Michael Bennett's Better the Blood is a remarkable, post-colonial crime novel

Michael Bennett.

Michael Te Arawa Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) admits he doesn't have an off switch. He writes at a standing desk, most recently on top of a riad in Morocco, and begins every day at 5am with a 10.13 km power-walk - an obsessive tic he's also given his lead character in crime fiction debut Better the Blood (except she runs an inner-city Auckland route).

Bennett's a celebrated showrunner, scriptwriter, and film-maker – he was the 2020 recipient of the Te Aupounamu Māori Screen Excellence Award – but had never attempted a crime novel.

The challenge was to write something that was more than just a "page-turner".

His dilemma? To write a crime novel that addressed two centuries of injustice and inequity and kept those pages turning. Could he meld the post-colonial Māori experience into a slick, compelling, contemporary thriller - one with the power to resonate far beyond our shores?

Turns out Bennett was more than up for the challenge. Better the Blood is a remarkable, post-colonial crime novel that is sure to feature on many critics' end-of-year best lists.

It's already making waves and is to be turned into a six-part television series by Bennett and his partner Jane Holland. The novel has also been sold into multiple territories - with 11 translations in the works before first publication - one oddly enough in Latvian – a rare feat by a local author.

Bennett's a big fan of North American writers S.A. Cosby and David Heska Wanbli Weiden – writers who have tackled similar cultural and social issues in crime fiction.

Like them, he thought it important to go to "deeper places that might not always be found within the crime fiction genre".

The novel centres around Māori detective Hana Westerman, who is charged with hunting down Aotearoa's first serial killer.

She's a talented detective who has risen quickly through the ranks - but at some personal cost.

She's divorced and her relationship with her teenage daughter is fraught. She's also alienated from her wider whānau after she is filmed, early in her police career, hauling peaceful Māori protestors away from a land protest.

As well as presenting an action-rich thriller, the novel details Hana's personal journey and the embracing of her Māori identity as she comes to understand and even empathise with the killer's motivations, while she does everything she can to stop them.

Bennett's decade-long involvement with the Teina Pora case led him to Better the Blood. He made the documentary The Confessions of Prisoner T, which led to the discovery of evidence that was pivotal in Pora's exoneration, as well as writing a non-fiction account of the case in 2016.

IN CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL BENNETT

How did your experience with Teina Pora inform this novel?

There's a direct line between being one of Teina's supporters, and this novel, and in much of my other work. I've always been passionate about social justice; something I inherited from my extraordinary parents. With Teina's story, I was working from awful, heartbreaking facts. With Better the Blood I could leave behind facts and deep-dive into high-octane fictional thriller storytelling that ultimately explores very similar themes, from a very different angle.

Is the daguerreotype of the 19th century colonialists described in the book - men who essentially lynch a Māori chief - based on a real image?

I was born on November 5. Growing up I learned far more about Guy Fawkes and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot than about the colonisation of our country. At a certain point I became aware of the 19th century land wars; it was a massive jolt. It's impossible not to be shocked by the near-genocidal suffering for Māori, who were trying to defend our traditional lands and our way of life against a massively better-armed foreign power with no moral or legal right to be here. The image at the heart of the book, the unjust execution of a Māori chief in the 1860s, doesn't derive from any single photo or event. It's an attempt to distill the brutality of the period into a single, haunting, awful image.

Have race relations in Aotearoa improved in your lifetime? Are your kids in a more tolerant, understanding culture or is there still much work to do?

There's so much to be positive about! My kids are fluent in te reo through being able to access full immersion education. It feels to me that the generations who will soon lead our country are comfortable in their skins, their reo and their culture. For them, equality isn't aspirational, it's lived-in. We're the first country to have an authentically indigenous public holiday. We have scrutiny and a settlement process for implementing Te Tiriti o Waitangi. But that doesn't mean everything is fixed, not by a long shot; that's a big theme of the book. Te Tiriti is about true equity, living out our very New Zealand values of decency and equality – no one with their eyes truly open can pretend we're there yet. And "good enough" isn't good enough.

Pākehā distrust and paranoia of Māori was behind the 2007 police raids in the Urewera - did you have that in mind when writing Better the Blood?

Real events enter the zeitgeist – the man facing off against the tank in Tiananmen Square is reflected in our national memory by images from the hikoi, the peaceful land protests of the 20th century, what happened in Urewera. None of those stories are mine to tell; I worked with a friend and brilliant storyteller, Tim Worrall (Ngāi Tūhoe), to create a fictional iwi with a unique fictional whakapapa, so as not to appropriate anyone else's story.

You've said that to be Māori and an artist, it's hard not to be at least a bit angry. What did you mean by that?

Being part of the fight for justice for Teina Pora, what happened to him makes me bereft to this day. And yes, angry. The institutional problems of our justice system I saw in Teina's case are just the visible tip of the iceberg. I welcome constructive reform and change, but, for now, Māori remain disadvantaged across every socio-economic matrix – access to health, mental health support, access to education, life expectancy, the ugly results of inter-generational poverty including depression, suicide, child poverty. We are by far the most imprisoned indigenous race on the planet. The average wealth of any Māori citizen is a sixth that of any non-Māori citizen. I'm not a politician, I'm not naturally a protester – I'm a storyteller. By telling stories I can do my small part in lifting up the carpet and shining a torch on what's under there.

You've said you admire books with "deep humanity and such deep pain". I find both of those in Better the Blood … it's an exciting crime novel but also a moving one.

I'm glad! I want to be moved by what I read and watch. I think most readers and viewers feel the same. Whatever genre, I want to finish the last page of the book or see the last frame of the movie understanding a little more about our fellow occupants of Planet Earth. Otherwise it's just been entertainment.