Frantic recently won the Sisters In Crime Davitt award for best crime novel by an Australian woman in 2007. Katherine says "It was a great thrill to win and to attend the awards dinner in Melbourne". On the night, however, the expression 'you can take the medic out of the job but never out of the medic' proved itself true when a dinner guest staggered from the bathroom calling for help and Katherine had to provide some emergency care in the stairwell. A retired nurse came to help in time for Katherine to make it back to the stage to be presented with her award. As a very senior police officer, Judge Liz Gaynor and forensic pathologist Dr Shelley Robertson were also in attendance, it was commented later that if the young woman had been unfortunate enough to not survive her episode, the autopsy, investigation and legal proceedings could have been undertaken without anyone leaving the room.
Says Katherine:
My books are crime thrillers, part of a series where each book features a different paramedic whose life spirals into danger alongside Sydney police detective Ella Marconi who lands the job of sorting out the mess.
In 'Frantic', now out in the UK, so much trouble begins for paramedic Sophie Phillips early in the story when she’s called to a woman in labour. With the birth of her own baby with all its tears and joy still fresh in her mind, she’s pleased to be going to the case, in contrast with her work partner Mick, who, like the majority of paramedics, dreads birth calls because so much can go wrong. Soon, Sophie and Mick are struggling with the situation when the baby is born unconscious and not breathing, then they can’t stop the mother’s haemorrhage. Later at the hospital Sophie thinks "... this job, sometimes … you felt capable of the work, powerful even in your capacity to save lives, and then the universe showed you exactly who was boss."
While I never went to a case like that, thank goodness - all the births I went to resulted in healthy babies - I was able to use the anxieties I felt and the outcomes I worried about to throw challenges at my characters. And because when writing crime novels, a good rule of thumb is to decide the worst possible moment to make things worse for the characters and then try to make them even worse again, it’s not long before I have Sophie’s own life turn into a disaster when her husband is shot and their baby kidnapped.
In 'The Darkest Hour', published this year in Australia and next year in the UK, it's another paramedic, Lauren Yates, whose life is thrown into turmoil when she finds a murdered man and his killer in an inner-city alley. This never happened to me either - again, thank goodness - but I've spent more than my share of time out and about late at night, in alleys, and around dead bodies. This is the good thing about using real life experiences in fiction: it's this level of fine detail that can really bring a scene to life for the reader. Being able to describe what it feels like to roar down a city street in an ambulance with lights and siren going when you've actually been there and you know what that siren sounds like inside the cabin, you know what paramedics talk about on the way to a case, gives the work that unmistakable ring of truth.
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