A serial killer in Noosa

In his first novel, Promise, Gold Coast-based author Tony Cavanaugh introduces the fine folk of Noosa to a sadistic serial killer with a penchant for young blondes. Already being compared to the likes of Michael Connelly and Harlan Coben, the former TV and film producer and writer (credits include Once Were Warriors and Medivac) is being hailed as a huge new voice in Aussie crime fiction. Cavanaugh spoke with Time Out about entering the mind of a killer, terrorising the people of Noosa and two sequels, already in the works.

The novel reads like a kind of LA noir… but in Noosa, of all places. Where did the idea to stick a killer and this fish-out-of-water detective in the Sunshine Coast come from?
The idea sprang from a moment when I was getting breath-tested at the Noosa Police Station early one morning in a highly embarrassing incident where I was picked up from drunk driving after totaling my mother-in-law’s car on the bush track from the Noosa north shore.

You totaled the car?
Yeah, it was a complete write-off. So the idea came in the station. I had been doing a lot of research on psychopathic behavior for a film I’d just made which was about a psychopathic young lady, who murdered a young girl. I was at the police station and when they were getting the machine to read my blood alcohol reading, I said to the officer – because many people on the Sunshine coast have moved from down south like Sydney or Melbourne – “Are you local?” He said, “Nah mate, I moved up from Melbourne,” so I said, “Why? Why did you come here?” and he said,  “Cruisy lifestyle mate, its bloody fabulous, cruisy lifestyle.” I just imagined him then when he was in his mid-forties, had a bit of a tummy, getting up in the morning and going down to the beach for a paddle, and that sort of thing. And it just struck me at that moment, what if there was a really nasty serial killer in this world? Because he wasn’t alone, all the cops I’ve come across up here just love their cruisy lifestyle and they wouldn’t be equipped to handle the sort of killer that I’d drawn in the book.

It’s funny, because while you have this very Australian setting, the book itself reads very much like an American crime novel. It’s been compared to Michael Connelly. Were you conscious of wanting to do something that we don’t do that much in this country?
I was conscious that that was what I was doing but it wasn’t a conscious choice on my part – I just wrote it as best or the only way I knew how to. So no it wasn’t a conscious decision to write it like that but I was aware, while I was writing it, that it seemed a little different what I had read. But I’ve always been a huge fan of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, James Cain – I grew up with those authors. And more recently I’ve been devouring Michael Connelly, Robert Crais and Dennis Lehane. I love that genre and I particularly love that last clutch of writers who are just pumping out the most brilliant books.

Having spent a bit of time in Noosa, it almost seems a bit cruel to inflict a Connelly-style killer on these seachangers. Was there something else about Noosa – aside from the fact the police force might struggle with a killer like this – that made it an ideal setting?
The Noosa tourist association is going to be unhappy with me [laughs], but I love it! It’s a beautiful spot. It is weird though. Like the first or second time I was driving up there on the coast highway I turned off and drove inland and hit the water then drove along. There were all these signs along the other side of the water near vast tracks of bushland that read ‘Do not enter, unexploded bombs.’ From the Second World War.

I’m not all the way through the book yet, but it seems like it’s going to get pretty heavy, and pretty dark.
I don’t know if you’re yet up to the part where I write in the voice of the killer…

Not yet.
Well when you get there, that question becomes really relevant. I did write the killer pretty much in the third person but in the editing I changed it across to the first person. But even writing him in the third person, I found it really freaky. And, it's going to sound really cliché, but I literally did have to go and have a shower after I finished writing.

Really?
Yeah. I found it really distressing.

And especially because he’s preying on such young girls.