Kiwi milks fundamental fears for crime thriller

Paddy Richardson admits she was a little worried the bad guy in her best seller Hunting Blind may have been "a little flat".
She needn't have worried. The fact this guy is pure evil comes out loud and clear and, as Richardson points out, he's not as important as the other characters in the story. He's the instrument of all that happens.
And what happens is that on a perfect summer's day at a community picnic by a lake a little girl goes missing, never to be seen again. Seventeen years later her sister, now a psychiatrist, is prompted to re-examine her sibling's disappearance after the revelations of a patient with a disturbingly similar story.
The (intentional and deliciously chilling) evil undercurrent which pervades Hunting Blind makes it a real page turner and it's easy to see why it's done so well, although it appears to have caught Richardson by surprise.
"I get very absorbed in the process of writing, getting it as good as I can and I'm not thinking about whether it's going to be a best-seller so I'm very thrilled it is. I didn't think I'd ever do it."
Richardson says her next book is another crime thriller but is "a little bit different", exploring the idea of somebody being in prison for a crime they may - or may not - have committed.
The idea came to the author after she watched a British documentary about someone wrongfully convicted of a crime.
"I thought it was an interesting idea."
The ideas for her work can come from just about anything.
"It can be a conversation I overhear, an image, something I've read in a newspaper, anything."
As for Hunting Blind, losing a child, Richardson says, is every family's worst nightmare.
"It's one of those fundamental fears, that somehow you might lose your child. So that may have triggered the idea for Hunting Blind but it started with an image - a perfect summer's day, a picnic by the lake and something happens."
Richardson still reads voraciously, three or four novels a week at least, but is a bit more discerning since becoming a full-time writer.
"I used to just read indiscriminately, now I read more critically, I choose books for the writing rather than the story."
One genre she doesn't read a lot of, ironically, is the one she's unintentionally fallen into as a writer - psychological thrillers.
Which is why her success has come as something of a surprise to Richardson.
"I'm happy about it but maybe a little surprised that I've moved to a different genre to what I started working on. I had been seen as a so-called literary writer and now I'm a crime writer - although it seems to me I'm just a writer."
One thing Richardson clearly is not is just another writer. Her past two books are being published in Germany over the next two years and she's been "stunned and excited" to have had Hunting Blind topping New Zealand's best-seller list.
Any time a Kiwi product hits the best-seller list is great news, an indication of growing recognition from the reading public for locally-written books.
"I think New Zealand writers are becoming more prominent and that's happened in the last 20 years or so," Richardson says. "There are far more New Zealand writers being published now and having books published overseas."
Richardson cites Lloyd Jones' Mr Pip as a good example of a book that has done wonders for New Zealand literature.
"When a New Zealand book does really well like that I think it helps all New Zealand writers. I think there used to be a cultural cringe about New Zealand writing, that maybe it wasn't as good as that of other, overseas writers but I think we are changing in terms of attitude towards that.
"There are some fabulous New Zealand writers and we have our own writing identity."
Richardson has been writing for about 20 years, starting with poetry when her children were young, then short stories, a collection of which was published in 1987.
It seemed inevitable she would eventually write novels and her first, The Company of a Daughter, was published in 1997, followed in 2008 by A Year To Learn A Woman and, this year, Hunting Blind.
Now writing full-time, Richardson treats it like a job.
"I think of it as a working day. I have to. I love writing but I have to have a routine and stick to it or ideas fly away. It takes so much energy and time, not just the writing but the thinking, planning, living with the characters."
During a routine "working day" Richardson writes from about 9.30am until 1pm, has lunch, then takes a walk and does some more writing in the afternoon.
Richardson may well have the perfect place to write. The mum of three grown up children lives with her husband in Dunedin on the Otago Peninsula with an office that overlooks the ocean.
"It's a really lovely place to write," she says.
The perfect place then to create another page turner.
Hunting Blind, by Paddy Richardson, Penguin, $28