Several years ago, I was sitting in a café with a group of fellow New Zealand writers, discussing books we’d recently read. With several of us, me included, working on thriller or suspense projects, we meandered onto the subject of thrillers and mysteries set in Iceland, as well as Norway and neighboring countries.
And it struck us that New Zealand covers all the same bases as a setting for noir.
Our country is as remote as Iceland, hanging on at the edge of the world, next stop Antarctica. Winds from which continent often sweep across our shores, bringing bitter cold with it. We are, in fact, so remote that we often get left off maps.
What better place to set a thriller than this isolated group of islands in the Pacific so far from the rest of the world that it is a mystery in and of itself?
The NZ landscape also lends itself to the dark and the intense. It’s not that it isn’t beautiful — quite the opposite. New Zealand has spectacular primeval forests and breathtaking alpine peaks, alongside lakes and rivers of a haunting turquoise due to glacial flour.
We also have bustling modern cities, complete with the dark elements you find in cities across the world. But with a population of just over five million, New Zealand offers a lot of space to be alone. Whether it’s on a windswept beach that stretches for miles, or inside the sprawling green of the “bush”—that so innocuous a name for the tangled old-growth forests that cover the country.
My first thriller, A Madness of Sunshine, was partially inspired by a moment of aloneness I witnessed from the window seat of a bus traveling from one remote South Island town to another.
This young woman with a cheerful smile and a battered backpack got off the bus at an unofficial stop used by hikers to gain access to one of our many national parks. She was the only hiker in view, probably the only hiker for miles around, and I watched her as she walked into the vanishing point created by the trees that shadowed the narrow path.
Of course, because I’m a writer, I thought, what if she isn’t alone out there? What if the reason we don’t have serial killers in New Zealand is because no one has ever discovered their crimes?
Yet that same dangerous and lonely landscape has a thousand dazzling facets. The air is sharp and crisp, the roads through the wilderness so long and straight in places that you feel as if you’re driving into eternity.
On our last trip to the West Coast of the South Island, we stopped at a one lane bridge over a glacial river. I walked onto the center of the bridge and took countless photos before I heard the sound of a single solitary car. I was off the bridge by the time the car crossed, and then I walked back onto it, safe in the knowledge that no other cars would come before I finished taking my photographs.
But not all of these lovely and secluded places are in remote areas. My second thriller, Quiet In Her Bones, is set in the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park, which is a part of Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city.
As you hit Scenic Drive—which comes off the funky and café-heavy town center of Titirangi—the trees on either side enclose you in a tunnel of increasing darkness. There is little sunshine from that point onward, the forest canopy so thick that if you find a spot from where you can look down on it from a higher vantage point, all you see are the curling fronds of giant tree ferns and dark green foliage from another time.
A hundred people could be walking underneath and you’d have no hope of spotting them. So it made sense to me that a car could slide off the road and down under that canopy, to disappear for ten long years.
My newest book, There Should Have Been Eight, was also inspired by the New Zealand landscape. It’s effectively a locked room thriller—except that the locked room happens to be a crumbling old mansion in the Southern Alps. A place where sun can turn to snow in a matter of hours, and torrential rain can swell rivers and make them impassable—while also grounding all helicopters.
There is no way out.
Because our weather, too, is noir-ready. New Zealand’s Māori name, Aotearoa, translates to the Land of the Long White Cloud. This is a country ready to give you the moody and cloudy scenes so prevalent in noir, alongside bright sunshine that strikes a discordant note at just the right moment.
So why NZ noir? Hanging on the edge of forever, starkly beautiful, mysterious, and dangerous by its very geography, why not?
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