Joanna Jenkins on why Potts Point was the perfect setting for a murder mystery
Read an piece penned by Bad Neighbours author Joanna Jenkins.
My Granny lived on Edgecliff Road Woollahra in an art deco building. I spent my childhood visiting her from my parents’ rundown farm in Queensland, a transition from country to city and from poverty to riches. My child’s way of understanding the gulf was to tell myself that everyone in Sydney lived as she did.
A dark staircase hushed with carpet wound up the centre of the building. We entered Granny’s home through a red cedar door on the stairs into a flat bathed in light. I day dreamed at the windows, watching the people in the houses below, wondering about their lives.
If Ruth Dawson was going to live in Sydney (and she spent my first two books banging on about how she was going back there where she belonged), she was going to live in Granny’s flat.
But in order to make this novel about inequality work, the building needed to contain all the strata of society, from homeless person to rich banker, and the people in the middle. Woollahra—a very beautiful monotone—wouldn’t cut it.
Granny and I caught the train from Edgecliff Station to the city, and King’s Cross was the exotic, dangerous stop on the way, thick with grime, shady characters, and people down on their luck. Granny forbade us from getting off the train before Martin Place.
When I was older, and could evade Granny’s vigilant scrutiny, I ventured down to the Coca Cola sign and the Cross. The working girls looked young and cold (there was always a westerly blowing), drowning their desperation in the glaze of heroin. It was sad, and tawdry, and exciting.
Along Victoria Street, some of the lovely terrace houses were protected with floor to ceiling grills.
Potts Point has gentrified now. What interested me was the impact gentrification had on the people who lived there. If they had acquired a flat in the seventies, when proximity to crime made real estate near the Cross cheap, they would be hanging on desperately trying to keep up with the body corporate fees. Some would sink, unable to afford it.
I wanted to portray the newest kind of rich, using money and chutzpah to buy a harbour view, obsessed with status and the acquisition of stuff, objects which signify wealth and the display of it.
So I moved Granny’s flat down the hill to Potts Point—easy enough to do with words.
I was lucky to have guided walking tours by Espie Dods, architect. Together we examined the laneways and the buildings. He told me why the buildings were no more than eight stories (the hydraulic lifts could not go higher), why they had lightwells, showed me the patterns in the bricks. The buildings and the streets were rich in a storied past: the Regis, the yellow house on MacLeay Street, and its history of artists, the Sebel town house, the poo on sticks sculpture overlooking William Street.
He gave me ‘Darlinghurst Nights’ Kenneth Slessor’s poems about the shop girls who sat at the windows of their bedsits dreaming of a better future.
Find the right setting and the characters create themselves. Find the right building, and you have a plot.
Bad Neighbours by Joanna Jenkins releases August 4.
Bad Neighbours
by Joanna Jenkins
From the bestselling author of How to Kill a Client and The Bluff comes a page-turning thriller of fraud and lies, murder and greed.
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