Interview with Angela Savage - winner of the 2011 Scarlet Stiletto Awards

Angela Savage is the winner of this year’s Scarlet Stiletto Award for her story, ‘The Teardrop Tattoos’. Angela is the first winner of the big red shoe to have been a published crime writer. Her manuscript for her first book, Behind the Night Bazaar, won the 2004 Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and went on to be published and then shortlisted for the 2007 Ned Kelly Awards for Best First Book. Her second book, The Half-Child, was shortlisted for this year’s Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction.

The Sisters in Crime were delighted with Angela’s win and interviewed her about the impact of winning the big red shoe.

First off, congratulations on your win. You are no stranger to the winner’s podium at the Scarlet Stiletto Awards. You won 3rd prize at the Awards in 1998 for a story that went on to become the basis for your first book, Behind the Night Bazaar. Is this first time since that win that you've entered a story in the SSAs?

Yes. I’ve entered the Scarlet Stiletto Awards twice in 13 years, winning a prize both times. I guess I’m into quality not quantity.

What inspired you to enter this year's SSAs? Did you decide to enter and then write a story or did the story arrive needing somewhere to go?

A bit of both. I had a story idea that had been simmering on the backburner for several years, but it was a desire to enter the 2011 Scarlet Stiletto Awards that provided the incentive to get it down.

I had a crisis earlier this year, around the time I was applying for an Australia Council grant —unsuccessfully as it turns out—about whether I could call myself an ‘Australian writer’. My first Scarlet Stiletto story ‘The Mole on the Temple’ and both my novels, Behind the Night Bazaarand The Half-Child, are set in Thailand. I set myself the challenge of writing a story located much closer to home, and the Scarlet Stiletto Awards gave me an opportunity to take risks and try something new.

Your winning story is about a woman who wreaks her revenge on a local mother she believes responsible for her having to give up her dog, which is a restricted breed. What sparked the idea for your winning story? How long did it take you to write? The subsequent incidents with dangerous dogs must have really given you a shock.

The idea came from a chance encounter: I was dropping my daughter off at my local child care centre when I met a man with teardrop tattoos on his face and a brand new puppy that he told me was an American pit bull. My imagination ran away with me and I started to envisage what might happen if I was the sort of mother who would report someone like that for being in possession of a dangerous dog.

I wrote the story over 8 weeks. I know this because I email whatever I’m working on to myself as back-up. I started the story on 1 May and emailed myself the final version on 21 June. However, during that time I was also working four days a week in my day job and writing other stuff at night. I believe short stories benefit from short bursts of writing followed by periods of being allowed to percolate.

And yes, it was a shock when, a matter of weeks after submitting my story, four-year-old Ayen Chol was tragically killed in an attack by a pit bull terrier. It made then theme of my story topical, though the encounter that inspired it took place in 2007.

What was the impact of your 3rd place win in 1998? On your ambitions and on your writing?

Winning third prize in 1998 was enough to convince me that I was on to something. I hadn’t considered writing crime fiction before then, but the more I got into it, the more I realised it was the ideal genre for the themes I wanted to explore in my writing.

The six years I’d spent living and working in Southeast Asia in the 1990s made me aware of how much I was shaped by my culture of origin to a degree that’s only possible when you’re in an ethnic minority. And working cross culturally is a lot like being a detective. You’re always trying to figure out the big picture from a small set of clues, distinguish a reliable source from someone who’s trying to take you for a ride, searching for meanings lost in translation.

A third prize in the 1998 Scarlet Stiletto Awards was enough to convince me to try my hand at crime fiction, daring me to believe I might have something to offer the genre.

What do you think the impact will be this time around?

Winning the ‘red shoe’ clearly carries prestige. I’ve been invited to do some media, which is always welcome as it provides a means of attracting new readers to my body of work.

The biggest buzz so far has been receiving a message of congratulations from Val McDermid on Facebook!

What's next on your writing horizon?

I’m working on the second draft of the third book in the Jayne Keeney series, working title The Dying Beach, set in Thailand’s exquisite southern provinces of Krabi and Nakhon Si Thammarat. There are murders, environmental crimes, culture clashes and cobras. Hopefully I can bring it all together.

I’m also working on a short story for an anthology to be published in 2012 and exploring the possibility of doing a PhD in fiction in 2013. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to be Doc Savage.

I like the sound of Doc Savage. How does writing short stories compare with writing books? What are the different challenges?

You know how actors are always saying they want to direct? Well, this novelist and short story writer wishes she could write songs!

On the Scarlet Stiletto Awards night, I was interested to hear previous ‘big shoe’ winners Evelyn Tsitas, Liz Filleul, Amanda Wrangles and Eleanor Marney say that writing short stories works best for them as mothers.

Pound for pound, I find short stories harder and more time consuming to write than novels. Short stories and novels have different centres of gravity. Both need to hook readers in at the start, but the narratives have different arcs. Short stories are less forgiving. There’s no room for superfluous adjectives or adverbs. You have to maintain the pace or lose the reader’s interest.

With novels you can loiter a little while the nuances of the story and characters play out. The challenge is to make those plot ebbs as engaging as the flows.

Ultimately writing is a craft like any other. I enjoy working in different forms and believe I will get better with practice.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll even figure out how to tell a story in a song.

Thanks for your time, Angela, and best wishes for the next book.