Peter Morris

I’d wanted to write a novel since I was in my twenties, but for most of my life I never really believed I could do it. There was always work, family and everything else that gets in the way, and writing a book remained one of those things I thought I might do ‘one day’. When I reached my sixties, I realised that if I was ever going to do it, ‘one day’ had probably arrived. The real inspiration for *The Long Grass* came from two places. The first was a childhood friend of mine who had passed away a few years earlier. He’d had an incredibly difficult life and I wanted, in some small way, to pay tribute to him. He became part of the inspiration for one of the novel’s most important characters. The other inspiration was Far North Queensland. I spent time in Weipa in the mid-1980s, when the novel is set, and it was an extraordinary place. It was remote, isolated and sometimes pretty wild, and I witnessed some things up there that stayed with me for the next forty years. Eventually those two things came together. I began imagining a murder mystery in which the victims weren’t necessarily innocent, and the killer wasn’t simply a monster. I wanted to explore what might drive someone to kill, and whether understanding why they did it could change the way we felt about them. Once I had that idea, I finally had the story I’d been waiting all those years to write.

The Long Grass is a crime novel set in Far North Queensland in 1985, and the story is told in three parts. It begins in the remote mining town of Weipa, where three men sleeping rough in the long grass near a local beach are murdered in three very different ways. A team of detectives is flown up from Brisbane to investigate and they quickly discover that Weipa is a very different world from the city they have left behind. The investigation takes them from Weipa to Cairns and eventually back to Brisbane. Along the way we get to know the detectives themselves, particularly Detective Sergeant Annette Mollison, who became a much more important character as I was writing her than I originally intended. I became very fond of Annette, and judging by the feedback I've received from readers, quite a few of them did too. She'll return in my next novel. But The Long Grass changes considerably in its second part. Once the detectives have worked out who committed the murders, the perspective shifts and we begin hearing the killer's story in his own voice. We go back through his life, his childhood and the trauma that shaped him, and begin to understand not just how he became a killer, but why he believes he had to do what he did. In many ways, the murder investigation in the first part of the novel is the vehicle that takes us to that story. What begins as a question of who killed these men? gradually becomes a much more difficult question: if we understand why someone became a killer, does that change how we judge them? The final part brings the detective and the killer together again in the Noosa Everglades, where those two sides of the story finally collide.