The West Australian - August 10th 2002 (Australia)
PR, Buddha and Crime
Crime fiction with a dark spin is the stock-in-trade of a Perth based author.
When
Kinky Friedman entered the crime-fiction market - the
Sam Spade of Texas, the only country-music singing,
Jewish gumshoe who writes stories about a PI called
Kinky Friedman - it seemed unlikely there was an original
niche left in the art form.
Well, another one has been carved out by Perth-based David Michie, a former public relations operative - and Buddhist - who worked in London for 10 years.
A Buddhist writer of mysteries set against the sometimes murky world of PR? Yes, indeed. Critics internationally have dubbed Michie's yarns "PR thrillers".
But isn't the idea of a Buddhist crime writer egregious?
"On the contrary," he explains on his web site. "One of the great attractions of Buddhism for me is its unflinching approach to reality, no matter how unappealing that reality may be. "It's also the case that both public relations and Buddhism are concerned with the distinction between appearance and reality."
In person, the 40-year-old Zimbabwe-born Michie is a dapper and articulate promoter of his art. As might be expected of someone with his background, he is a good communicator, personable, interested.
The author of four PR thrillers, Michie has also written The Invisible Persuaders, a controversial expose of the PR industry in the UK. In his work there he saw the impact and reach of spin-doctoring from the inside.
Although he named names and copped some flak from the practitioners, Michie says the more reputable PR firms, and the professional body representing the industry, were only too happy to see shonky practices exposed.
"The PR and media shenanigans I write about are, for the most part, real," he says. "Whether it's something as trivial as photo copying newspaper coverage as 110 per cent, to make clients think they filled more space than they did, or as serious as circulating negative, but non-attributable stories about corporate enemies, these things really do go on."
So Michie has plenty of raw fodder for his plots. And given that so much of modern life is connected to public relations - government, industry, defence, education, entertainment - it is not likely that he will exhaust the PR thriller's viability in the near future.
The plot of his latest offering came from a source he often taps. "I get a lot of ideas wallowing on the sofa reading newspaper feature articles," Michie explains.
"And I was reading yet another one about the ageing issue. The fact is that no one really understands what causes ageing. And there are scientists all over the world beavering away to produce some elixir vitae."
As a result of pondering the article, Michie developed Expiry Date, a story concerning a biotech company that develops a "cure" for ageing. They test it on a boy suffering from progeria (a disease which rapidly ages the body such that a child of seven suffering from it has the physiology of a 70 year old).
"There is a disappearance in the very first chapter," Michie explains. The body of a boy suffering progeria is found washed up on a river-bank in England. His death might not have been accidental.
The plot of Michie's latest offering came from a source he often taps. "I get a lot of ideas wallowing on the sofa reading newspaper feature articles".
On the other side of the Atlantic, a dramatic breakthrough in gene therapy has been made. Some powerful interests are threatened, not least of them the multi-billion dollar health insurance industry. But what is the connection between the dead boy and the gene development?
The plot sounds intriguing. And PR has a central role to play as the mystery deepens. "There's always a big slab of public relations in anything I write. It's my background," Michie says. "In this context it is public relations as it applies to biotech companies. As I write in the cover-blurb, biotech is as much about spin as it is about science.
"Biotech companies sell what they call "blue sky" - the hope that their product will be the silver bullet that will cure obesity with no side effects, or that will stop prostate cancer, or whatever. So you have all these corporate communications people trying to put across as fact that their company is on the 'brink' of discovering something, trying to sustain share prices on the back of it. So spin comprises a large part of it."
Michie says his literary influences are various. "I have catholic reading tastes. My favourite living author is Dominic Dunn. But he's only written four books and most people have never read them. He covered the O.J Simpson trial. I'd describe him as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the current decade. He knows all the secrets of the rich and famous in Los Angeles and New York".
"In terms of the overall thriller genre, (my influences are) the old standards, the Alistair MacLeans, the Ian Flemings. But I wouldn't say I've tried to mimic anybody."
The themes Michie has tackled so far in his books include child slavery, animal testing, biotechnology and genetic engineering. They all have strong contemporary resonances. Is this an indication of the audience he is seeking to reach?
"To a certain extent I guess I'm targeting Generation Xers," he says. "I think they have more strongly held views and are more interested in expressing them than are the baby boomers."
But the political and social issues that interest Michie are really meant to provide background and context to what are essentially crime thrillers written to entertain.
"If you want to learn about genetic engineering, my book is bot the place to learn it," he says wryly.
By Rod Moran