Revelling in Christchurch's dark side has won crime writer Paul Ceave an international audience.
The casual violence and graphic horror of Paul Cleave’s serial-killer novels are so vividly portrayed I was having second thoughts about meeting the crime writer in the flesh. I wasn’t the only one. After one of Cleave’s friends’ wives read an early manuscript, she apparently took her husband aside and asked: “Are you sure about Paul?”
Cleave’s harrowing depiction, in four books, of Christchurch as a city swarming with villains living beyond-the-pale lives in let-go streets, gives the impression his place of residence might be somewhere in the House of Horrors badlands.
Not so. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed to discover that the small but perfectly formed 35-year-old with pellucid blue eyes and chiselled features lives in a very orderly street in the quiet suburb of Redwood with his girlfriend and three cats.
Although Cleave’s first book, The Cleaner, sold over 250,000 copies in 2007 when it was released in Germany and was Amazon’s number one bestseller there, his New Zealand profile is so under the radar he can rest easy that Mayor Bob Parker won’t be balling him out over the negative effects his noir novels may be having on Garden City tourism.
But watch this space: Cleave has plans for a mayor to be taken out by the next serial killer to come hot off his assembly line.
Hot is the operative word here, with the writer who didn’t pass UE English and was ridiculed for his schoolboy creative-writing endeavours (including a heroin-addicted Santa who put the helper elves through a meat grinder) clocking up 12-hour days when he is “in the zone” and churning out a staggering 20,000 words during a writing jag (to the strains of the Killers in the background).
The initial gush usually comes to a grinding halt with no plot worked out beforehand and Cleave allowing his characters to run amok in the very over-the-top Christchurch landscape. There are literally piles of half-begun novels lying fallow, which may or may not be returned to further down the track and fashioned into a going concern.
Fans of Cleave’s novels – which also include Cemetery Lake and The Killing Hour – rejoice in bumping into characters from previous books who were major but have become minor: Joe from The Cleaner, for example, who poses as a mentally handicapped cleaner in book one and is sighted again during a prison visit in the about-to-be-released Blood Men.
Admitting he has no qualms about painting Christchurch as a nasty place, Cleave says he is simply cashing in on its reputation as New Zealand’s murder capital and bases his dim view of the city on perilous Friday night bicycle rides through the centre along Manchester St, where thugs would randomly abuse him.
However, a recent encounter at Christchurch Airport changed his mind. A woman, seeing him shy of cash at a parking station, silently gave him $5 and walked off.
“I caught up with her and asked her where she was from and when she said Christchurch I told her, ‘This is bizarre because no one from Christchurch is that nice.’ Then I mugged her, murdered her and she’s buried under the house.”
When I ask if he could describe his childhood in Redwood as a happy one, Cleave replies deadpan: “Oh yes – apart from the abuse.”
It is the same killer punchline humour that Joe, his favourite character, uses to punctuate The Cleaner, but rest assured there are no skeletons in Cleave’s past. During the salt-mine years when he gave up his job in a pawn shop and sold his house to fund and concentrate on the writing, he returned to the parental home. His mum (and No 1 fan) would go through his manuscripts acting as self-appointed cuss-word editor crossing out all the expletives and Cleave still can’t pen anything without imagining the response from her and his dad.
Blood Men was finished at lightening speed because a new deadline was whipping him along. His mum, to whom the book is dedicated, has a lung disease and only a short time to live.
The book has yielded the breakthrough Cleave has been working so hard for. As well as being published in Australia, the UK, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Russia and Japan, he has landed the big one: a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster in the United States.
“Blood Men is the book I’m most excited about because it combines the elements of all three books and I’m really confident it will do well,” he says.
It tells the story of Edward Hunter, who was only a kid when the police came to arrest his father for killing prostitutes. The heavy burden of being the son of a serial killer is great, made lighter only after Edward has his own family – a beautiful wife and daughter – and a steady job. That all changes in a tragic event just before Christmas that reunites him with his father, and the fast-paced novel leads us to discover whether Edward has inherited the same killer instinct to make him “a man of blood”.
Cleave blithely admits that apart from absorbing FBI profiles and swotting up on Wikipedia about schizophrenia (for Blood Men), he hasn’t done the writers’ equivalent of the Stanislavsky method; he thought it unnecessary to interview any real-life detectives or murderers, has never seen the inside of Christchurch Central Police Station or visited the prison cells he writes about so graphically.
Shortlisted for the Australian Ned Kelly Award for Crime Writing in 2007, he bemoans the second-class status given to crime writers by the local literary crowd, the paucity of grants available and the lack of outlets stocking the genre.
Crime-writing aficionado Craig Sisterson, who has a blog called Crime Watch, is on a crusade to instigate a New Zealand crime fiction award and “crime watches” local bookstore shelves looking for rare sightings of the genre. He sends maddening, tantalising photos to Cleave of European airport bookstores groaning with crime fiction compared with our barrenly stocked airport shelves back home.
Cleave is on the brink of international stardom and has already turned down one New Zealand film company interested in turning The Cleaner into a movie. Given the very visual sense of his novels and his belief from the beginning that they would translate well into film, he is obviously hanging out for Hollywood to come knocking.
The lad from Redwood has only recently had his first OE, during which he met up with publishers and appeared on panels where he was thrilled to hang out with other crime writers such as John Connolly and Mark Billingham, whom he describes earnestly as “the coolest, nicest people in the writing world”.
Back home, he bides his time watching The Simpsons and dramas such as The Mentalist, where he guesses the culprit within the first five minutes. “My girlfriend hates it but I just can’t stop myself from sighing and saying out loud, ‘It’s him.’”
Perhaps he should do what this crime writer does best: write the murderer down on paper and keep it hidden till the end.