Alan Carter

Alan Carter is the author of PRIME CUT (Fremantle Press Feb 2011) his debut novel. It won the prestigious Ned Kelly Crimewriting Award in 2011 in the category of Best First Fiction, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger award in 2010 and has been selected by the Australia Council GET READING program for the list of 50 Books You Can’t Put Down 2011.

In his “day job” Alan Carter has been making TV documentaries since 1986 and his Fremantle-based production company, Alley Kat Productions, has been producing quality and innovative documentary programming for local and international markets since its establishment in 1995. From 1997 – 2000 Alan also acted as Executive Producer for the ABC on independently-produced documentaries in WA. Alan’s individual Producer/Director credits.

Alan Carter has also worked as CEO of Film & Television Institute in Fremantle, State Director of Oxfam, a taxman, a labourer in a chemical factory, and a shelf-stocker in a supermarket.

Breath

My name is Alan Carter.  I live in Fremantle, a mega-city on the south-west coast of Australia with a population of about 30,000 people.  I have been asked to write something about breath.  I told this to my wife, Kath.  I said I’m going to Shanghai in China and they want me to write about breath.  She thought it was a very good idea because when I am in the middle of thinking about writing it is something I often forget to do.

       ‘Breathe, Alan,’ she says. ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’

I also tend to stare into the distance and it takes me some time to come back.  But that is writing.  A communion with life and death through breathing and forgetting to breathe and through going away and coming back.

I write crime stories.  My characters are forever breathing their last breath, involved in breathtaking risks, breathless with excitement, or taking deep breaths to calm themselves in the face of intense provocation.  My character’s name is Philip Kwong and he is a detective with the Western Australian police.  He is perhaps two or three centimetres taller than me, maybe a few kilos lighter, and ten years younger.  He likes cryptic crosswords – just like me.  He also plays piano very well – which I don’t.  He is one of a very few Chinese people in the police force and often feels like an outsider in his job. Yet also he feels like an outsider from his Chinese culture – he does not speak Chinese (coincidentally, neither do I) and the last person in his family to do so was his grandfather.  Kwong is loosely based upon a person I met during a TV documentary I made with the police.  He set me thinking – what is his life as an outsider among mainly Anglo colleagues, how many times a day does he have to prove himself to them?  TV, by the way, is my day job - that is what pays the bills until I become an international best-seller!  I am awaiting this development with bated breath.  

In the first book, “PRIME CUT”, Kwong was working with the Stock Squad – a team of officers who specialise in investigating the theft of sheep, cows and farming equipment.  It was a punishment – he had been demoted from his job in Homicide because he failed to do his job properly.  The story opens with him investigating a dead cow by the roadside in a small town in rural Australia a long way from anywhere.  Here dust and flies inhabit the hot air he breathes and he wants out.  Kwong is sent to another nearby town on the coast where a body has been washed up on a beach.  Because there are no detectives available in the area he gets the chance to look into it.  I lived on the south coast of Western Australia for a while when my wife was teaching in a school opened to service the workers for a new mining boom in a tiny town called Hopetoun.  500 people lived there, and when the boom came it brought a massive increase in population – to 2000.  So there, in Hope-Town, begins a story that takes Kwong into the underbelly of the mining boom.  Mining is the mainstay of the Australian economy which has helped to make Western Australia a very prosperous place and for which we are, of course, very grateful to China.  Along the way Kwong meets some Chinese workers who are being treated harshly by their Australian employer – they are confused when they meet Philip Kwong – a Chinese detective who does not speak Chinese!  Anyway, as you might expect, he solves the mysteries that surround him, gets the girl, and the sequel.

The sequel, “GETTING WARMER”, is released this month while I am here in Shanghai.  Now Kwong is rewarded for his work solving the case from the first book and is returned to working Homicide cases in the mega-city of Fremantle.  He finds people a lot more complicated than the animals he was dealing with in Stock Squad – gangs attacking each other, missing persons, dangerous colleagues, and a rogue assassin.  He also has a failed marriage and a son to look after every second weekend.  Once again he solves the mysteries, arrests the bad guys, and lives to fight another sequel.

So now here I am in Shanghai to breathe some new life and authenticity into my character for his third and possibly last adventure – unless my publisher decides they want more.  I cannot keep hiding my character behind my ignorance.  Detective Philip Kwong needs to learn more about his Chinese-ness, to understand more about the history and culture of his ancestors, and discover how much of his heritage helps to make him a good detective.  And the only way he can do that is if I put some work in and try to learn more myself.  I have been to China before – to Beijing and Liaoning – with my TV documentary work.  But Shanghai has always held a fascination for me ever since, as a child, I saw photographs of the Bund architecture and realised it looked a lot like Liverpool – not so far from the town where I grew up in England.  Liverpool in China?  How can this be?  Over the years I learned more; I also read the Inspector Chen novels of Qiu Xiaolong who showed me a city of history, culture, poetry and great food.  After I read those I had even more reasons for wanting to come to Shanghai.

So now, with some trepidation and a great deal of excitement, I approach my – and Detective Kwong’s – greatest challenge yet.  Like me he has travelled from Hopetoun, a small village of 2000 people, and now we end up in Shanghai - a city of 23 million.  The whole of the population of Australia packed into one city!  In two short months can I unlock enough understanding of Chinese history, culture, and philosophy to really fool my readers into believing that I know what I am writing about?  I think not – but I hope to have a lot of fun trying, I hope also to meet and learn from some wonderful writers and thinkers here in this room.  I look forward to exploring this amazing city, talking to its people, hearing its stories, and dreaming up new and dangerous adventures for Detective Kwong.  I hope also to share stories from my own strange, twisted, and sometimes funny world as a writer of Australian crime.  I will be jumping into the deep end and so now it is time to take a deep breath and dive in!   -  Alan Carter