Books: Bonding over bloodshed

By Craig Sisterson - New Zealand Herald - Canvas magazine

Award-winning Auckland writers Linda Olsson and Thomas Sainsbury tell Craig Sisterson why they’re collaborating on a thriller trilogy.

Linda Olsson and Thomas Sainsbury blend big issues with personal storylines in their crime series. Photo / Kathrin Simon

We meet where they killed a man. Budding writer Brent Taylor was working late at the University of Auckland library when he was attacked, his skull bouncing and vertebrae popping as he tumbled down the stairs.

Linda Olsson and Thomas Sainsbury smile widely as they shake my hand. They may not have personally shovelled the troubled young man's body over the guardrail, but they planned his death. And he won't be their final murder; they're just getting started with the debut of their first thriller together, Something Is Rotten.

"Linda, I really think we should do something. Let's write a thriller." Sainsbury was living in Olsson's basement when he spoke those words a few years ago, the pair having met while they were taking Witi Ihimaera and Stephanie Johnson's creative writing programme at the University of Auckland.
Despite a shared love for Scandinavian thrillers, it seems an odd literary coupling: A Matamata-raised scribe in his early 30s who has won awards for subversive, comic tales for stage and screen (Sunday Roast, Super City) and a Swedish ex-financier in her 60s whose poignant novels of past secrets, love and unlikely friendships (Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs, Sonata For Miriam) have been published in 18 countries and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Europe.
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Footnote: The Bookman read Something is Rotten earlier this week. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and am glad to know that is the first in The Matakana Trilogy. Bring on  # 2 I say !