Article from:  Samela Harris November 17, 2007
SHE was born just three weeks after the Beaumont children vanished from Adelaide's Glenelg Beach in 1966. The drama, tragedy and mystery of that unsolved crime were to shadow her years through a move from Adelaide to Darwin, and another move to Canberra with her family. Then, on through medical school and out into general practice. It was to surface as the doctor mellowed into her 30s. She underwent a dramatic career change, emerging on the Australian literary landscape as crime writer Kathryn Fox. Her first novel won the 2005 Davitt award for best crime novel. Her second was a bestseller released around the world and suddenly, thanks to her medical background, she was being hailed as "the new Patricia Cornwell". Fox now lives in Sydney. We don't know her true identity. She guards her born name and private life jealously. We will not be talking about them. Crime, medicine, humanity . . . these are the Fox subjects, those which fill her working days. Those days no longer feature the practice of medicine. After 12 years working as a GP, she had had what she calls "the full cup". "When the cup is full, it is time to give up," she says. Now writing is the full-time job and no one could be happier. Kathryn Fox may write of the seamy side of life. She may create irascible, jaundiced detectives and depraved, psychopathic villains. But, almost as a tonic to these creative preoccupations, she emerges as an effusively happy, humorous, outgoing soul. "It was a really big thrill for me being accepted by the Crime Writers Association of Australia," she declares. "I might write thrillers but that was the best thrill for me." She has just had her third thriller published, Skin and Bone, which has been chosen as The Big Book Club's selection for November. This new book, which explores a murdered Sydney mother, a missing baby and a mysterious personal trainer, centres not on the forensic physician Dr Anya Crichton, who starred in the other Fox books, but on a tough and bitter detective, Kate Farrer, and her new partner, a family man of a detective who is as handy with a nappy as he is with arson clues. Fox has taken particular pleasure in developing these ill-paired characters, especially the prickly Kate. "I wanted to feature a different heroine," she says. "Kate was in Malicious Intent, though. She is a member of my ensemble cast. I liked the idea of a character ensemble, where they can interact, come into contact with one another in different books. "And I wanted to explore Kate's back story, to find out why she was so pugnacious. I didn't like her at first." She pauses to reflect. "Of course, in reality, one is not going to like everybody and everybody is not going to like you. I've discovered this with readers." Internet feedback, it seems, is sometimes hard to take. Fox calls them the "armchair critics" who, liberated by anonymity, ping off gratuitous bursts of email venom. Some crime readers are fixed in their tastes, obsessively loyal to their favourite writers . . . or so Fox explains. It is clear she feels stung. But she is not striving to emulate anyone and, possessed of a generous spirit, feels no territorial imperative on the creative scene. She believes in a more-the-merrier of crime fiction, a world which encompasses Patricia Cornwell, P.D. James, Sara Paretsky – and Kathryn Fox. After all, it takes a year to write a good crime novel. So readers need interim supplies. "The more drops, the bigger the ocean, I like to think," she says. She insists that she doesn't write her books in a study. "It is an office, because it is work," she says. Yet work is also her joy. She thrives on researching and writing, finding it less emotionally draining than the daily interactions of a GP. Fox says she sets herself three domestic tasks to get out of the way each morning before she settles into her office where, amid her reference books on corollary sciences such as forensic entomology and polynology (the study of pollen), she gets down to the cogitations of crime. "The logical progressions of crime- solving are not so different from medicine," she says. "In medicine you are presented with a situation. You are told facts and then you examine and investigate and come to a conclusion. Police in theory do the same thing. If you find that you are wrong, you go back and do the same thing and see if your premise was wrong the first time. "So I don't see the two as that separate, although readers do. They see a difference in writing being the arts, and medicine being a science. "But medicine is as much art as science – the way you deal with people, the way you interpret . . . "Often it is what people don't say that is what is crucial in diagnosis. And police should have the same radar out," she says. It is never crime alone that features in a Fox novel. She lets loose other strands of the doctor's world – contemplations on domestic violence, on the politics of de-institutionalisation, social pressures which impact on crime, people who slip through the cracks of the system. "For instance, when Kate in Skin and Bone spots some photos of children on a suspect's table, she thinks of pedophilia but, Oliver, her partner, sees it differently because he is a father. And we can discuss the problems that fathers now have in displaying affection with their children. "How easily affection can be accused of being inappropriate. The frustration of men today . . . even a woman with a black eye evokes suspicion. People look away. I fell on wet tiles and got a black eye and this happened to me. It is the ease by which people may be accused." So it is that Kathryn Fox, beyond the solving of the violent crimes of her books of fiction, seeks out justice for the real world, too. Read an interview with Kathryn Fox on ABC's Articulate site:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/articulate/200605/s1640373.htm
Read an article Kathryn wrote for Shots Magazine at http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/features/2007/k_fox/k_fox.html
Listen to Kathryn interviewed on BBC Women's Hour at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2005_48_fri_03.shtml
Kathryn Fox in conversation with Richard Fidler on ABC radio at http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/conversations/stories/s1635249.htm?nsw
The Weekend Australian Magazine 
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