Author Interview: Dave Warner

Dave Warner is the author of Sound Mind Dead Body, one of our current book club reads. He took some time to answer a few questions for us, and you can get to know more about Dave (and his characters) right here:

What do you know now that you didn’t before you began your book?

My research into 1929 gave me some fascinating insights into the time. For example, nothing much has changed in Afghanistan. When the ruling prince tried to westernise the country by making an edict that men should wear pants, fundamentalist mullahs reacted to such an extent that he was eventually overthrown. 

I also learned that in 1929, Trotsky was writing articles from Constantinople for the New York Times. It was an amazing era with a looming depression and world power constantly shifting.

What aspect of your book do you think will generate the most book club conversation?

Now that is something I wish I knew. I hope that book clubs who are devotees of Golden Age Whodunnits will reference this work with some Agatha Christie classics, and that word of mouth will be that if you like Orient Express, A Mysterious Affair at Styles, etc., then you’ll enjoy ‘Sound Mind Dead Body.

Which of your characters would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?

No real spoiler to say that Lady Julia Pedhurst, who winds up a victim, might be less than good company with her acerbic tone.

Which of your characters would you like to invite to a dinner party?

Much as I would love to hear Fred Willets account of being an aviator in the First World War and then a policeman on the WA Goldfields, I think I’d like to invite Prudence Meadows, the very smart young pharmacist.

I’d like to know what it was like being a young single woman with academic qualifications looking for a partner just after the war had killed off many of the eligible males, and how she enjoyed or disliked running her business in a small town.

Do you have a favourite novel?

Not really, although in the crime genre my thriller fave is The Silence of the Lambs, my Whodunnit fave is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, my slice of humour/great dialogue fave is Get Shorty, and my character-detective with plot fave is Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked.

What is the book you have read more often?

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow because it’s so dense I have to keep re-reading to try to understand any of it. I’ve read The Tin Drum a few times and did understand that!

What is it about Agatha Christie and novels from the Golden Age of Crime that appeal to you so much?

With Agatha in particular, I think that her best works have at their heart an ingenious premise (eg, What if all the suspects did it? Or What if the killer killed three people to hide the fact that they were only after one?) This premise is then teased out with a complex and satisfying plot that can be solved if the reader really knows the writer’s tricks. 

There is an engaging detective who is not at all what you might assume (not a handsome, rugged action man), and the era is one that has more and more appeal in the days of too-fast, overcrowded 2026. I’d love to be on a Cook’s tour in a luxury steamer, or a guest at a manor on the Cornish coast, or visiting countries at a time when there were no fast-food international restaurants or coffee houses.

Do you think these Golden Age mysteries are a good training manual for a crime writer today?

Absolutely. The best tricks of Agatha and other authors of this era are still being used in current TV shows. There is very little that is ‘new’, and these authors were at the pinnacle of a highly popular and competitive industry. You’d be mad to ignore them. 

Is it true that Sound Mind Dead Body began its life as a murder mystery game for your friends to play?

Not quite. Its origin came in 1984 when I was on tour with my band. I’d got my tour manager and mate David Zampatti into reading Agatha Christie novels, and after a hard 3 AM rock gig, next arvo we’d be reading our books in the quiet of the hotel room, or discussing them.

It was at the Prince of Wales in Melbourne – the bastion of punk – that I suggested to David it would be great to write an Agatha type play where the action happened in and around the audience, like in the rooms of the manor house. He suggested that it should play out over a weekend, and we came up with the idea of writing a play and staging it over a weekend.

I wrote the play, we assembled the cast, and we performed it for the first time in July 1984 at Cave’s House, Yallingup, WA. That play forms the basis of ‘Sound Mind Dead Body’, and Harcroft Manor is pretty much Cave’s House transported to Devon.

Do you enjoy writing villains? Which of all your bad guys would you like most to have a good, long bus ride with?

I do like writing criminals who aren’t all bad. In my EXXXpresso series, there are a number of slightly crooked characters (and some really bad ones) who are fun to write, so I suppose I’d like to ride with someone like Zeen from EXXXpresso, who is sexy and dangerous but who likely won’t kill me if I fall asleep.

How do you choose what book you are going to write next? (You seem to have an endless supply of ideas!)

Usually, as you say, I have a line of ideas, half-formed, barely formed, or developed. I just take the next one on the line, but avoid, if I can, writing two of the same series in succession. Sometimes I just get so excited by an idea that I want to get into it straight away. Overall, I try to mix it up for my own pleasure and hope the reader doesn’t mind the potpourri of crime genres I delve into.

Is it fun to write about music and your characters’ musical tastes in your fiction?

For the first novel, City of Light, it was fun to locate my own band and that of my musical cohorts in the story because it was right in that era. And I often find that there is some musical inspiration to the novel. 

River of Salt was like that, and my Dan Clement Kimberley series tries to capture the tone of my song ‘Waiting for the Cyclone.’ Summer of Blood was so much fun because the research took me into my favourite musical era of psychedelic San Francisco. But I try not to overdo it. I get a bit annoyed with authors who make their detectives devotees of ‘cool jazz’ or Brit 70s New Wave because they think it makes them edgy. 

Read more about Sound Mind Dead Body.