Q&A with Michael Robotham

We chat with multi-million-copy bestselling author Michael Robotham about his upcoming book, The White Crow.

Where did the character of Philomena McCarthy come from?

Phil first appears in the opening chapter of When You Are Mine, which is among my favourite openings of any of my novels.

I was eleven years old when I saw my future. I was standing near the middle doors of a double-decker bus when a bomb exploded on the upper level, peeling off the roof like a giant had taken a tin opener to a can of peaches. One moment, I was holding onto a pole and the next I was flying through the air, seeing sky, then ground, then sky. A leg whipped past me. A stroller. A million shards of glass, each catching the sunlight. 

I crashed to the pavement as debris and body parts fell around me. Looking up through the dust, I wondered what I’d been doing on a London sightseeing bus, which is what it looked like without a roof.

In the aftermath of the bus bombing, Phil is comforted by a young police officer, who moves between the wounded offering water and words of kindness. That is the moment Phil decides to become a police officer. She wants to help people and to make a difference.

I then decided to complicate her life, by giving her a family that wouldn’t appreciate her chosen career. Having spent years working as a journalist in London, I had met my share of old school East End hustlers and geezers and petty crims. I had also immersed myself in stories of the Kray Twins, the Richardson Gang and Mad Frankie Fraser, who were legendary figures in the East End.

The juxtaposition of the two seemed perfect for storytelling with endless possibilities of conflict and divided loyalties.

How did you think of the title of the book?

It took me a long while to come up with a title for the book, but ultimately it turned up in the text. When we think of an outsider in a family, we often refer to the black sheep, but in many parts of Europe, they use ‘the white crow’.

This a perfect description for Philomena, who is the white crow in her family. The outsider. It also resonates because, in the wild, white crows are more prone to fall prey to predators because they stand out more than other birds.

What made you decide to write psychological thrillers?

I didn’t actually set out to be a crime writer. It might sound naive, but I just thought I was writing an interesting story. It came as quite a shock when the label was applied. The reason I created Joseph O’Loughlin was due to my fascination with the human mind. Everything we do and say; and everything that has ever happened or will happen in the future comes down to that few pounds of porridge we call a brain. When Mozart wrote his symphonies, when Hitler ordered the Final Solution, when a serial killer murders young girls, or when a teenage mother abandons her baby in a rubbish bin – it all comes back to some aspect of human behaviour.

How much pre-planning goes into each book?

I don’t plot my books in advance. Instead I come up with an idea, create a group of characters and let the story unfold organically. Stephen King once described it as like discovering a bone sticking out of the ground. You begin brushing the dirt away, unsure if you’re uncovering some rare fossil, or a dog bone. Hopefully, it’s the rare fossil.

What’s the easiest and most difficult parts of your job as a writer?

The easiest part of being a writer is being able to do this full-time, which is a privilege enjoyed by very few Australian authors and creatives. This has allowed me to write nineteen novels in the past twenty-one years as well as touring and promoting my books around the world.

The hardest part of being a writer is my own desire to make every book better than the last. I wrestle with every novel, convinced this one will expose me as a fraud or that I’ve run out of ideas. I have signed every book to my long-time agent with the same message, ‘Dear Mark, we’ve fooled them again.’