Lucifer exists, evil exists, that good may exist, and triumph. Down the mean streets the good man must go. Baddies and goodies. So, what kind of baddie would drive my stories of village goodies? None of the venal politicians and tunnel-vision bureaucrats were brutal enough to unsettle my village postmaster and his neighbours determined to protect their humble slice of paradise. Given my preference for a comic tone, who would do the job?
The first time I cracked up at a crime caper series was Chester Himes’ cops Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones visiting more anarchy on the Harlem villains than their most violent drug-induced nightmares. The second time was Carl Hiaasen’s comic Florida noir tales. A rural Kiwi village did not fit those levels of mayhem. Well, it does in Ronald Hugh Morrieson stories, but my preference was for Tom Sharpe anarchy in a friendly village context like those in Whisky Galore and Clochemerle, nearest to what I had in mind for the fictional version of the coastal Bay of Plenty village I grew up in. But a Kiwi village does not have the class system that generates the Sharpe approach.
I required an inside operator, one who swims in the same unhurried Kiwi pool, a tadpole who grows into a cane toad.
I cannot pinpoint when my ponytailed villain Bob Rogers emerged from his primordial swamp. Maybe it was recalling that evening I was drinking with friends in the Brunswick in Willis Street, Wellington, and loudly lamenting the volcano emerging under my wisdom teeth with the intensity of a roadside jackhammer. I can take away the problem, a voice whispered in my ear. I turned hopefully, only for a distressed curse and a shadowy figure hobbling away from a friend who recognised an insidious drug-dealer when she saw one.
The image of a shadowy local lurking to exploit whom his drugs may devour was the gamechanger in constructing the first Kotuku tale. I was clear about the bulk of the cast list. These centred on the war-damaged postmaster, his supportive wife and too adventurous son. There was the punch-drunk publican hopelessly possessive of his ravishing wife, the storekeeper and his pie-baking wife, the bibulous old Catholic priest and the lovelorn Anglican curate, the deadbeat garage proprietor, the declining bowling club members. The late 1980s shutting down of the post office and railway station inspires entrepreneurial drug farmer Bob Rogers to buy up real estate, and more opportunity when gold is discovered in the local creek. Bob’s dire practices force the village stalwarts to make common cause.
I drew on experience of budding psychopaths among fellow pupils, like the little guy who always wanted to fight. One fight went on so long that my brother came down from home to say my tea was ready and to come home instantly. As I turned to obey, I copped a coward king hit to my ear. Then there was the boy in Glen Eden who employed a clothesline prop to attack us ‘Doolans’ whenever he saw my brother and me. I figured his Northern Irish Protestant origins explained such demented behaviour, for the prop was easily dodged or grabbed to counterattack the fleeing assailant.
There were surly bodgies at St Peters who liked to scare you with a flick knife, afterschool bodgies in flash clothes or black leathers riding ear-splitting motorbikes, hobnailed boots adding showers of sparks to further intimidate, bullies in labouring jobs who picked on us because we were students, guys on campus selling ‘bennies’ and others already buying houses.
As a journalist, I met some bad and/or threatening men. In Sydney’s King’s Cross I met the security man for The Wayside Chapel’s vicar who told me I could write his biography, he had killed men, until the vicar rescued him. I said I would get back to him, and before I could, he and the vicar were arrested for running a prostitution, drugs and gambling empire.
In Karljevo six policemen detained me for six hours over alleged lack of a visa. In London’s Soho a journalist colleague who knew the villains we drank with had several times to talk as persuasively as Arthur Daley to get us out of a pub or drinking den. In Belfast at the height of the Troubles two Irishmen confronted my photographer and myself in the notorious Falls Road, our policewoman escort talked us out of that. In Glasgow we took the police advice to run like hell from a gang chasing us along a murky underpass. In the old ruins above Thessaloniki at dusk I purchased too many oranges to avoid the advance of a knife in my ribs. On the Southern Chief train through desolate Apache country in the middle of the American nowhere a brawny guard threatened loudly to sling me off the train because he had the power to do so.
Bob Rogers was an amalgam of all the belligerent, vain, selfish, greedy kids chasing the girls and the glory and ultimately the money, and later their sociopathic adult versions. When gold is discovered, Bob not only wants to grab it all, but he also wants to grab the voluptuous wife of the local publican. He treats everybody with contempt, starting with his alcoholic mother and the younger kids clamouring for the drugs he can sell them. It was tempting to write a sticky end for Bob, but the open end allowed for a reprise. It took two decades and another shift in the country’s sociology for it to emerge.