Not Quite Right features discussions that are unfiltered and uncensored,
and may include themes that are inappropriate for younger listeners.
Also, I swear a lot.
Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to not quite right.
My name is Ed and this is the third of a series of interviews that Amanda and I
recorded at the Words on the Waves Writers Festival this year.
This time we're speaking with Blanche d'alpatier.
Blanche is an award winning biographer and author of fiction and she was at
Words on the Waves to talk about her latest book, The Bunny Club,
which is a racy murder mystery involving high profile personalities and male
escorts.
Many of you will recognise Blanche as the wife of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
But not me apparently, as you'll soon hear when I plant my foot
in my mouth and deeply embarrass myself.
Sorry Blanche.
So please enjoy my little gaffe and our discussion with Blanche Delpaugean.
So we're here at Words on the Weights with Blanche Delpouje.
Hello Blanche.
Hello Ed.
So tell us what brings you to our little corner of the world here?
An invitation I which I'm delighted that I accepted.
It's a lovely festival and you've got great speakers and I must say I've been
incredibly impressed by your volunteers.
A really good feeling of community up here and a lot of community interest and
I might say, a fairly divine setting.
Yeah, it's beautiful here and it is a lovely
team.
So most people will know you from being Bob Hawke's husband.
Where is his wife, actually?
But never mind.
You know what I'm trying to say.
I do, yes.
But before that and after that, you've obviously had quite a career in
writing and you're here to talk about your book, The Bunny Club.
So tell us about the book.
Well, it's a complete departure from everything
I'd written before because it's a murder mystery and before what I've written is
fiction and non fiction and essays.
And I had a long break when I was married to Bob when I I wasn't writing.
And then I wrote a series of historical novels which didn't do at all well in
terms of sales in Australia, but they're being looked at in Hollywood.
So maybe the Hollywood's falling to basic.
Anyway, so, so this book is crime fiction, which I've never done before and I wanted
a new challenge and that's why I went for it.
So your book, The Bunny Club, I understand it's a little bit spicy too,
is that right?
It's raunchy.
Tell us about that.
Well, I just wanted to write that.
The reason I bring it up is because we actually run writing competitions and
we're running one now, which is we call flash fiction.
It's ****** writing competition.
So we're particularly interested in that.
But yeah, good fun.
Yes, yes, it was good.
But but how does that fit into the murder mystery aspect?
I mean, I guess we don't typically see.
We've obviously got romance and ****** other go hand in hand you might say,
but it's not so common to see crime and raunchy side stories I guess.
Well, the victim in this book is a woman and a
high profile media woman.
And the main suspect is a male escort, OK, whom she's been seeing romantically and
she believes it's a great love affair and blah, blah, blah.
And of course it's not.
And so that's where the ****** element comes in his, his life, OK, as as a,
as a go into that life as a male escorting life.
OK, so why the change into crime fiction?
And I don't wanna call it ****** or it's kind of a spicy crime fiction.
I've always had a lot of sex in all my novels.
But the crime fiction was just because I wanted a new challenge.
And it's very different from writing a regular novel.
And it's more complicated, I might say, the things you've got to fit in and
you've got to keep the reader in the dark while dropping a little a series of bread
crumbs and then a whole series of red herrings.
So that's complex and I think one of the reasons a lot of crime fiction doesn't
have much development of characters because they're working so hard on the
plot and the narrative.
But I think because I came from a a novel writing background,
I'm very interested in character.
So I put a lot of character into the book.
Yeah, it is very technical and plot based, I would imagine.
How did you come at that?
Did you do any reading about the process?
I was extremely lucky.
I had a very good friend who was a former detective.
Yeah.
And so I went to him all the time for information.
I spent hours talking to him.
Yeah.
So that's on the like the police procedural side of things, I guess.
Yes.
And I also had friends who are lawyers and then I I asked them all these
technical questions about what happens with arrests and yeah, et cetera, though.
That's interesting.
But also what about from the, the novel writing aspect of it?
So obviously you've got experience writing novels,
but it is a maybe specialised area of, of novel writing.
Did you?
It's it, It is.
Yes, it is specialised, aired.
Did you have any mentors or any books that you kind of absorbed to help you
with that side of the process?
No, just life.
Life is your teacher.
The Life was my teacher and I started writing this the way I started first
writing, which was a novel which is now being
republished 50 years later, published in Indonesia and it was set in
Indonesia.
I'm very proud of that, that they're recognising that sort of
turned it into a classic in Indonesia.
So I ended up doing 7 draughts of this book because I didn't know what the hell
I was doing.
That's very reassuring to me.
I'm in draught mode myself, so it's nice to know that you did get
there in the end.
Well, with the first novel it had 12 draughts.
OK, if that's any encouragement.
Yes, I think to many writers it is for sure.
Yeah.
And it must be is hard work.
It's hard work.
And you must be driven to get through 12 draughts, you know,
and and still still keep at it and not just, I guess get too frustrated and,
well, it's not driven so much.
Well, I guess psychologically it is true.
But it feels like motivation, OK.
You're just highly motivated from hell to do it.
Just mad about it.
I think that's probably a shared experience for many writers.
It's just why are we doing it?
We don't, I don't actually have a logical reason.
We just must.
There's no money in it.
There's no no recognition.
No, no, not for a long time and maybe never do we
have to do it.
Yeah.
You're lucky to get recognition in your lifetime.
You're saying your book's been made a classic.
I doubt there's many people who could say that in their lifetime.
You know, that's really cool.
And so, I mean, it sounds like the challenge of doing
something new was a motivating factor in this case as well.
Oh, yes, I'm.
I'm of an adventurous nature, yeah.
Is it something you do again or is this kind of 1 and done in terms of the crime
genre?
Are you looking at something new or is this like your little niche now that
you've kind of found.
Well, and I'm looking at doing a sequel to this
book, reusing the two detectives because I like
them very much and then using three of the characters I already I haven't
particularly developed them.
I'm I'm particularly developing one of them as characters in in the next book,
but I can't decide which one I'm going to murder Too many choices there for you too
many choices yes, you couldn't murder them all.
Have you considered that?
Well, that's possible too yes, the Game of Thrones.
Oh, and that old classic Agatha Christie.
And then there were none because actually, in fact, I just went to see the, the,
the So did you the the play.
Yes, that was really wonderful.
And modern setting, like the set design, I should say.
It was really cool.
It was.
It looked terrific.
Yeah, it did.
So you're saying you're talking with Hollywood now as well.
So is there anything you can share with us about that?
Oh, no.
Look, it takes forever because so much money is
involved.
And in fact, everything's changing because of AI,
and it is going to make making movies much, much cheaper.
Yeah, eventually.
Well, not eventually, Pretty quickly.
This new Google AI suite is extraordinary.
My son, who is a sculptor is right across this
and he keeps on sending me videos.
And you honestly cannot tell that they're not humans.
Yeah, they are getting very, very, very realistic now.
Yes, I've seen the new, the new Google One,
especially that you you mentioned is really realistic.
But still, I mean, taking that from just a the couple of
minutes to write sort of fully fledged TV shows, see other applications.
Like imagine you film a scene and there's just an issue with that scene,
whatever it might be.
And in normal circumstances, you might have to reshoot the whole scene.
And obviously there's a lot of cost involved with that,
but if you can just edit out the little issue, we have too much trouble,
then I think that's gonna be an option that most directors would take.
So lots of applications for AI.
It's in everything, isn't it?
No applications at all.
Probably been doing now.
It is.
Absolutely.
So stay out of our territory.
Slashing her wrists?
Well, that's something that we talk about a lot
as well.
You know, from the writing perspective is that it's
kind of a shadow looming over everything at the moment.
It is.
And of course, having all of our work stolen,
all our IPS stolen, no address.
And have you seen a direct consequence of that for yourself?
Well, I think it's just more generally, and one really doesn't know yet what's
happening, though I, because nobody's admitting that this
whole book was written by an AI from materials stolen from 10s of thousands of
writers.
So what's the, what is the implication that you're
saying you're, you're thinking that that's permeating
through Hollywood at the moment and the discussions you're having that's also
looming in the background.
Well, everything's in flux and like the whole
world actually at the moment, the whole world is in flux.
We're moving from an old established world that we knew into a new world that
we honestly don't know.
And we're in this very difficult, transitional,
very confusing transitional period.
And it's it's hard to say what's going to be valued as well, because I mean,
we're talking about narratives and writers.
I think that's still very much valued because it's something that AI can write,
but it can't write a compelling like murder, ****** murder mystery novel.
Yes, yes.
That's what we don't know.
That really is an unknown and time will deal with that.
But as, as we talked about before, like it's not going to stop us, is it?
Yeah.
So that's, you know, we're going to go ahead,
keep bashing our heads against that brick wall.
But you know, I think in particular something like
crime fiction, where so much of it is that idea and that
spark of the idea that's compelling to the writer,
but then hopefully to the reader as well.
You can't get that out of a machine.
That's got to come from the human brain, right?
But don't forget AI is stolen.
Yes, that's true human brain.
And we can't read every book either.
So we don't know if we might encounter something for the first time thinking
it's original, when of course it's not.
Yeah, but I hope our imagination does keep us
ahead of the the machinery.
Well, it's a very compelling idea.
And I think just hearing about the Bunny Club, which is a great name by the way,
as well, it sounds like it could be a great
premise, a great idea for ATV show, especially if you expand it into a few
novels.
Yes.
Well, a number of people, including film makers,
but he doesn't make that sort of movie, has already said to me, oh,
this is dead set for a movie.
I hope so.
Yeah.
I was gonna say that.
Is that something you consciously think of while you're writing as well,
Like you imagine the characters and how that would play out on the screen or?
No, I I can just see the characters sort of
almost as I can see you across this table.
No, I don't.
I don't imagine that at all.
I'm just wondering, do you come up with your own titles?
Because I was looking through some of your other titles as well.
They're fabulous.
Like the monkeys in the dark.
It's just these really compelling ideas.
So are they all from your own brain?
All my own, yeah.
With actually with the inception of what's my best known book,
he ended up calling it Robert J Hawke a Biography because that fitted the
typeface fitted on the on the the title page,
because I wanted to call it Bob Hawke a biography.
So every other book has been my title.
And I mean, that would be an interesting experience
as well, writing a biography for someone very
close to you.
I mean, we we typically imagine biographies to be
written by someone maybe a little bit more distant.
So and when the person they.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
So I'm interested in that too.
Obviously you have a huge amount of experience in non fiction writing.
So do you find your process is sort of similar or is it a whole different ball
game when you're working with these different genres or I've always liked
research.
So obviously for a biography there's an enormous amount of research doing,
the family doing friends, blah, blah, blah.
But for this novel and for all my novels, I've had research too.
But there's been more in this crime fiction novel because I didn't know
anything about male escorts, for example, or detective work.
And the interesting thing was I showed to friends draughts of the book without
revealing who was the murderer, and the one person who picked straight
off who it was was one of the detectives.
So they think differently from us seeing the clues.
I love it.
Amazing.
Well, that was very interesting.
Thanks for talking to us.
Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about or,
or raise or let people know about?
Just that.
I hope this festival continues and continues to prosper.
It's been growing over the last five years and this year 5000,
1000 people and let's hope next year 10, 000 people not.
Yeah, well, we've been coming here for three years
now, so it's great to see it grow.
And we don't see much of this kind of thing on the Central Coast,
so that's good.
And your prices are very reasonable.
I hope you can keep the prices reasonable in in Sydney.
They're getting mad.
And you want to include everyone, right?
It's such a beautiful thing to be able to share this love of words together.
So, yeah, it's been great talking to you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Writers Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.