There is something prophetic about the choices that Chris Hammer commits himself to.
Maybe its his natural instinct for gathering together the strands of a story, or his openness to being swept along in mysterious events and their narrative inertias.
Back in 2018, his first novel, Scrublands, coincided with the advent of an entirely new, and irrefutably Australian literary movement. His wasn't a work of crime fiction that appropriated outback noir. It symbolised and embodied it, digging into our consciousness just before the drought broke and the genre exploded.
Just as improbably, his latest crime thriller, The Tilt, has now arrived at the same time as our eyes are suddenly turned towards a different kind of danger. Just as several famous but now imperiled townships alongside the Murray River face their own disasters, Hammer's new novel has suddenly floated into our view, emerging eerily out of nowhere like the floodwaters have themselves.
Atop of that strange tide, the one that unsettles the town and threatens to wash the dust away from its secrets, is the insightful homicide detective Nell Buchanan. In a way that reprises a common trope in the thriller playbook - the peculiar stranger who wants new answers to old questions - it only takes a day or so for her troubles to start.
Yet so much of what makes Hammer such a clever crime writer is that tropes and constructs are only ever the smallest part of his narratives. His commitment to adding dimension to what many other writers might have been content to submit to stereotype builds for his readers a complex and psychologically compelling framework around his stories.
"When I started to write Scrublands I thought that plot was everything, that plot was how you made a good crime book," he explains.
"But as I got further into it I found myself getting really intrigued by character. I really like the idea that a character can end up being a completely different person to the one they are at the start of a book.
"When I wrote The Tilt that's exactly the idea I set out to explore. Nell Buchanan isn't just there to solve an abstract kind of cold-case. It's all a bit more emotionally charged for her than that."
It's also a charge that accumulates as the novel unfolds, transmitting its own rattle and static down the streets of Tulong, a fictional border town that Hammer has imagined might somewhere lurk in the shadows of the river redgum forests along the NSW-Victorian border.
The real fascination for readers of The Tilt is that Hammer has somehow created a place as recognisable as it is perplexing. It's a paradox that Buchanan loses herself in, as the town she once knew twists into a shady, dangerous labyrinth where mysteries fester.
"As a reader, I've always loved those books where you find yourself getting immersed in a different world," says Hammer.
"For me setting is hugely important. It builds the atmosphere for the book. In this novel, the setting is based on the Barmah-Millewa forest. It's a real place. But the town near it has a completely different lay-out and shape.
"You find yourself reinventing a setting sometimes. If you think of crime books set in London or New York for instance, they all have their own interpretations of those locations. It can be exciting, threatening, magical and sinister all at the same time. I think readers really respond to that as well."
Listening to Chris Hammer refer to this kind of responsiveness, this connection that he strives to build between his work and his readers, reminded me that before his enormously successful career as an Australian crime writer, he forged an equally reputable career as an international journalist. The kind of driven, inquisitive and nomadic characters he now creates in his novels suggests that his professional background has never faded too far from view.
"I was a journalist for nearly 30 years. I think that helps my crime writing a lot," he says.
"When you work in a job like that you get an understanding of how the world works behind the scenes. You run into some weird and wonderful characters. I guess we call them newsworthy. And you get pretty good at observing those kinds of people."
On Friday, October 28, Chris Hammer will be discussing his new novel, The Tilt, at Toronto Library (11am to noon) and Newcastle Regional Library (6pm to 8pm).
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