Narrelle M. Harris spoke to Melbourne award-winning Sister in Crime, Sarah Bailey, about Click, her latest novel and second in her Oli Groves series. It follows the multifaceted personal and professional lives of news journalist and podcaster Olive Groves, rookie DC Pen Kibbs, and their colleagues, as well as various missing and murdered women, suspects and witnesses in overlapping and possibly connected crimes, centring on a killer taunting police and the public with photographs of his victims.
I love a title that encompasses multiple aspects of a story. ‘Click’ refers to the perpetrator’s sign-off on his messages, as well as the state of modern news and social media, with click-rates, clickbait headlines and so on. How did you choose such a perfect title? Was it your choice from the start?
Thank you! I like the title too and I’m excited to confirm that Click was my idea and a name that came to me early in the writing process. I haven’t always come up with the titles for my books. In fact, I’ve suggested some terrible options over the years and my publisher has had to politely put me in my place but I think I’m getting better at it because the most recent three books I’ve written have all been named by me.
Click is very tightly written and very intense (and when my husband interrupted me while I was reading the climax, there was nearly a marital Incident!) You balance some pretty complex plotting with strong emotional landscapes. The result is a crisp and gripping yet always clear narrative, leading to a denouement that retains all the complexity and uncertainty of the real world. What techniques did you use to keep that tension so perfect, and all those threads clear and yet so beautifully woven together, right through to the last page?
I’m so glad you liked it and enjoyed the pace. Creating tension and managing the various plot threads is something I find quite challenging, especially in the final stages of writing when there are so many sub-stories to manage. I think my main technique is lots of editing and trying to embody my characters as much as possible. If they are feeling the heat,then I’m probably doing it right!
Click is set in early 2020, just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic and during Trump’s first term as US President. There’s an exquisite tension in that setting(given that from our viewpoint of 2026 we know what happens next in our world) which that hums alongside the tension of the theme of Click – the ongoing and unabated violence against women that manifests in a lot of different ways. Did you ever consider setting it in a different time period?
I wanted to set Click in early 2020 for a few reasons. Firstly, The Housemate ended in 2015 and I didn’t want more than five years to have gone by in Oli’s life. It was also when the conversation about domestic violence in Australia became a high profile political issue and when certain technologies I wanted to feature became prevalent. And lastly, while I didn’t want to write a COVID novel, I liked the idea of setting the book when the pandemic was looming. I felt like it would add to the tension if the audience knew what was around the corner.
Among the awful male characters in the suspect list, you also have some great examples of healthier masculinity (even though they’re often still a little clueless about women’s experience of the world). How important were they to the balance of your story?
I don’t think about balance too much when I’m writing my initial draft; I try to focus on story and characters and let things take shape. I’m more conscious of these elements when I’m editing. Overall, I try to ensure my characters are believable and fully formed, whether they are good or bad and regardless of gender. You are right though, there are some terrible men in this book so it was nice to have a few who had some more positive traits. And my female characters are far from perfect.
I sometimes find that in books with a lot of characters, their speech patterns fall into similar rhythms and they end up sounding too alike. With Click, every person’s voice is distinct! I love your command of dialogue and how you’ve nailed each character’s personality in how they speak, as well as their inner thoughts. How do you approach capturing the cadence for each character to make them so vivid?
This was something I had to work on, especially as I introduced a dual narrative in Click, a technique I had never tried before. Switching between Pen and Oli’s voice was challenging and it took me awhile to ensure they were distinct from each other and had their own tone and language. A lot of it is trial and error and often it’s a case of trying to picture them talking. I think about how they look, how they sound, what they are scared of – things like that.
A lot of crime fiction can’t help but be a bit larger-than-life and shading towards the melodramatic – which I love – but Click is very restrained in that sense, maintaining plausibility and never sensationalising the violence (even though the media outlets in Click often do). How does this narrative choice reflect your own views, experiences and philosophies of the themes?
I write about what I’m interested in, worried about and talking about with family and friends. I’m a news junkie and I worked in advertising for a long time, which shares similarities with the media industry. A lot of the things I explore in Click are based on headlines I’ve come across, questions I’ve asked myself and things I tackled in my advertising job, especially issues around technology, image manipulation, and trust when it comes to information sources. Hopefully, this investigative approach helps keep my plots grounded in reality, even though, of course, I tend to write about the extremes in society. I like to think that I write plots that are plausible but not predictable, things that can happen but fortunately don’t happen very often.
What was your favourite part of writing Click?
I love creating new characters and I really enjoyed dreaming up Pen and working out her backstory and what made her tick. And returning to Oli five years after The Housemate was fun too.
And what are you looking forward to doing next?
I’ve recently finished the draft for my next novel, which will be a standalone story about a TV journalist called Leni who hosts a current affairs show. I’ll be working on the edits of that for the rest of this year as well as starting the draft of my next novel. I’m also working on the pilot of an original TV series and very excitingly, my first novel, The Dark Lake, goes into production as a TV series in August, so I’m hoping to spend a little bit of time on the set once filming starts!
More info here.