My new novel, Hope to Die, started life with an episode of 60 Minutes Australia. It was called ‘Where is Baby Tegan?’ and it was about Keli Lane, a woman who’s serving an 18-year prison sentence in New South Wales for the murder of her new-born daughter. I’d never heard of the case before that, though it was clearly a cause celebre in Australia at the time of the 2010 trial, generating wall-to-wall press coverage and fierce public debate.
The facts of the case almost beggar belief. Lane was 21 when Tegan was born, but no one around her had the faintest idea she was even pregnant. Not only that: this was the fourth of five secret pregnancies in just seven years: two were terminated, two babies were adopted, and Tegan simply disappeared. Lane left hospital with the child, and was then seen at a friend’s wedding later that same day, apparently without a care in the world, and certainly without her daughter. She maintains to this day that she handed the baby over to its father, but even the name she gave police has changed over time, and this ‘Andrew Norris’ has neither come forward, nor been identified. She told authorities at least eight different versions of what happened to Tegan, and there were so many untruths – 95 in all – that all the prosecutor had to do in court was go through them all to leave her credibility in shreds.
So as a true-crime story, this has it all: shocking secrets, baffling lies, an alleged murder and a still-missing baby, all of it set against the backdrop of Sydney’s affluent Northern Beaches. It’s easy to see why a crime writer like me would be drawn to it. But from that initial impulse to making use of the case in a work of fiction is a complex and sometimes problematic process.
As far back as Edgar Allen Poe, real-life crimes have been providing the raw material for tales of murder from imagination. Poe drew on a brutal 1830 killing in The Tell-Tale Heart, and there have been endless examples since, from Murder on the Orient Express (the Lindbergh kidnapping case), to Psycho (modelled on the serial killer Ed Gein), right up to blockbuster recent thrillers like Gone Girl, which incorporates elements of the 2002 murder of Laci Peterson.
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As you might have noticed, I studiously avoided using the word ‘inspiration’ in this list, and that in itself is a perfect illustration of the thorny issues at play here. Crime fiction and crime fact may have always been two halves of the same psyche, but the relationship is at best uneasy, and sometimes downright conflicted.
To take one obvious example – is there a point where it becomes ‘ghoulish’ or ‘exploitative’ to use real-life cases, and if so, when? The best-selling crime writer Laura Lippman found herself facing exactly those questions when she based her 2007 debut What the Dead Know on the still-unsolved disappearance of Katherine and Sheila Lyon in 1975. Speaking at the Harrogate crime festival in 2014, Lippman said her way of dealing with this is to take only the barest minimum from the real crime: she does no detailed research thereafter, with the explicit aim of taking her story “as far away as possible” from what actually happened, and thereby avoid “the survivors [feeling] used or compromised or exploited in any way”. That said, she also fiercely defended her right to use the basic facts of any crime in a work of fiction: “I refuse to put any fences up around what I’m going to write about. I’m going to write about anything I want to write about.”
As this suggests, where there are survivors of a crime – whether victims or the family members of either victims or perpetrators – there can be very real ethical, and indeed legal, issues to navigate, as anyone who’s had their novel checked by their publisher’s lawyers will testify. Clearly you can’t accuse a still-living individual of committing horrific crimes they’ve never been convicted of, even in a so-called ‘novel’, but beyond that things rapidly get a lot more complicated. All fiction involves invention – of course it does, it’s called artistic licence – but when does ‘licence’ veer into lies? Or, looked at another way, is it even reasonable to demand that books drawing on real events should always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? What is the ‘truth’ in such a context anyway? Surely any such account – whether novel or non-fiction – is always going to be a partial perspective, however accurate and impartial the writer tries to be.
The Staircase is a brilliant case in point. We’ve now had two on-screen versions of this story, both with the same title: one documentary and one drama. And yet, as devotees like me know, the so-called ‘factual’ version may claim to be objective but is actually decidedly partial in its selection of material; while on the other hand it could be argued that the dramatisation offers a different and deeper psychological ‘truth’, even though some scenes and elements of that are clearly ‘made up’. And of course that’s precisely what it was aiming to do: as the director, Antonio Campos, told Hollywood Life, “our intent was to explore the real elusive nature of truth and how ultimately the truth gets kind of caught up in storytelling, and everyone trying to tell their version of the story.”
At its best, crime fiction excels at exactly this type of exploration. Those who have little time for the genre often poke fun at the Hercule Poirot-style big reveal, with the great detective extracting The Answer like a rabbit from a hat. And they have a point: crime novels do follow the same broad trajectory towards a denouement that literally ‘unknots’ the mystery. But that movement towards resolution can be both subtle and profound: human beings are hard-wired to learn from narrative – that’s why we tell children fairy-stories about the dangers lurking in the big wide world, and that’s why fables going all the way back to Aesop build towards a final revelation of truth.
In most crime novels that revelation will be primarily a whodunnit, but in the based-on-a-true-crime novel the emphasis often shifts instead to the howdunnit and even more the whydunnit. Unlike fact, fiction has to make sense, as Tom Clancy famously observed, and crime fiction drawn from real life proves this rule more powerfully than any other genre. The motivations of living breathing criminals are often infuriatingly difficult to fathom – many either can’t or won’t explain what led them to do what they did. But once re-imagined in fiction, the writer has an unspoken but compelling contract with the reader to provide some answers.
And that was my challenge, in Hope to Die. Not only to ‘do a Clancy’ and make a seemingly inexplicable story make sense, but develop a central character whose psyche is ‘available’ to my reader in the way that a real person’s can never be. I can’t explain why Keli Lane behaved as she did; but in creating Camilla Rowan, I had to show how someone else in that situation might find themselves making similarly baffling decisions, and hope that there would be a truth in the novel that grew out of that process. Not ‘the’ truth, but ‘a’ truth. Not factual truth – I don’t know what happened to Tegan any more than anyone else - but perhaps an emotional and psychological truth that could help us, in the end, answer the all-important Why.
Hope to Die is published by Penguin tomorrow
