Dave Warner back on the beat
Every so often I encounter what I call the one degrees of Perth. Unlike in Hollywood where any actor is supposedly six acquaintances from knowing actor Kevin Bacon, in WA odds are you’ll have at least one acquaintance in common with anyone you meet. Or so goes my theory.
Pub rocker and Suburban Boy Dave Warner and I have one degrees of separation — a connection I discover the day before his Saturday book launch and reunion gig at the weekend.
The musical legend and film-and-television writer was in town to launch his latest novel, Before It Breaks, a Fremantle Press title personally edited by the press’ well-respected adult-fiction publisher Georgia Richter.
He then played a reunion gig of sorts, Dave Warner’s WA Day Demolition, with our connection-in-common — film-industry sound designer and original Dave Warner’s From The Suburbs bandmate John Dennison — and other Suburbs and Pus band members.
“I wanted to do another crime story and I had this idea in my head, that had been going around for about 10 years,” says the man who brought everyday Perth experiences to his music.
“While I was doing TV, I kept reading authors that I really enjoyed, like (mystery writers) James Lee Burke and Henning Mankell, where the geography and location of the place are really the main character along with the protagonist. Their characters kept coming across people from their past so there’s this really interesting thing of how do you deal with the past and how does it impact on the present and your future.”
Warner believes place is something writers seep into a book.
On the publishing scene, it’s been 15 years since one of Warner’s adult novels first graced shelves. But he hasn’t been languishing in a Mug’s Game. Instead, he’s done hard yards in the film and television business, writing scripts for a range of projects such as the September film release Blinky Bill the Movie (starring Toni Collette and Ryan Kwanten), Never Tear Us Apart: The Untold Story of INXS, Graham McNeice’s Westbrook docudrama, Alex Proyas’ Garage Days, Restraint (Travis Fimmel, Stephen Moyer), McLeod's Daughters and Cut (Kylie Minogue, Molly Ringwald). He’s also written five non-fiction books on the music and sports industries for publishers such as HarperCollins, and three Charlotte and the Starlet children’s novels for Random House, with the last appearing in 2009.
“I love novel-writing. I had this story of doing a story up in the North West that had some links or hooks back to Europe in the late 1970s. I like the polar opposites of the North West of Western Australia against cold Hamburg (in Germany),” he says.
Warner’s last adult novel had been Murder In The Off-season, a year 2000 crime-series trilogy novel which starred an ex-rocker detective called Andrew “Lizard” Zirk who Pan Macmillan introduced in 1998. Off-season had followed another stand-alone crime novel for the major in 2000 — a WA road caper called eXXXpresso. The title had followed his second stand-alone, for Vintage in 1997, called Big Bad Blood and set in Sydney’s red-light district Kings Cross in the 1960s.
The author’s relationship with the publishing majors came after his Western Australian Premier’s award-winning debut City of Light was published by the then Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1995. The fictional story of a Perth beset by a serial killer during heyday of the WA Inc era jointly won the Premier’s fiction prize in 1996, with the press re-releasing the title this January as an ebook (Fremantle Press $10).
“My original thought was that I might use my main protagonist from City of Light — Constable Snowy Lane — bring him back for this book, but when I plotted through and thought about the storyline it wasn’t quite right,” he says. “Snowy Lane is a big, sprawling Raymond Chandler secret-upon-secret and this one is a bit more contained, a bit more localised and slightly more procedural so I had to come up with a new protagonist for this, (Detective) Inspector Daniel Clement who’s a cop who’s transferred from Perth to Broome.”
The ex-homicide detective inspector is originally from the Kimberley but has reluctantly returned to his home town to be nearer to his daughter Phoebe. The policeman uses his disappointment at the breakdown of his marriage to her mother Marilyn to filter many of his encounters as he investigates the murder of a small-time cannabis grower Dieter Schaffer whose old link to the German police force proves relevant to the investigation.
Warner’s latest detective is a pearl of the north, a quiet but persistent policeman whose resolute self-awareness will earn him fans among readers tired of washed-up investigator-types who don’t quite ring true.
The author has surrounded Clement with the kind of loyal, mainstay characters that make for a good crime series — a hot-bodied medic bent on seduction, an unavailable crime scene technician who’s girlfriend material, and small-town policestation colleagues whose personal lives sometimes intrude on the job.
Warner admits he’s less familiar with the Kimberley he’s visited three times than the Suburban Sprawls of his other crime offerings. But he’s done a good job with the Broome and Derby-set story, filling the plot with action and embedding the characters and place with a liveliness that’s testament to his decades of script-writing experience.
These days, Warner returns to Perth about four times a year and is hoping to stage another run of his Elvis Presley-esque Fringe World Festival musical The King and Me which he debuted in February.
The 61-year-old likes Perth’s creative energy and the network of West Australian contacts he’s built over many years. One degrees or more, it’s connections like these that prove a mainstay for his Suburban life.
Before It Breaks is published by Fremantle Press ($30, ebook $10).
