Following the success of Outback in 2022 and Paradise last year, Australian author Patricia Wolf is set to continue her DS Walker series with Opal, at the end of September 2024. This time, we’ll be visiting the opal fields of Queensland – a setting for real-life skulduggery and swindling which will make an ideal home for a story that sees members of Lucas Walker’s family caught up in the gemstone trade in ways he wishes they weren’t. Queensland is home territory for Patricia, who left to travel the world, became a writer in London, then lived in Lisbon before arriving in Berlin, where she’s now based. We decided to find out more about the latest novel and this popular series…
What will crime fiction lovers love about Opal?
I hope they’ll find the plot intriguing. I think it has some interesting twists and turns. The book opens with Walker and his little sister Grace going out bush to pick up their cousin Blair, who has been working in an opal mine. But when they try to leave, they find the river has flooded, and they’re completely cut off. Then the murders start… and Walker and his family are trapped, with a killer in their midst. There’s a whole new cast of characters to get to know and the setting is very isolated but beautiful. I hope readers will enjoy being immersed in the landscape and the quirks of the opal mining community.
And why did you decide to write crime novels set in Northern Queensland?
Whenever I come home, the Outback calls to me. I love the vastness of it, the wide horizons, the huge sky, the landscape and the people who live there – they’re laid back, genuine and usually quite interesting characters. It’s a singular place and one of the world’s truly ancient environments. I’d tried my hand at writing novels before, but they’d never felt quite right. Then, in 2019, I took a long road trip around north-west Queensland and DS Lucas Walker just came to me. I’d spend four or five hours a day in the car, and it felt like Lucas was sitting in the passenger seat, telling me his story while I drove along those long empty roads. And I realised that when I wrote about home, the words came easily. I love this part of the country, and I feel like the country speaks to me.
Who is Lucas Walker and where’s he at in this novel?
Lucas Walker is a detective sergeant with the Australian Federal Police. He’s been working undercover in the organised crime division for almost a decade, but his identity has been leaked. No longer able to work his undercover role, he’s stuck on desk duty. His old nemesis, Stefan Markovich, the leader of the Vandals motorcycle gang, still eludes capture. He’s also starting to realise that he gives so much of himself to work that it’s affecting his personal relationships.
It has a family angle this time with his sister and cousin. Tell us more about Grace, Blair and the family dynamic with Lucas?
Family is really important to Lucas. In Outback, when we first meet him, he’s spending some time with his beloved grandma who is terminally ill. His grandma played a big part in raising him and his cousin Blair, so they’re more like brothers than just cousins. Grace is his half-sister. She’s 15 years younger, and Lucas, very protective by nature, is especially protective of his little sister.
What was it that interested you about the opal fields?
Outback Queensland definitely has a wild-west vibe to it. I grew up in a mining town, so I’ve always been interested in the industry. You also need to be a certain kind of person to mine for opal: a bit of a gambler, a hard worker, a dreamer. All of that really appealed to me from a novelist’s perspective: the romance of it, the excitement of finding a stone that changes your life and the shattering disappointment of failure.
Who or what are Lucas, Grace and Blair up against in Opal?
Lucas, Grace and Blair are very much the outsiders in this book. They’re only visiting this small town – they’re not locals, they don’t belong. That means they have few allies when the bodies start piling up. Even the Queensland police detective sent to work the case proves to be somewhat of an antagonist. And some of the locals don’t trust Walker or the opal miners and want to take the law into their own hands by setting up armed patrols. The whole town is fearful and simmering on the edge of violence.
What are some of the themes you wanted to tackle in the novel and why did you find them interesting?
I was keen to explore isolation and how different people respond to it. So many of us live in cities these days and with the internet we’re rarely alone. The Outback is different. The scale of it – I love it, but it also blows my mind every time I go back. Out bush, there’s a genuine sense that if something happens, you’re largely on your own. With Opal, I wanted to explore how different people react to isolation: some people crave it, others use it to hide, and some people can’t wait to leave. And, from a crime perspective, isolation offers opportunity, too.
What are you reading at the moment, and what other crime authors / books do you take inspiration from?
Recently I read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which is not crime fiction, but is a lyrical, fantastical, poetic novel and so beautifully written. On the crime front, I really enjoyed Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle – brilliantly evocative of life in 1950s Harlem and written from the perspective of a small-time criminal and his cohorts. I don’t read much Aussie crime while I’m working on a book as I find it distracting, but I have When One of Us Hurts by Monica Vuu on my list to read when I finish and will reread Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore again, too. It’s my favourite Aussie crime novel and it always inspires me to work harder on my use of language, dialogue and description.
What’s next for Patricia Wolf?
I’m working on book four in the series at the moment. It will be set in Berlin, where Lucas is on the trail of Stefan Markovich, the Vandals bikie. He also takes the chance to reconnect with Barbara, for whom he has feelings that he hasn’t fully acknowledged. There’ll be a book five, too, set in Tasmania.
I love that there’s such a large and growing cohort of Aussie crime writers making waves internationally. When Outback was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger in 2023, three of the six shortlisted authors and the winner, Hayley Scrivenor’s Dirt Town, were by Australian women writers. For a long time the cold bleak Scandinavian landscape was the main scene of crime, and it’s so exciting that the heat of Aussie noir is now considered as a real competitor.
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