, writing is a compulsion. I’ve always done it. I started writing songs – they were the vehicle for my storytelling when I was younger. And when I stopped playing in bands, I switched to writing novels. I don’t have as much time for it as I would like – I do have to run a business – but I have enough time.

The upside to running the company at the same time as being an author is that it provides rich material to write about – each and every day. It also means that I can afford to write about what I find most compelling – and am not forced to try my hand at what seems trendy or what someone else might think I should be writing about. I am free to write my stories, in the way I see fit. 

Q: What environment helps you best to sit down and write? 

A: When you are busy, as I usually am, and have competing priorities, as I usually do, then motivation is the key. What motivates me is engaging with the world in a positive way – where the moral or philosophical issues that I like to write about have a chance to spring to life. Going for a walk in the park can be motivational, watching the news can be motivational, reading a book can be motivational, listening to a great piece of music can be motivational. And my office life can be motivational. 

The location I like to write in varies. I am not one of those writers who needs to go to the same small ‘writing room’ each morning at 7 am. For me, the constant that I seek is good light. I don’t like to write in dark and depressing closed-in spaces. I love a good chair and a good desk in a bright and open space. 

Q: What were your challenges when writing The Signatory and what helped you overcome them? 

A: There are always many challenges to writing a novel. Number one is getting the first draft down on paper. But that’s easy compared to the rewriting. It is incredibly hard to look back at your own work and make the necessary corrections/improvements.

Having said that, what is satisfying is that, when you do, and you spot the stupid mistakes you made in the first draft, you know you are making the manuscript better. That motivates you to keep going. 

When you feel you’ve given it your best shot, it’s also great to get feedback from an external source, such as a friend or an editor. Just when you are feeling burnt out by the process, that external feedback can give you a new energy. Enough to have another go and do that extra bit of rewriting that is always needed on my manuscripts. And as with the previous manuscripts I have written, that was certainly the case with The Signatory.

Q: What aspects of corporate life in Sydney led you to set the novel there? 

A: While I travel regularly, Sydney is my primary place of work, so it was easiest to set the novel there. I know Sydney very well and I hope that gives the novel – from a setting point of view – extra authenticity. 

But it’s important to note that the themes in the novel are universal. From a business point of view, what I am describing in The Signatory could have happened in any major western city. The reader is looking into a Sydney-based ad agency, but it has been bought out by a global firm, and that happens regularly in cities around the world.  

The fictitious global company in the novel is listed on the US stock exchange, and that means it has all the pressures on it to consistently increase revenue and profit that all listed companies have. And all the associated temptations for management to cross the line between right and wrong (to make an extra dollar).

Q: Were you influenced by other crime authors, and, if so, what are the points of difference between their work and yours? 

A: I am influenced by storytellers in general, rather than just crime writers. In terms of the crime genre, I am probably more familiar with the classic British novels and movies and TV shows than American or Australian ones, but I find inspiration in any great story, regardless of where it comes from. 

The thing that distinguishes my novels is that they are so firmly anchored in a world that I know intimately. I grew up in Sydney at a time when there was plenty of crime and corruption to observe (extending to governments of every persuasion and various police forces around the country), and I have worked in the corporate world for almost my entire adult life. I have strong feelings about the rights and wrongs of what I have observed in my life and that colours my writing. 

Click here to buy The Signatory now!

Why did Jenny McFadden pass up a book talk with Richard Flanagan?

Blogger's Note: This is Jenny's launch speech for The Copyart Murders

It’s a pleasure to be here to introduce a new novel by Geoffrey Gates – The CopyArt Murders.  Of course I did have tickets for another book event this evening –as we speak Richard Flanagan is conducting a book-talk with Jennifer Byrne at the Town Hall on his Booker Award winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  Understandably, I ditched this big-ticket gala once I was made aware of the opportunity to speak on behalf of Geoffrey Gates. 

 The Copyart Murders is a work of Crime Fiction. And I’m sure Geoff would be pleased to hear me say this, it’s a work of “intellectual” Crime Fiction. As most readers know, Crime Fiction has enjoyed a massively extended period of readership popularity. Possibly this is because we are all, by nature, nosey busybodies who like the opportunity to peek into the private, illicit doings of seemingly upstanding people. And certainly it’s also because, given the state of existential uncertainty in which we all live in the modern era, we all crave the sense of closure and certainty that the average Crime Fiction novel affords us. Even if we don’t know what the hell is going on in our own lives, it’s nice to read about an orderly, if blood-soaked world, where hidden actions can be deduced from small amounts of evidence and perpetrators can satisfactorily be brought to justice. It gives us some sense of stability and safety to think that there are still noble searchers-out of truth somewhere in the world – the Poirots, the Miss Marples, and all the rest who will stop at nothing to set an uncertain and often dangerous world to rights. And you only have to look at any random television program to know that, after concocted ‘reality’ cooking and building shows, crime rules the remote control.

However, how can the often ill-regarded, stock-standard, pulp-fiction elements of Crime Fiction find a place in the more intellectual realms of modern literary fiction? If you’re ever suffering from some serious disease which requires a long period of bed-rest you could try reading Foccault, or Derrida or Roland Barthes, in an effort to understand post-modernism before you die. And then you’ll die anyway. Yet the playfulness of postmodernism, so often alluded to in theory, does exist in practice. So, purchase a copy of Geoff’s novel before you hit the groaning shelves of post-modernist theory.

To clarify from the outset, within the novel written by Geoffrey Gates lies a novel written by his hapless and sometimes truth-challenged Australian protagonist, Blake Knox.  Geoff’s novel concerns, and I quote, “A would-be novelist found unconscious on the grave of an artist who very much resembles the victim in the novel he had come to France to attempt to write.” Thus, the novelistic endeavours attempted by the would-be author within the novel, Blake Knox, prove to be somewhat fraught since the at-the-time “fictional” death that he writes about predates by 23 days the death of the very artist who is the victim depicted in Blake’s crime fiction novel. Detective Sauveur who is investigating this murder of the artist immediately presumes it to have been committed by the would-be novelist Blake Knox himself. Sauveur, with a considerable degree of cynical self-reflexivity points out, that this is ‘a most unfortunate case of foreshadowing.’ Blake Knox himself notes ruefully that ‘stumbling upon the plot of an actual crime was an occupational hazard of writing he had never considered before.’

To boot, the death imagined and then written about before the occurrence of the matching “real” death upon which the novel-outside the-novel turns, is a very postmodern death. It is a death seemingly brought about by the very material that so plagues the royalty-dependent modern novelist of the real world – death by photocopy.

Indeed, the novel concerns itself to a considerable degree with the problem of re-presentation. In discussing one of the artworks of the murdered artist Jean Genet, the narrator, the sometimes fumbling but nevertheless intelligent Blake Knox, notes that Eyes (2003) was a landscape painting with a camera lying in the grass in the foreground, and Mount Ventoux in the background. There was an immediate tension over subject, whether it was the work being painted or the representation of that work in the camera lens where a reflection of the mountain and sky had been carefully matched. This pretty much sums up the problem at the heart of the novel. What is “art” and what is merely reproduction? And, more to the point, how can the detective work performed by the fictional detective/detectives be separated from the detective work done by the novelist/novelists in the creation of the very novel in which the detectives and novelists are represented? It’s all a puzzle – but then so is the world.

The Copyart Murders is also a demonstration that, outside the kind of single-minded pulp fiction, which brooks no deviation from formula, there is no such thing as the single-genre novel. Sprinkled liberally throughout this work of crime fiction is an entertaining mix of travelogue, laconic Australian humour and French for Beginners (not to mention sex, lies and videotape.) For instance: ‘…it was a short walk to the village’s main attraction, the Notre Dame de Cadenet. Legend has it that a former farmer was ploughing his field here in the 12^th century when his cows suddenly knelt down in front of a row of century old junipers (“Cade” in French) and the farmer decided to build a chapel here in response to this minor miracle. (But perhaps his cows merely had dodgy knees.)’ And elsewhere;  ‘Whatever evidence the French police had against him, it was a matter of common sense that a lanky intellectual like Blake would hardly be the type to commit a murder for the hell of it. For what possible motive could he have? A deep hurt in response to the painter’s manner to him during their dinner together? A pathological hatred of landscape paintings?’ You get the drift. The novel will engage your intellectual faculties, but it will also entertain you.

The novel begins with a memorable statement from Italo Calvino; “Who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined.” And indeed when the renowned novelist Geoffrey Gates is remembered and lauded in biography, perhaps his own description of his young, inexperienced but very readable and entertaining writer-protagonist Blake Knox, on his journey from Innocence to Experience, will preface those memories: ‘a teacher and (very occasional) writer whose only earthly possessions were his acoustic guitar a mustard-coloured sleeping bag, and an ever-expanding collection of paperbacks.’ Given his parlous state Blake concludes ‘I’ll write a book… because everybody likes an author!’

The Copyart Murders is a memorably entertaining and engaging novel on many, many levels. I recommend it to you most highly.

– Jenny McFadden