Black teeth by Zane Lovitt: 16 March, 2017

"Lovitt was the Ned Kelly Award-winning author of the collection The Midnight Promise, and this full-length novel is another testament to his skills as a storyteller. The voice of Jason, an ungainly tech-head who would righteously mock me in online forums for using the phrase ‘tech-head’, is clear and true: a man shrouded in anxiety and embedded in the world of his laptop, infrequently surfacing under a new identity to face the world and stitch someone up." – Fiona Hardy

Zane Lovitt was a documentary filmmaker before turning his hand to crime fiction. His debut novel, The midnight promise, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, and led to Zane being named one of the Best Young Novelists of 2013 by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Zane will join us for a Q&A on Thursday, 9 March between 8 and 9pm. Please leave any questions you have below. (And discuss his writing at your leisure!)

Want to buy Black teeth? Receive 10% off when purchasing it from Readings at State Library Victoria. To receive the discount online, enter the promo code BOOKCLUB in the promo code box during online checkout. To receive the discount at our State Library bookshop, simply mention the Thursday night book club at the counter.

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Hi Zane,

What in particular attracted you to the tech and privacy world? Does it offer anything particularly thrilling, for you as a writer, for the crime genre?

Thanks!

Hey there, Cory. Thanks for the question!

The tech and privacy world began as the solution to a problem that a lot of genre writers face, which is how to make something old new again. The war on cliche is a big deal for any author, but especially someone working in the thriller genre, and I wanted to create a protagonist-investigator different to any I'd seen before. The tech and privacy world is the world of Jason Ginaff, who lives online more willingly than in the real world, who rarely leaves the house, who enjoys the variety of identities he can inhabit online and applies that same thinking to the real world, where he uses a variety of names/identities to wring information out of people.

And the privacy stuff was interesting as a background for Jason, because he's obsessed with privacy and keeping himself secret, while his job is to undermine the privacy that other people should be enjoying in the online world. I liked that conflict. It reminded me of Harry Caul in The Conversation - a surveillance expert who doesn't know how to deal with real people, and is terrified of getting spied on.

So that presented itself as a way of writing an investigator protagonist in a new and interesting way, a hyper-updated version of Harry Caul, with an entirely new plot to thrust him into...

cheers
z