Ihaka's creator a guest at Festival

Paul Thomas

Paul Thomas writes for a living. Sports biographies, film scripts, newspaper columns and the much loved crime fiction for which he is internationally renowned.
Paul is one of the featured writers at this year's Whanganui Literary Festival where, billed as the Godfather of New Zealand crime fiction, he will talk about his writing life and, hopefully, his enduring character, Auckland policeman Tito Ihaka.
Born in the UK, Paul arrived in New Zealand with his parents when he was three years old.
"We worked our way up the country, starting outside Timaru and ending up in Auckland," he says. "I'm essentially an Aucklander; that's where I went to secondary school and university."
He started out in journalism at the Auckland Star.
"I also worked on a paper called the Auckland Sun, which was the first new daily newspaper in New Zealand for 50 years. That was post the '87 stock market crash and it lasted for all of 333 days. It was owned by Brierley's and they closed it. I then went to work in PR and the outfit I worked for sent me to Sydney to run their office there, which I did for a couple of years and hated every moment of it.
"In '92 I did what I had been wanting to do for a long time; quit PR and became a full-time writer. By then I had ghost-written a book with John Wright, the cricketer, called Christmas in Rarotonga. That was the first book I'd actually written. Then the people who published that asked me if I was interested in doing John Kirwan's book. At that stage JK was playing in Italy over the New Zealand summer, so to do the book I had to go and spend a couple of months with him in Italy. That was the mechanism that got me out of PR and into writing; I couldn't do both."
That meant giving up his "day job" was not such a reckless gamble.
"I had a few months' work and a guaranteed cheque at the end of it," says Paul. "That was the transition into full-time writing.
"After that I did another ghost writing project with John Hart, the coach, who, at that stage was sort of in the wilderness, and when that finished I wrote Old School Tie [the first Tito Ihaka novel]."
Ghost writing rugby and cricket books was Paul's way of "sneaking into fiction".
"I had dabbled in it and had stuff I had started and never followed through on in the bottom of a drawer and stuff I had started and followed through on but it wasn't good enough. Then with Old School Tie it was really the first time I was writing in my own voice instead of being derivative and being overly influenced by other writers. I decided with Old School Tie, that rather than follow any formula or any other writers, and instead of being respectable, I would just write exactly what I would like to read and hope others felt the same."
Having finished the novel, Paul rang Geoff Blackwell, the young dynamo of the publishing company that he had written the sports books for, and asked where he should send the manuscript of Old School Tie.
"The Blackwells had a family business called Moa, which expanded and merged with other publishers, but they didn't do fiction at all," says Paul. So it was surprise when Geoff persuaded his partners to take it on and publish it.
"Twenty something years down the path I'm still published in New Zealand by the heirs of the company that I started out with, and it's nice to have that relationship."
The Ihaka novels have been translated into several languages and published in other countries, including the UK and the USA.
As well as the sixth Ihaka novel, Paul is also working on a film script of Inside Dope, his second Ihaka novel. "It's a project that has been kicking around pretty much since Inside Dope came out," he says. "That's 20 years, but the producer has commissioned me to have another crack at the script." It's not the first screenplay he has written. Ihaka: Blunt Instrument was written while Paul lived in Sydney. While it was not based on any of the novels, it was a blatant attempt to get Ihaka across the Tasman.
Paul now lives in Martinborough. "I've lived in Auckland, Sydney, London and Toulouse and now I'm living in Martinborough, which I think has a permanent population of about 1000.
Paul's last visit to Wanganui was in 1968 when he represented Kings College in a cricket match against Collegiate. Collegiate won.
¦The Godfather of New Zealand crime fiction - Paul Thomas
Saturday, September 19.
11.30-12.30