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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Susan Chenery

‘You’re not the nice guy I thought you were’: the Australian crime novelist and the French bank thief

Australian author Marele Day felt an ‘elemental empathy’ between herself and French fugitive Jean Kay.
Australian author Marele Day says there was an ‘elemental empathy’ between herself and French fugitive Jean Kay. Photograph: Natalie Grono/The Guardian

When Marele Day boarded a catamaran in Darwin in 1979 she could not have known the skipper was an international fugitive, on the run from an infamous 8m franc bank heist in Paris.

In the pungent heat of that November, she did think, she says now: “Here’s a man from beyond the horizon.”

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