Explosive fiction

Volcanoes are a passion for Anne Maria Nicholson. Photo / Supplied

As a child growing up in the central North Island, Anne Maria Nicholson climbed Tongariro and Ruapehu. And that was it - volcanoes were in her veins.

Although she went on to become a Sydney-based TV reporter, she never lost her fascination with them. It led to her first novel, the best-selling Weeping Waters, based on the Tangiwai disaster. And to research the sequel, that fascination has taken her to Italy and the world's most dangerous volcano, Vesuvius.

"There are something like 14,000 volcanoes around the world," Nicholson says, "so the book could have been set anywhere, but I felt it had to be Italy. Vesuvius is so dangerous because millions of people live around it. You can't stop an eruption, you can only get away from it.

"But on a normal day in Naples the traffic is so bad you can barely get a car down the street so can you imagine what would happen in an emergency?"

Nicholson, a senior reporter with the ABC in Australia, went to live in Naples while she researched Pliny's Warning (HarperCollins, $34.99) and spent time interviewing scientists and archaeologists about the threat Vesuvius poses. She takes a very journalistic approach to research and is unafraid to knock on doors and ask tough questions.

"I walk the walk is what I like to say. I'm very comfortable with that. Reporting is what I do and I love it, whereas writing fiction is the big challenge."

In Pliny's Warning she has bound together fact and fiction quite tightly. The book returns to the character of vulcanologist Frances Nelson and, although some sections are set on White Island, it is mostly concerned with the real-life political and social scandals besetting Naples.

"It's a place where there are no boundaries of human life that people won't cross for money," Nicholson says. Although she touches on the city's well-publicised toxic rubbish problem, at the core of the story is an issue that hasn't received so much international attention - continued building in what is known as the red zone, the path of the lava flow of previous eruptions.

Nicholson interviewed the experts trying to predict what would happen if the volcano were to blow again, which areas of Naples would be destroyed and how long people would have to evacuate.

She found huge dissension among scientists and that the Italian government was reluctant to listen to what would happen if the worst happened.

"When I embarked on this I didn't know much about the science of volcanoes at all," she says.

"So it's something I've worked hard on. You don't want people to feel like they're reading a science book but you do have to know 100 per cent what you're talking about."

Nicholson has fictionalised the controversy surrounding Vesuvius, tangling up her vulcanologist character Frances in a Mafia-driven web of corruption and greed. There's also a love story and a brilliant evil character called Camilla Corsi, a sort of Cruella De Vil of science. "I wanted to make it authentic but also a good read, sexy and mysterious," says Nicholson.

Researching the novel also meant testing herself physically. Nicholson had decided to describe the ancient ruins of Baia, a lost civilisation beneath the Mediterranean Sea and that meant seeing them for herself.

"I'd never scuba-dived so, before I left Sydney, I did a four-day open-water course," she says. "Even though I swim in the ocean regularly, it's a huge leap to scuba - and I'm a middle-aged woman. But I'm always very determined. So I got my PADI ticket and did the dive at Baia that now forms the opening chapter of Pliny's Warning. It was a thrill to touch another civilisation like that."

Nicholson, who has three adult children, has managed to research and write her first two novels during extended leave from her job as an arts reporter for the ABC news.

Now her aspiration is to become a full-time novelist. "I guess writing a novel is almost like the inner self in a way," she says. "I can set a story in an authentic background and say so much more than I could as a reporter. It's for others to decide whether I've achieved anything worthwhile but I like the idea of bringing out the emotions."

She is planning a third Frances Nelson book, this time set in Asia and again tying together volcanoes and ancient civilisations.

"I'd also like to come back to live in New Zealand and write a book that will trace my ancestry," she says. "I have a little bit of Maori blood that I only became aware of as an adult, so I'd like to explore that."

With Weeping Waters about to come out in Germany, Nicholson hopes that some day Pliny's Warning might be published in Italy. "While it paints a fairly dire view of Naples I hope it comes through that I'm not condemning the city," she says.

"The book is about ordinary people trying to live their lives against a backdrop of violence and corruption - which is exactly how it is in real life."