The Scoop
On a crisp April morning in 2011, at a café in Canberra’s inner south, Chris and Steve had a chance meeting and began exploring the idea of combining forces to write a novel. A few days later, at the same café, they began plotting the Marmalade Files on a blank sheet of butcher’s paper.
When the idea of a satirical political thriller, set in Canberra and featuring newshound Harry Dunkley, was put to HarperCollins’ publishing dynamo Shona Martyn, the two journalists were told to send in a half-dozen draft chapters and a synopsis. A few weeks later, on the evening of the Federal Budget, they received a phone call from publisher Jeanne Ryckmans. “We’d like to publish your novel, and a second,” she told the boys, which was exciting and daunting, given they’d barely written a quarter of the first.
Quickly they discovered that crafting a fictional thriller meant plundering a vast reservoir of unprintable stories and vignettes, collected during their combined forty years working in the Canberra press gallery.
They also learned the vagaries of the law as it applies to fiction. Let’s just say several of their characters required radical surgery to satisfy HarperCollins’ gun barrister.
Published in August 2012, the Marmalade Files is the first in the Secret City trilogy and charts the rise of China and the demise of mainstream journalism. It also features two embarrassing sex scenes, mercilessly lampooned by the ABC’s Annabel Crabb when she launched the novel on a boozy weeknight at the National Press Club.
The Plot
When veteran reporter Harry Dunkley is slipped a compromising 20-year-old photo of Defence Minister Bruce Paxton, it sets off a deadly chain of events. The Toohey Government, Labor to its bootstraps, is in deep trouble with former Prime Minister cum Foreign Minister, Catriona Bailey, plotting her vengeful comeback. That is until she has a stroke on Lateline. Bailey is placed on life support, her heart maintained by a single thought. Revenge. Dunkley goes in search of Chinese spies at the heart of Australia’s political machinery. But along the way he’ll learn the harsh reality of seeking out the truth in the minefield that is national politics.
DETAILS
Title: The Marmalade Files
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Publication Date: 01/08/2012
Pages: 322
ISBN: 9780732294748
BISAC1: Fiction / Political
