ITW contributing editor Carolyn Haines talks to Lindy Cameron about her new thriller, REDBACK.

Lindy Cameron’s newest book, REDBACK, moves her focus from the more personal world of Melbourne investigator Kit O’Malley to the global scope of terrorism and political greed.

In REDBACK, we meet Commander Bryn Gideon and American journalist Scott Dreher. The book opens with Gideon’s Redbacks, a crack team of Australian retrieval agents resolving a hostage situation and then moving on to track a new terrorist group.

What made you decide to move from the more intimate world of a private investigator to a book of global scope?

I began my author’s life (back in the 1990s) with the type of book that I was reading at the time – contemporary crime with a strong female protagonist. I chose a PI because I wanted my main character to have the ‘freedom’ a cop doesn’t have when investigating something. I also wanted to present my home city, Melbourne , to a wider reading audience. A strong sense of place is one of the keystones of good crime fiction, and I wanted Melbourne to be a character in my series.

My first published book was an archaeological mystery adventure called Golden Relic. It was a stand-alone or is the first in series! It’s set in Melbourne , Cairo and Peru . I had such fun writing about places I’d been – or wanted to go – that I knew sooner or later I would return to the wider world.

By its very nature crime fiction holds the promise of a resolution. In fact, that is the unspoken pact that we modern crime (and thriller) writers make with our readers. And these days it’s not just the whodunit, but the why that’s important. The motives of the good and the bad guys must be examined or at least revealed, the outcome must be believable, if only in context, and justice, of some kind, must be seen to be done.

Most importantly, a good crime novel provides closure, brings order to the chaos of everyday life and reason to the madness around us. Within the covers of a crime novel you expect everything will turn out okay in the end. The good guys win hopefully with honor, integrity, and more than a few page-turning thrills.

So although crime fiction is the perfect vehicle for delving into social, legal, political, or environmental issues, these topics are usually investigated on a more intimate level through stories told in one place – like Melbourne . The foreign setting (as in Australia being foreign for Americans) simply puts a different slant on crimes that everyone can understand on some level. Crimes like murder, assault, robbery, white collar shenanigans, local political or environmental scandals. We all understand these on some level because they all happen locally – just with a different accent.

But in the 12 years that I’ve been dealing with the fictional crime-fighting of my own city, the real world around me has been going to hell in a hand-basket.

There’s war and warmongering, acts of terrorism, whether homegrown or the work of the enemy, the nefarious schemes or governments or government agencies, and the wicked plots of rogue states or fanatical cells. Although these things are touching more and more of us, they are not yet something experienced by people in every neighborhood.{mospagebreak}

So the main reason I turned my fictional attention from the local to the international was because I got angry and frustrated enough at the world at large – and, in particular, with the many questionable political decisions and procedures instigated in Australia and abroad by other members of the so-called Coalition of the Willing. I wanted to find a way to express that frustration while entertaining as many people as possible.

It was obvious that a contemporary political / espionage / thriller was the best vehicle for the stories I now want to create: fast-paced action-adventure with believable heroes set in a recognizable world. Redback is fiction based in reality. I’m hoping it might be seen as the thinking-person’s action thriller.

Are the Redbacks fictional, and if so, what are they based on? If they’re real, would you tell us a little of their history?

The Redbacks are entirely fictional as far as I know. I’ve read a lot in the past few years about mercenary-types or just ex-cops or soldiers who have been hired to re-abduct children kidnapped by a parent who takes them home to his (usually) or her own country. There’s also the host of foreign businessmen kidnapped on a regular basis by rebels or insurgent groups or criminals asking for ransoms. These victims also get rescued by mercenaries and the like.

The Redbacks as a concept were based on the need for that kind of unit as a full-time operation. They are government-sanctioned but not government run. I also endowed them with all the money, high-tech gear and resources they could ever want so they can just pick up and go wherever they’re needed. If only they were real.

The name Redback, by the way, is taken from one of Australia ’s many poisonous spiders.

What authors inspired you to take on such a big landscape? Is there any political/thriller writer that you greatly admire?

I love Nelsen DeMille for his action and his splendid storytelling. I also really like Carsten Stroud, David A Rollins, Gayle Lynds , Taylor Smith, and Vince Flynn.

But my crime/psychological thriller writing hero is Val McDermid.

In REDBACKS, did the plot come to you first, or the characters?

The characters and the idea for the retrieval agency came first by a whisker. I wanted to create a group of Australian action heroes but set them in an international arena. And I wanted to comment on home-grown and international politics include an American non-fighting hero and terrorists from a variety of backgrounds to demonstrate it’s not as simple as us and them – because who are we; and who are they?{mospagebreak}

Was it difficult to manage so many different elements of such a complex story? How do you manage a timeline in a book like this?

I nearly went mad. The timeline was especially difficult because the whole story takes place over a couple of weeks but things are going on at the same time in Sydney, Washington, Peshawar, Houston, and the middle of the Pacific. This means stuff happens in the same moment but all the times and even the days are obviously different.

Rather than writing each character or group’s story arc and then editing it into the correct time frames, I wrote it chronologically. So I wrote from one scene to the next – in the same order that readers get to read it. Hence the madness!

I’ve heard highly respected authors talk about the reason for writing a particular book. I was struck by one author’s statement that “if a book isn’t political, at heart, there’s no reason to write it.” (political in the sense that it addresses issues such as class, race, gender—not party politics) Would you agree or disagree with this statement, and also if REDBACKS is “political,” would you care to elaborate on this?

I think I answered this one earlier, but I totally agree with the statement. My crime novels are political in the sense of addressing personal equality, freedoms, the local political or criminal machinations that affect everyday life, etc.

REDBACK is political on just about every level including actually political in terms of how I have represented my fictional world Leaders and the things they do, and what my other characters think of that.

You’re very active in Sisters in Crime. Along with serving as co-convenor, you edit STILETTO, an anthology of Australians sisters’ stories published annually. You also have a crime anthology coming out from MIRA in 2008. Why short fiction, which has been such a difficult sale in past years?

The short-fiction answer is: I was Editor of Scarlet Stiletto the first cut which is an anthology of the 13 first-prize winning stories, and 13 category-winning stories from the first 13 years of our annual crime and mystery short story competition called The Scarlet Stiletto Awards.

I am also Editor of Stiletto, the Sisters in Crime Australia magazine, which comes out three times a year and features interviews, reviews, and feature stories on the many functions we run.

I am also the Editor of and a contributor to a True Crime anthology called Meaner Than Fiction [subtitled Powerful Australian True Crime Stories of Failed Justice]; and co-author, with my sister Fin J Ross, of a forthcoming True Crime collection called Killer in the Family.

Lindy Cameron is a resident of Australia and national co-convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia Inc. She is also an animal lover with five cats and one dog in her household. You can find out more about Lindy at www.lindycameron.com

ITW contributing editor Carolyn Haines is the author of PENUMBRA, named one of the top five mysteries of 2006 by Library Journal, and FEVER MOON, a Book Sense notable book, and is a contributor to the New York Times Best Selling anthology MANY BLOODY RETURNS. Her newest thriller is REVENANT. www.carolynhaines.com