If I Tell You I'll Have to Kill You by Michael Robotham

Author:Michael Robotham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN005000, book
ISBN: 9781743434345
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

So there I was at the Crazyhorse, working as a peepshow girl. Despite the sleazy trappings the work was fun. I lost a few friends along the way—the ones who couldn’t understand that being a feminist and a stripper weren’t mutually exclusive—but I made new ones. The other dancers were friendly, bawdy and funny as hell, and each shift was a combination of playing dress-ups and putting on a high-school musical, albeit a raunchy one. You could do anything you wanted on stage: tell a story; take the piss out of yourself or the crowd; perform a comedy act to crack up the other girls.

Every day something ridiculous happened. One time a guy carked it in the cinema, and no-one realised he was dead for eight hours. When the girls complained that he smelled the cashier sprayed him with air freshener. (Okay, maybe that isn’t so funny. Either that or you had to be there.)

As much as I’d wanted a grown-up job after university, possibly with a suit and a briefcase, I realised I’d actually fallen into the perfect occupation for a wanna-be author. I worked good hours and was gathering material every day. I got to know strippers who were mothers and students, party girls or personal trainers. I met bikies and gangsters, swingers and corrupt cops, blue-collar workers and businessmen. I was privy to their hidden lives and secret fantasies.

Of course I still wanted to write. I enrolled in a professional writing course at the Melbourne CAE, and took Novel Writing 1. I began writing about a stripper called Simone (my dancing name) with a working title, Peepshow. You’re probably thinking this was a crime novel, right? Noooo. In some weird hangover from my days at Wingham High, I saw myself writing a literary novel. Simone didn’t do much in Peepshow except loll about, pondering her Brazilian and her existential angst. Needless to say it was a boring piece of shite.

Then I attended a session at the Melbourne Writers Festival called ‘Why Write Crime?’ featuring Kinky Friedman, Robert Crais and some Australian guy who seemed to be quite drunk. They basically said, ‘Why would you write anything else? You can still have serious issues in a crime novel, but you wrap them up in an entertaining plot and get your point across all the more effectively.’

Talk about a ‘eureka moment’. Peepshow had to be a crime novel. How could I have been so stupid? On the tram on the way home I tried to think of a crime. I went through a mental hit list I had been keeping for years. Top of the pile was the sleazy boss of a King Street table-dancing club. I immediately went home and wrote a scene where his body washes up on St Kilda beach. Simone Kirsch, feminist stripper and fledgling private investigator, was born.

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