JUNE 1 2019 LISTENER 49
and his fourth, Thirteen, was a fixture on
bestseller lists for months and appeared
on many best-of-the-year lists.
But it didn’t come easily. Or quickly.
“From the age of 19 to 20, I wrote ascreenplay, because I thought that would
be easier,” says Cavanagh. “I got an agent,
but didn’t get anything sold. I simply
gave up. I didn’t write anything after that
because I didn’t think I was cut out for
it. My mother was the only person who
ever encouraged me to write, and when
she died, I became depressed. I sought
counselling after a while, but I knew I
needed to do something else. In the end, I
decided to give writing another go.”
Enter the third person, a relative
stranger. “Eddie Flynn came to me in
a moment in court,” says Cavanagh,
an ex-bouncer who became a top
employment lawyer after mistakenly
signing up for a law degree (he was
hung-over and got in the wrong line at
university).
“I was cross-examining a witness and I
got him to admit he was lying. Afterwards,
I knew I’d tricked him into revealing the
lie. I’d conned him. Now, he was not a
truthful witness in the first place, but I
realised that a lot of the skills a good con
artist would have are also the same skills
used by expert trial lawyers: manipulation,
distraction, misdirection. And the basic
form of Eddie Flynn’s character came from
that.”
Flynn is the hero of Cavanagh’s first
four books, a con man turned razor-sharp
attorney who uses both toolboxes to
try to find some justice in a system that
doesn’t always provide it. A hustler with
a heart, Flynn is a flawed man, helming a
compelling series that blends courtroom
intrigue and high-stakes out-of-court
action.C
avanagh’s storytelling brings some
freshness to a subgenre made famous
by the likes of US heavyweights Scott
Turow and John Grisham.
In his latest novel, however, Cavanagh
has stepped away from the courtroom,
and Flynn. Twisted centres on mega-selling
mystery author JT LeBeau, whose own
identity is a mystery. When a woman
ends up in a coma after confronting her
husband, whom she suspects of beingthe deeply secretive writer (and hiding
his huge fortune from her), her husband
goes on the run and readers are taken on a
journey where nothing is what it seems.
Forewarning us to distrust all that we
read, Cavanagh still dazzles with his skill
and sleight of hand. Regardless of where
the truth may lie, Twisted is a compelling
book that’s much more than its high-
concept hook.
Writing it was a leap of faith, Cavanagh
says. “It was scary, but it was something I
had to do.
“I think I wanted to prove to myself
that I could write a novel that didn’t
take place in a courtroom. In the back of
my mind, I also had Michael Connelly,
John Connolly and Mark Billingham – all
writers I know and respect enormously.
All of them had done standalones early
in their careers, and they all learnt anddeveloped from writing those books. I
knew I had to try it, too.”
Cavanagh says he wrote the manuscript
for Twisted nervously, and even had his
wife and another friend read it when he
was only halfway through. “There’s a lot
of self-doubt when you’re a writer, no
matter how experienced you are. Some
of that is healthy, I suppose. Without the
structure of a trial to hang a story on, it
was a real struggle to write this book.”
Surprisingly, given the nature of Twisted,
Cavanagh says that he writes without a
detailed outline. He wanted to put his
own spin on classic thrillers with great
twists, which meant the process was
“technically very difficult” and required
plenty of help from his wife, agent and
editor. “I think we got
there in the end. The
challenge in this book
is that I was trying to
write twists, in a book
about twists. That was
what made it fun.” l
TWISTED, by Steve
Cavanagh (Orion,
$34.99)G
ET
TY(^) IM
AG
ES
“Without the structure of
a trial to hang a story on,
it was a real struggle to
write this book.”
Tr y ing to write
twists in a book
about twists:
Steve Cavanagh.