The mystery writer in Mt Vic

The mystery writer in Mt Vic

A local academic has written his first novel – and it includes some familiar places.  Jane O’Loughlin reports.

International mystery novel Lepan’s Shadow is about a retired professor living in Mount Victoria who travels to Chile for work, where he gets mixed up in a suspicious death.

It’s written by a retired professor living in Mt Victoria who previously travelled to Chile for work – coincidence?

Local author Douglas Pearce acknowledges there are some strong biographical parallels between him and his protagonist, Cliff West. However he assures me: “I haven’t hauled the body of a French anthropologist out of a hot pool in the Atacama!” Pearce is an emeritus professor of tourism management at Victoria University, who has lived in Mount Victoria for 25 years.

Keen to continue writing into retirement, he decided to turn his hand to a genre he enjoys – mystery.

A visit to the dramatic Atacama Desert in Chile as part of a work trip gave him the idea of a setting for a crime. A Professor is found dead in a geothermal hot pool. The New Zealand academic gets involved, and before long starts to uncover a range of suspects and motivations for the suspicious death. The action in the novel mainly takes place in Chile, France and in Wellington, all places the author is familiar with.

Pearce has published several academic books on tourism, however this is his first work of fiction, and admits he did find the move to writing a novel “a major learning curve”. A first draft sent to a manuscript reviewer resulted in some pointed feedback about the mechanics of writing, such as dialogue, story arcs and pace – and how to leave the audience hanging at the end of a chapter.

“I found that from the feedback I got, that clearly there's an art to writing fiction,” he says with a wry grin.

He was less keen to take the advice to remove detail about the lives of academics, and the feedback from former colleagues is that one of the strengths of the book is the accurate portrayal of academic life.

Pearce has ended up self-publishing his book, meaning a hands on approach to cover design, printing and distribution.

He puts the difficulty of finding a publisher down to the novel not fitting neatly into certain genres – being neither ‘cosy murder’ nor the other extreme of including multiple ‘improbable’ murders with gruesome levels of detail. The mix of settings means the book can’t easily be marketed as a ‘New Zealand’ book.

However Mt Victoria readers will be pleased to see some familiar places appearing in the book. The protagonist lives in a Pirie Street townhouse, goes for a walk along Oriental Parade and even pops into Moore Wilson’s.

After a couple of years of writing the novel, Pearce says his protagonist, Cliff West, became “very much part of the family”, and he has enjoyed bringing him to life. When asked – somewhat mischievously – if the novel is a chance to create a glamorous alter ego for himself, Pearce says the parallels are mainly limited to settings he is familiar with. However he does think the world of the academic researcher and the detective solving mysteries are all that distant. As he has his character Cliff West say: “Ask the right questions, collect and analyse the right information, draw your conclusions.”

Lepan’s Shadow is available to purchase from The Underground Bookshop.