In the opening pages of Holly Throsby’s latest novel, Clarke, a team of policemen arrive at a suburban house bearing excavation tools and ground-penetrating radar. Across the road and over the fence, the neighbours who knew the house’s former owners watch with dread and relief. The day they’ve waited years for has finally arrived.
It’s a familiar premise to anyone who has followed the real-life case of New South Wales woman Lynette Dawson, whose 1982 disappearance was brought to light by the award-winning podcast The Teacher’s Pet. This August her husband, Chris Dawson, was found guilty of her murder 40 years ago, a conviction Dawson is appealing.
“I listened to Teacher’s Pet like about 30 million other people,” Throsby says from her home in coastal NSW, where she lives with her young family and a puppy who whines in the background.
It was a small detail from a 2018 police investigation of the Dawsons’ former home in Bayview that piqued Throsby’s imagination. “The people who lived in that house had no idea of the history of the house,” she says. “These police arrive at their doorstep for this historic crime, and they were completely unaware that there was potentially a body buried in their back yard.”
“That was the [launching] point; how would that feel on a human level, to have the police arrive and the property you lived in suddenly have this history revealed to you?”
That history brings together Clarke’s two main characters: Barney, recently estranged from his wife and son and now renting the former family home of missing woman Ginny Lawson; and his neighbour Leonie, an unadventurous travel agent who is raising a five-year-old boy in the absence of his mother.
“I wanted to write a book about crime, but at the same time, it is much more about the reverberations felt by the people close to the victim and how it’s affected their lives,” she says.
“By the time I finished the first draft it was really an exploration of people trying to avoid feeling pain, and how avoiding feeling pain produces more pain.”
Like Throsby’s previous novels, Clarke is not necessarily a whodunnit. But the questions that gently unfold over kitchen tables, back yard fences and landlines (all of Throsby’s novels take place in the pre-internet 1990s) prove compelling, tragic and human in their own way. “They’re kind of anti-crime crime novels – with the set-up of a crime novel that then subvert those expectations,” she says, of her earlier books.
Her last book, 2018’s Cedar Valley, riffed on the story of the so-called Somerton Man, whose anonymous death on an Adelaide beach in 1948 fuelled decades of spy theories, false leads and codebreaking. For Throsby, part of that case’s intrigue lay in the fact it might not have been a crime at all – borne out by a recent breakthrough that suggests the man’s story was smaller and sadder than the more sensational theories shared online.
“Sometimes the outcome and the answer is something that’s mundane, and that’s probably often the case,” she says.
Mystery novels set in small Australian towns have become big business since Throsby’s debut Goodwood arrived in 2016, just a few months after Jane Harper’s bestseller The Dry. While Throsby’s books use some familiar set pieces – missing women, a local rumour mill, and casts of eccentric locals – they often sidestep some of the extremes that have made the “outback noir” genre a publishing phenomenon.
“I didn’t want it to feel like a scary outpost,” Throsby says. “I do think there’s been a tropewhere the landscapes are these outposts that are inherently dangerous. Whether that stems from a kind of Picnic at Hanging Rock or Wolf Creek thing, there’s this idea of some small communities being closed to outsiders, [and] that there’s something inherently dangerous in the landscape itself.”
Clarke doesn’t gild its notes of parochialism, domestic violence, and racism. But Throsby’s writing once again foregrounds the warmth and humour also present in regional communities; it is more Northern Exposure than Wake in Fright.
It’s something Throsby was first exposed to in her other life as a singer-songwriter; having grown up in metropolitan Sydney, she spent her 20s and early 30s on a “long, hard regional touring” circuit before moving out herself three years ago.
“If you’re a bigger artist you can afford to play one show in a capital city,” she says. “But we were never like that – we had to tour endlessly. But I acquired so much affection for regional Australia, and so much information I would then use in my novels. A lot of what ends up in the books is what I learned either recording music in small towns, or touring – and then realised I loved it so much that I moved out of the city.
“I was like, ‘what am I doing living in the city, when my imagination is in these small communities?’ I just needed to move.”
Clarke by Holly Throsby is published by Allen & Unwin on 1 November
This article was amended on 31 October 2022 to correct the Somerton Man’s year of death.
