In Exiles, bestselling author Jane Harper's latest novel, detective Aaron Falk (first introduced to readers in 2016's The Dry) travels to South Australia's wine country where he engages in a little post-COVID reflection over a glass or two of red.
Does he want to continue living in the city, where he works long hours poring over spreadsheets in his role investigating financial crime for the Australian Federal Police (AFP), with little time for a social life or anything else?
Or should he give it all up for a life among the grapevines, in a small-town community reminiscent of his childhood home?
It's not giving too much away to reveal that Falk spends much of Exiles — the final instalment of Harper's Falk trilogy — mulling over these questions.
His creator, too, has been considering the question of work-life balance.
"It's been a busy few years," Harper recently told ABC RN's The Book Show.
It's something of an understatement coming from a writer who not only published five books in the last six years but also found time to have two children: Charlotte, born in 2016, and Ted, born in 2019.
While Harper is grateful for her success, she admits, "I do look back, and I'm not sure I'd want to do that again."
While she intends to write a sixth novel – "an Australian mystery similar to the tone and feel of the other books" – Harper is ready to take a break.
"Like lots of people, COVID … [has] made me reflect a little bit about work-life balance," she says.
Her plan? Slow down the "pace of production", spend more time with her kids, and resume her favourite pastime — reading other people's books.
A bestselling debut
While Harper had always wanted to write a novel, she put her dream on hold for 10 years while she pursued a career in print journalism.
"You hear some writers say, 'Since I was a little kid, I was writing short stories, I was always scribbling away' – I never did it. I literally never wrote a word unless I was paid for it," she told The Book Show's Claire Nichols at Sydney Writers' Festival in 2018.
Realising she needed some "external motivation" – like an editor or a deadline – if she was ever going to write her book, Harper enrolled in an online course in 2014, submitting a synopsis and prologue for a mystery novel set in rural Victoria.
At the end of the 12-week course, Harper had a finished manuscript that she dared to hope might get published.
Of course, The Dry became a New York Times bestseller, with Reese Witherspoon snapping up the rights before the book even made it into print.
The cinematic adaptation of The Dry, directed by Robert Connolly (Paper Planes; Balibo) and starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk, was released in 2021.
It sounds like a fairytale, acknowledges Harper, but glosses over the hard work of the intervening years.
"It wasn't like the book you see now," Harper says of the first draft, a 40,000-word "skeleton" with "two-dimensional" characters and "stilted dialogue".
However, the unpublished manuscript had merit, winning a 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Award before it was published by Pan Macmillan in 2016.
The Dry later won the Davitt Award for crime fiction and ABIA Book of the Year in Australia and the 2017 UK Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Gold Dagger for the year's best crime novel.
Director of the Sorrento Writers Festival on the Mornington Peninsula and former bookseller Corrie Perkin remembers ordering only a handful of copies of The Dry when it was published in 2016.
After reading the book, she sensed it would be successful, but "had no idea that it would be an international phenomenon," she says.
After a couple of weeks, a discernible buzz had formed around The Dry.
"I just kept reordering and reordering and reordering," recalls Perkin.
Booksellers didn't hesitate when Harper's second book, Force of Nature — also starring Falk — came out a year later, and bought it in "big quantities", says Perkin.
"In a short space of time, Jane had cemented a readership, she'd attracted international attention, and she was an author who was certainly going places."
A pandemic novel
Some authors – Liane Moriarty, for one – claim they don't plot out their books, instead letting the story flow organically.
Not Harper, who knows exactly how the story finishes before she starts writing a novel: "I'm a big planner," she says.
"I often start with the end point in mind … and then I build the story back from there. I think about the characters I need to best tell that story and … [incorporate] the twists and turns that readers come to expect."
Her goal, she says, is to "surprise those readers that are not easily surprised and ideally give them that satisfying resolution at the end".
COVID-19 lockdowns meant that Harper wrote much of Exiles in her back room, on a laptop balanced on her knee – a far cry from the quiet solitude that is her preferred environment for writing.
The deep concentration required to write a book was hard to achieve in a house occupied by six people: Harper, her husband Peter Strachan, their two kids, and Harper's parents, who were stuck in Melbourne when their flights home to the UK were cancelled due to the pandemic.
Each adult would take the children out for an hour of exercise, securing Harper three precious hours a day to write.
She drew heavily on her experience as a reporter to get the job done: "I'd been a print journalist for 13 years, so I'd learned a lot about how to get words on a page when you can."
Today, when she writes, it's in a sun-filled St Kilda office furnished with a desk, book-lined shelves, a healthy ficus plant and not much else.
Harper says she deliberately keeps the place sparse to ensure nothing distracts her from writing.
"I don't do anything else here – I don't do emails, I rarely do meetings, I just come [here to] … work on the book. I find having nothing here … is such a great way for me to focus my attention where it needs to be."
Like a lot of people who worked from home during Melbourne's long COVID lockdowns, she realised "it's really good to have that mental break between your work and home," she says.
Evoking the Australian landscape
For Harper, who seeks to create settings that are "fictional but recognisable", each new book necessitates a research trip.
For 2020's The Survivors, she embarked on a road trip along the rugged Tasmanian coast, including a scuba-dive in the brisk southern waters.
For Exiles, she escaped Melbourne between lockdowns to take a tour of South Australia's scenic vineyards.
"When I go out on my research trips, I cherrypick key aspects of a setting and weave them into the landscape, ideally so it's not recognisable as any particular town or place, but hopefully the people who have been to that part of Australia recognise elements, and it feels three-dimensional to them," she told The Book Show in 2020.
Born in the UK, Harper lived in Australia between the ages of 8 and 14 before returning to England with her family. In 2008, she came back to Australia to work as a journalist at the Geelong Advertiser.
Returning as an adult enabled her to see the country through fresh eyes.
"That really helped me when it came to writing the novels. I had been quite aware of the differences that make Australia what it is – how people interact and the issues they speak about," Harper says.
Corrie Perkin believes that Harper's strength at evoking the Australian landscape comes from this outsider's view.
"She sees our landscape with a particular eye that perhaps those of us who have grown up here either take for granted or we can't see," she says.
Perkin cites "the bleak but beautiful loneliness" of the outback in The Lost Man (2018) as an example: "The flatness of the land, the hum of the silence, the insects and the birds – you can really hear a Jane Harper novel, and you can really see it."
The harsh natural beauty of Australian landscapes is "a gift to a writer", Harper says: "They offer a fantastic setting, and there's a natural amount of in-built danger."
The isolation of a rural Australian setting comes with a practical benefit too.
"I like it when the resolution is satisfying and feels believable and, in hindsight, you can see the red herrings and the pointers you should have picked up along the way and maybe didn't. It's a lot easier to create that feeling in a book when you've got a set cast of characters – a setting where you haven't got thousands of people coming and going like you might do in a city," she explains.
"You've got a pretty fixed group of people who have some connection with that area and some relationship with each other."
While Harper is widely credited with triggering a renaissance in 'rural noir' — crime fiction set in regional Australia — she is wary of any claim that diminishes the achievements of her fellow authors.
"I see it differently … What I see is authors working really hard to produce good quality books that meet the commercial standard for a publisher to be willing to put them to market, and then the readers have to embrace them and booksellers have to back them," she says.
Farewell to Falk
Set in verdant South Australian wine country, Exiles lacks the gothic setting of drought-stricken rural Victoria in The Dry, the menacing bush of Force of Nature or the storm-ravaged Tasmanian coast of The Survivors.
Dark threads run through every crime novel, says Harper, but "there's a lot of light in this book, and I really wanted the setting to reflect that".
In Exiles, Falk travels to the fictional town of Maralee to visit his friend Greg Raco, the capable country cop readers met in The Dry.
A young mother named Kim Gillespie went missing 12 months earlier, and as Falk is drawn into investigating her disappearance, he becomes romantically involved with one of her friends.
While Maralee, with its wine festival and picturesque reservoir, beats The Dry's dusty Kiewarra in the lifestyle stakes, each town fosters the same close-knit connections that are so important to Harper's work.
"A lot of this book is about the ripple effects that a tragedy has on a family or a small, tight-knit community … [that cause] people [to] inwardly reflect on their own part and what they could have done differently," she says.
The cast of characters draws from the group of friends surrounding the Raco family, Maralee locals who have known each other since childhood.
Harper enjoyed delving into Falk's personal life and exploring the complex relationships between the characters.
"I loved being able to show a different side to Falk in this one," says Harper, who knew from the outset that Exiles would be the AFP officer's final outing.
Harper published two standalone novels – The Lost Man (2018) and The Survivors (2020) – after 2017's Force of Nature, the second Falk instalment.
"I have always thought that I wanted to return to [Falk] for one final book, and it's taken me a few years to really think about what that book looks like … I wanted to find a story that was right for him," she says.
The decision to retire Falk was one born of affection rather than boredom or disdain.
Harper says she didn't want to extend Falk's longevity for the wrong reasons, such as commercial interests.
"It's not because I'm tired of writing about Falk; it's because I love writing about Falk – he's a character who is so special to me. He's been with me since page one of the first book," she says.
"He deserves a good ending, and that's what I feel I've given him."
Exiles is out through Macmillan Australia.
