Real Life: How having kids led author Vanda Symon to life of crime writing

Dr Vanda Symon has written seven novels and been shortlisted for the annual Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for three of them. Photo / Glenn Symon

“Had babies. Drove me to crime.”

It was these six words that saw Dr Vanda Symon come out on top in a newspaper’s poem competition many years ago. It’s also something of a memoir of her life.

The Dunedin crime novelist was a pharmacist and researcher for many years before quitting to raise her children, a 6-month-old and a toddler. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was only when she had children that she had the “mental fortitude” to start writing her murder mysteries fulltime, she says.

“I studied pharmacy and worked in pharmacies with my husband, and we’re owners of pharmacies,” she told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.

“It was a very, very mind-intensive, thinking career to have, because you had to work hard all the time – and if you made an error, it had the potential to do someone quite serious harm. So I didn’t have the mental fortitude to write at that stage.

“But when I took some time out from work to raise the children, that’s when I finally had some space to write the crime novels. So yes – had babies, drove me to crime.”

Symon, who has written seven novels and been shortlisted for the annual Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for three of them, says she managed to launch her new career by making the most of tiny pockets of free time.

“It was a matter of just writing in 20-minute snatches of time here and there when, if fortune had it, both children were asleep and I had the space.”

Crime wasn’t necessarily her genre of choice – going this route was simply a pragmatic decision, she says.

“At the time, I’d been given the advice ‘write what you love to read’. And I loved reading crime fiction and historic fiction,” Symon told Real Life.

“But at that point, having a 6-month-old baby and a 2-year-old, doing the research that was necessary for historic fiction was really quite difficult because that would involve libraries and archives – and they don’t tend to like you taking babies with you into those kind of spaces.

“So from a practical perspective, researching crime fiction was far more accessible and my husband’s stepfather had been a former police detective so I had someone that I could ask a wee bit about procedure or about details and things.

“So it was a practical choice and I have absolutely no regrets.”

Symon said she loves to explore the motivations of the “villains” in her novels – but she takes an empathetic view of them.

She says it’s very rare that someone goes into the world with a motivation to kill someone, but it happens as a result of circumstances – a bad decision that snowballs out of control, or a motivation to protect someone they love.

“It’s not that simple, thank heavens. I would hate to think that there are many people like that walking the streets alongside us, because that’s quite terrifying – but there are many people who circumstances have gotten away from, and they find themselves in this terrible position.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Symon spoke about her research into Pasifika people with dementia, coming from a family of 12 children, and the influence of her Fijian heritage on her life.

Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7:30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.