Five quick questions with The Final Call author Jen Shieff

Jen Shieff. Photo / Supplied

You have achieved a number of dreams in your life, including running a fly-fishing lodge and writing crime fiction. Anything else you want to do?

I've recently become a film reviewer - another dream come true - and I want to carry on reviewing for as long as big screens survive. Cinema has been a part of my life since I was moved to tears as a small child watching Friendly Persuasion when the son of a Quaker family defies his pacifist parents to join the home guard. Scenes and lines from that film have stuck with me ever since. I'd love to write a screenplay based on my books that somebody thinks about years later.

The Final Call is set in 1970s Auckland. What did you most enjoy about using that time period in your novel?

The social history of the 70s fascinates me. New Zealand was becoming itself, dealing with its own issues in its own way. The law was lagging when it came to prostitution and male homosexuality. Society was affected in different ways by the oil price shocks, carless days, maintaining a market in Europe for our butter, dawn raids, the rise of Māori activism, Norman Kirk halting the Springbok tour, the autocratic leadership of Robert Muldoon. There was a lot to be opinionated about. It was intriguing for me as a writer to try to capture some of that complexity, while also showing, in just a small part of the book, how the whole country was united in shock and grief when Air New Zealand's tourist flight to Antarctica crashed into Mt Erebus, killing all 257 people on board.

In all three of your books the historical details are important. How do you approach research?

I read. A week in Wellington's Alexander Turnbull Library in 2014 researching Auckland's infamous brothel owner, Flora McKenzie, set me on my course for all three books. Jane Tolerton's oral history collection, Convent Girls, provided lots of useful insights for The Final Call. I research as I write: news, contentious issues, books, films, food, wine, everything. I check with Merriam Webster's online dictionary to ensure all my characters' words were definitely in use at the time.

You skilfully recreate a more conservative New Zealand, in which prostitution is illegal and sexuality is not well understood. What do you hope readers take away from The Final Call?

I'd like my readers to see, or remember, the extent to which society has become more inclusive since the 70s, despite the pain and discomfort social change inevitably brings and the things that still need to happen.

Whose work do you love to read and why?

I love reading classics by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy for their unforgettable characters. I delight in Sarah Waters' use of words and images in her historic literary fiction. I am in awe of the quality of biographer Diana Souhami's research and the way she gives the women she writes about such vitality. When I want to escape completely, I turn to Patricia Highsmith's psychological thrillers.

The Final Call, by Jen Shieff (Mary Egan Publishing, $30), is out now.