My father was a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War and a decorated Flight Lieutenant in the RNZAF 485 Squadron. When he recently arrived in Britain during training, his plane's engine failed. With no options available, he was forced to rush into farmland in Hertfordshire, crashing into a tree before his plane crashed into the ground and burst into flames. He was pulled unconscious from the burning wreckage by the farmer, but not before he was severely burned. It was Dad's great fortune that he came under the care of Kiwi surgeon Archibald McEndoe, who reconstructed his badly burned skin, as he did for so many downed air crews in the war. It was the middle of the night at home in Aotearoa, and at the exact moment my father crashed, his mother (my grandmother) had a vision. She saw my father wading out of a lake in his flight crew uniform. His hands covered his face and my grandmother ran to him and begged him: 'What's wrong with your face Teddy, what's wrong?Behind his hands she could see that he was crying, but Dad didn't want to take his hands away, he didn't want to show her his face.
It was my father's face that was most badly burned in the fiery crash.
There is a strong matakite lineage in my family. This is nothing unusual for Maori families of course; most whānau have similar stories to tell about the deep interconnectedness of the physical and metaphysical worlds. Recently in te reo class, our Kaiako described the border that separates the world of the living and Te Ao Wairua as a thick wall of mist. If anyone on this side of the divide is in pain or needs guidance, or if anyone on the other side of the wall of mist has something burning to pass on to help us get here, the wall is permeable, passable.
A character who returns from the Other Side appears in my new crime novel Return to blood. It's the sequel to Better the blood, and continues the story of Auckland CIB Detective Hana Westerman, her firefighter daughter Addison, and their family and associates. Early in the book, Addison finds the remains of a murdered woman in the sand dunes near her grandfather's house. The victim was a woman named Kiri. When she was killed, Kiri was the same age Addison is now, late teens. Like Addison, Kiri is Māori, smart as hell, feisty, a handful. Hana has left the police force, but she is inevitably drawn into the shadowy puzzle of how this young woman's bones ended up in the cold black sand dunes. She has tried to leave murder and darkness behind her, but murder and darkness will not leave Hana alone. And at the same time, Addison realizes that Kiri is coming back through the wall of fog to the young woman who shares so much with her and who found her remains.
Crime fiction is traditionally all about detection and deduction. Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple use logic and reasoned thinking to unmask the killer. Early 20se Century, British writer and Catholic priest Ronald Knox published “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction”. Rule No. 2 read “All supernatural or preternatural powers are obviously excluded.”
Loosen up, man.
Kiwi crime writer Jacqueline Bublitz impressed with her debutBefore you knew my name,a major international bestseller. In New York, a dead young woman is found next to the Hudson River, and she is an ongoing character in the book – a poignant bystander in the search for her killer, with the detection becoming less important than the exploration of female stories and female perspective. – even the unlikely perspective of this murdered young woman.
Crime fans will know Charlie Parker, the creation of award-winning Irish author John Connolly. The instruments of darkness (2024) is the 23rd in the critically acclaimed series about a former NYPD detective who is, literally, a ghostly detective. Parker grieves over the murder of his wife and daughter and is often confronted with evil that goes far deeper than everyday crime. He often communicates with the spirit of his deceased daughter.
One of my favorite TV shows of all time is Edge of Darkness, from the mid-80s. Again, it's a murdered child who comes to a grieving father – as her father tries to unravel the incredibly complex knots that lead to his environmentalist daughter is shot in front of his eyes, she keeps coming back and talking to her father as casually as if she were still living in his guest room and not returning from permanent residency on the Other Side.
My books are described as the first Māori crime series written by a Māori author. Historically, Native American storytellers have also been underrepresented in book publishing. That is changing, and as Native American authors are read, it is perhaps not surprising that many of their stories blend spiritual elements with the crime genre. In Marcie Rendons Sinister gravesAs in the rest of her Cash Blackbear series, a young Ojibwe woman in rural North Dakota and Minnesota helps solve murders in the 1970s through her determination, attitude and her spiritual visions.
Shutter from Diné writer Ramona Emerson is a stellar debut Native Noir in which an Albuquerque Police Department forensic photographer helps hunt down the killers of an alleged suicide victim, aided by the ghosts of crime victims who point her to the truth. In White horse, by Erika T Wurth, a thirty-something Native American bartender in Colorado begins to see her mother's ghost, leading her to dig deeper into her mother's unsolved disappearance.
A session at the recent Auckland Writer's Festival entitled “Māori Speculative Fiction” featured a group of Māori writers who straddle the lines between the spiritual, the metaphysical and the mythological. I've heard another Māori writer of the genre say that it feels a bit strange for her to even give the genre this label – it's not really speculative, it's just the way we tell stories and the way we to see the world. That's a sentiment perhaps shared by the Native American authors above, and perhaps by most Native storytellers as well.
I love my characters like family – literally in many ways. Hana's father Eru carries my father's Māori name, Hana is an amalgram of many strong women in my life including my mother and my aunts and my partner Jane. Addison bears a resemblance that has been noticed more than once to my youngest daughter. My father died far too young, before he had the chance to meet my children, so it was a joy for me to metaphorically develop a relationship between father and one of his grandchildren in this new book. It's a strange job, crime writing – you give life and nurture characters you love, who you hope readers will fall in love with too, who are like family to you. Then you drag them to hell and back.
I have heard kōrero about discussions that took place among my ancestors when the missionaries came to our village in Rotorua in the 19th century.e century. Now that the whanau and the iwi were Christian, it was time to put aside the things that did not fit into this new image. It was time to leave matakite behind. But you can't decide to just put something that is in your whakapapa, in your DNA, that is part of who you are, into a box and put it away. The relationship between the physical world and the metaphysical world is not something spooky, nor is it “supernatural or supernatural”, as the Catholic priest Ronald Knox wrote in his book of rules. It's completely natural.
Return to Blood by Michael Bennett (Harper Collins, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.