Michael Brissenden on 'Smoke' - (writing) crime, corruption, and climate-fuelled wildfires

What secrets lie in the ashes…? This week on the SWN podcast we chatted to author and two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist, Michael Brissenden about his latest crime-fiction novel, Smoke. Michael worked as a political editor and foreign correspondent with the ABC for 35 years. In fact, you might just recognise Michael from ABC’s 7.30 Report or Four Corners program. He has published two previous novels, The List (2017) and Dead Letters (2021), and a non-fiction book, American Stories: Tales of Hope and Anger (2012). In this episode, we traverse both fiction and nonfiction; we discuss environmental and forest management, climate-fuelled wildfires and the universal challenges they present, the precarious state of journalism, as well as the multiple hot-button themes entertwined in the book. Although being a work of fiction set in the Californian sierras, Smoke draws many intersecting parallels with the world we’ve come to know since Black Summer. As a reader, you’re thrust into the smoky landscape; you become privy to small-town whispers, and soon discover this is about so much more than murder…

Listen to the latest episode where Michael talks to SWN host Bianca Millroy about (writing) crime, corruption, climate-fuelled wildfires, and much more, (No spoilers!)

Find out more about Michael Brissenden on his website, and follow him on X/Twitter. Smoke is available now through Affirm Press or your local independent bookshop! Catch him in September 2024 at upcoming Sydney BAD Crime Writers Festival, or Northern Beaches Readers Festival (Sydney). 

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We acknowledge the Jaegara and Turrbal People, Traditional Owners of the land on which this podcast is created, and the unceded cultural lands on which our guests live and continue to make and tell stories.

Transcript

On Tuesday Sarah and Amber drive the 35 minutes into Glebe and attempt to park in the street because there are workmen in the lane, and of course they have to park two blocks away and walk back. A squat apartment building looms over the trees, and someone has dumped an old brown sofa on the curb, and Sarah feels disappointed all over again.  

But as they approach Number 278, the little house leaps out at them from between the taller buildings. “This isn’t a terrace!” Sarah says—it’s a lovely historic cottage, with clean red brick walls and red tiled roof, the entry framed gracefully by a white bay window and a small, friendly porch. 

“Oh god, did I tell you it was?” Amber laughs. She fumbles a set of keys out of her handbag. “Just wait till you see inside. I’m so excited to show you!” 

The ceilings are high and pristine white, every door topped with stained glass in reds and greens and golds, original hardwood floors—repolished, screened-in sunroom, patio in the garden. Four bedrooms. 

“Three kids, then?” Sarah laughs.

“Two max,” says Amber, and shakes her head. “Though try arguing that with Tom. The fourth will be a guest room and home office. There’s a wine cellar and little bar-space downstairs that I think we’ll turn into a playroom—the bar part, anyway. Tom is pretty excited about the wine cellar.” She pauses, breathless. “But what do you think?”  

Sarah tries to picture what tables and chairs and lounges she’d furnish the place with, but so much will depend on colours, and those are limited by the baby on the way. Best to avoid whites and creams, and if you go with rounded corners now, she thinks, you won’t have to wedge bits of rubber over them for years, and too much glass would be a mistake for the same reason. It’s a phenomenal house, but it’ll need to look more homey to post photos online. 

First things first: colours. 

And Sarah has gone through all this in her head when she realises that Amber is fidgeting: spinning her wedding ring with her thumb, staring out the window, nervously awaiting her verdict. “Oh, Amber,” she says, overacting a bit, and though she’s not really a hugger, she presses her arms around the younger woman to reassure her. “Your house is gorgeous! I would live here in a heartbeat!” And if she could transport this house to a quiet street in Killara, well away from uni students or homeless people or the prying train, she would. It’s bigger than hers, more newly renovated, and has a nice spot outside for Wes to sit and have a beer. Or a persimmon. 

Amber beams. “I really wanted you to like it!” She begins to walk through the kitchen and living room and dining room pointing out things, ideas, and Sarah follows her but isn’t really listening. She hasn’t thought about Cambridge in so long, years maybe, but here it is, the thatched country cottage she and Julien stayed in one long weekend, a spring Bank Holiday—dormer windows, wide green lawns, yellow daffodils and purple irises crowding the door. 

“We should play croquet,” she’d laughed, and they would have planned a party, if the cottage was theirs—croquet and canapés, tiny fruit pies. It was posh, so unlike either of them, and it would be funny, a laugh among their friends at the lab. Later that summer, he would take her back to where he grew up, and she’d see zebras in the wild, lions and elephants. Stars from a whole new vantage. And she was so close to telling Wesley, breaking it off, choosing her right life, with Jules. Was supposed to meet him for a weekend in June, Amsterdam or Paris, her choice, and she’d do it then. 

Amsterdam, probably. 

But three weeks later and she was back in Blacktown while Grandma Hana died, a lonely year of bland food and nappy wipes, cleaning out and selling the house, until Wesley came back for a permanent job at Sydney and Sarah closed up the part of her life that was Julien and, without Wesley even knowing she’d been gone, slipped back into the life they’d planned. 

The Sandwich Generation, they call it, when you’ve got kids and parents to look after—when you sit your ageing mother in the corner of the living room in a too-soft chair, where she can doze or read romance novels or watch Kelly Clarkson on TV while you entertain the girls with coloured paper in the kitchen. Her appointments with the cardiologist, podiatrist, ophthalmologist, urologist scrawled in red on the calendar, against the girls’ blue: pediatrician, dentist, 

oncologist.

Not like they’d experienced it. “Are your parents well?” she says, and pictures an older couple like Amber herself, fit from walking and pottering in the garden, sweeping the footpath clear of leaves. But even before the other woman answers, she remembers that Amber’s adopted, her parents like every other American family on television, and Texan no less. 

Amber nods. “Mom’s planning to come out when the baby’s born. Spend a couple months with us, get her Mee-Maw time in. I think they’re a bit devastated I didn’t sign up to the family compound like my brothers did, but they’re young. They like to travel.”

“Your family has a compound?”

Amber laughs. “Not really. But no one left but me. They all still live in that same little town, where every graduating class has a NAME or two. Half of the kids play football. You have to watch out you don’t date a cousin.” She pauses. “It’s home, you know? But not forever.” She looks around the high-ceiling of the kitchen. “I already want my kids to stay close. Do you think we can? You know, make that happen?”

Sarah thinks of Hana, who’s made no attempts to leave. Is it a good thing? Or yet another failure on one of their parts? “I think Myles will come back,” she says. “He’s Char’s baby, he’ll want to raise his family here.” 

Here, Killara. 

“Yeah,” Amber says. “I want to have that with my kids, what they have. Like friends.”

Sarah feels a pang in her chest. Shakes her head. “I think you have to draw a line. There are times you can’t be their friend and their parent.” When, Sarah wonders, has she been Hana’s friend? When has she had the mental energy to try?

Amber nods, smiles with her brown eyes and all those white teeth. “And that’s when I call you,” she says. “Charlotte is going to be a nightmare, cake and pandering and all that. I love her to death, but honestly …” She laughs. “Plus, you can teach me the best recipes. Char says you used to have a food blog, too? Amazing.”

It’s probably still there, Sarah thinks, impossible to find now among all the new, template-driven sites, repetitive, overdrawn, everything optimised and impersonal. All those years of shopping organic, shredding vegetables into muffins, cutting sugar as if it made a difference what you ate, how many serves, how fresh. As if cancer didn’t just come back on its own fucking terms. 

“I love this house,” she says, pushing the thoughts away. “I’m so excited for you.”