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WORK TITLE: Only Killers and Thieves
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1978
WEBSITE:
CITY: Norwich
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
Also has Australian citizenship
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2018022632 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018022632 |
| HEADING: | Howarth, Paul, 1978- |
| 000 | 00993cz a2200217n 450 |
| 001 | 10679833 |
| 005 | 20180406073232.0 |
| 008 | 180221n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2018022632 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca11206963 |
| 040 | __ |a NcGU |b eng |e rda |c NcGU |d NcGU |d HU |
| 046 | __ |f 1978 |2 edtf |
| 100 | 1_ |a Howarth, Paul, |d 1978- |
| 370 | __ |a Great Britain |c Australia |e Norwich (England) |f Melbourne (Vic.) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Fiction |2 lcsh |
| 373 | __ |a University of East Anglia |2 naf |
| 374 | __ |a Authors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a Males |2 lcdgt |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Only killers and thieves, 2018: |b title page (Paul Howarth) about the author (born and grew up in Great Britain before moving to Melbourne, Australia; has dual citizenship; now lives in Norwich, England; MA in 2015 from the University of East Anglia Creative Writing Program) |
| 670 | __ |a Email from the author’s agent, February 21, 2018: |b (Paul Howarth; birth year 1978, confirmed that Only killers and thieves is his first book) |
PERSONAL
Born 1978, in Great Britain.
EDUCATION:University of East Anglia, M.A., 2015.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and short-story writer.
AWARDS:Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship, University of East Anglia.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in Great Britain, Paul Howarth moved to Melbourne, Australia in his late twenties. Howarth, who lived in Australia for six years, gained dual citizenship before returning to the United Kingdom with his family. He received a master’s degree in creative writing in one of the most prestigious courses of its kind in the United Kingdom. Howarth is a short story writer and novelist. In his debut novel, Only Killers and Thieves, Howarth sets his tale in 1880s colonial Australia in a story where two brothers are caught up in a web of revenge and survival. In the process of telling their coming-of-age story, Howarth also delves into how the colonization of Australia impacted the native aboriginal population.
The impetus for writing Only Killers and Thieves came from Howarth’s reading about Australia’s history. “I was interested to learn about settlement, beyond the familiar story of it once having been a British penal colony, and soon realized that the history of Australia was as rich and bloody as those tales of the American West so familiar from fiction and film,” Howarth Turner told Alyson Turner for the American Booksellers Association website. Howarth built on this knowledge via subsequent research connected with the Queensland Native Police. He also studied period newspapers and other publications, including The Secret War by Jonathan Richards.
Only Killers and Thieves takes place in 1885 during a horrendous drought. The McBride family’s land cannot support enough feed for the cattle, which are starving. Finally, the rains arrive, giving the family new hope. Fourteen-year-old Tommy and Sixteen-year-old Billy are the sons of Ned McBride, whose efforts to survive and prosper are hindered by John Sullivan, a land baron who keeps an iron grip on the region. Sullivan is a squatter who brought hard times on the McBrides by cutting off their water supply, resulting in a starving livestock. Helping Sullivan is Inspector Edmund Noone, who overseas the Native Mounted Police, which was responsible for genocide of Australia’s aborigines ostensibly to protect the white interlopers’ land.
One day, Tommy and Billy are on their way home after swimming at a water hole a recent downpour filled. Before they make it home, however, they come across a tragedy, a hanging that increases racial tensions. Shortly afterward, their parents are murdered and younger sister is seriously wounded. She later dies. Billy and Tommy suspect that the murderer is their family’s aboriginal stockman, Joseph. The brothers end up joining in with Sullivan and Noone as they form a posse to hunt down Joseph. The novel follows the posse and the brothers as they pursue Joseph. However, the murderous intent of the posse is soon revealed as they seek revenge on any aborigines that cross their path.
Meanwhile Tommy and Billy start to drift apart. “Howarth skillfully uses the fraying relationship between the … brothers … to illustrate the moral issues at the heart of his story,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. Tommy slowly becomes appalled by the havoc and death caused by the posse. Billy, however, has wholeheartedly committed to the evil Sullivan’s hatred of the aborigines. In fact, it is Billy who makes up evidence that leads the posse to decimate Joseph’s entire tribe. At one point, Tommy becomes attached to an aboriginal woman whose family is killed by the posse.
“While this book has a historical point to make, it also works as a suspenseful mystery and a resonant bildungsroman,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. G. Robert Frazier, writing for BookPage Online, remarked: “Howarth manages to infuse the old tropes with a depth of emotion and moral complication that will stay with readers long after closing the book.” Writing for the Washington Post Online, Mark Athitakis felt that Howarth was simplistic at times in his approach to describing the bigotry in the novel. Nevertheless, Athitakis went on to write: “Howarth is more nuanced when it comes to broader themes of power and masculinity.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2017, review of Only Killers and Thieves.
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2017, review of Only Killers and Thieves, p. 28.
School Library Journal, May, 2018, Katherine Magyarody, review of Only Killers and Thieves, p. 108.
Washington Post, February 6, 2018, Mark Athitakis, “Book World: The 1880s Outback Is No Country for Young Men,” review of Only Killers and Thieves.
ONLINE
American Booksellers Association website, http://www.bookweb.org/ (February 20, 2018), Alyson Turner, “An Indies Introduce Q&A With Paul Howarth.”
BookPage Online, https://bookpage.com/ (February 1, 2018), G. Robert Frazier, review of Only Killers and Thieves.
Cowboys and Indians, http://www.cowboysindians.com/ (February 9, 2018), Jesse Hughey, review of Only Killers and Thieves.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com (May 9, 2018), Sam Millar, review of Only Killers and Thieves.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (February 1, 2018), Mark Athitakis, “Two Australian Boys Seek Revenge for Their Parents’ Murder in This Blood-Soaked Tale,” review of Only Killers and Thieves.
Paul Howarth is a British-Australian author and former lawyer. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, where he was also awarded a Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship, and his work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize and Wasafiri New Writing Prize. His debut novel, Only Killers and Thieves, set on the nineteenth century Australian frontier, will be published in 2018.
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Only Killers and Thieves
A Novel
by Paul Howarth
On Sale: 02/06/2018
Format:
Hardcover
Price:
$26.99
Spend $49 and get FREE shipping on HC.com
Book Overview
Author Info
Paul Howarth
Paul Howarth
Photo by Sarah Howarth
Biography
Paul Howarth was born and grew up in Great Britain before moving to Melbourne in his late twenties. He lived in Australia for more than six years, gained dual citizenship in 2012, and now lives in Norwich, United Kingdom, with his family. In 2015, he received a master’s degree from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing program, the most prestigious course of its kind in the UK, where he was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship.
Howarth, Paul: ONLY KILLERS AND THIEVES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Howarth, Paul ONLY KILLERS AND THIEVES Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 2, 6 ISBN: 978-0-06-269096-8
Howarth's impressive debut is a Wild West saga transported to 19th-century Queensland, Australia. Two brothers come of age during a bloody wilderness manhunt against the background of a shameful era in Australia's racial history.
Brothers Tommy and Billy are the sons of rancher Ned McBride, who's barely surviving under the thumb of land baron John Sullivan. Sullivan's local rule is aided by his association with Inspector Edmund Noone, a leader of the Native Mounted Police, which carried out the genocide of Australia's indigenous people. Racial tensions escalate after the two brothers witness a lynching, and soon afterward they find their parents murdered--apparently by their aboriginal stockman Joseph, whose gun is found nearby. They have no choice but to join forces with Noone and Sullivan, who set out to take revenge on Joseph--or on any other tribal people they encounter on the hunt for him. The story deals unflinchingly with the brutality of Australian rule, and the true circumstances of the parents' murders are ultimately revealed. But the heart of the story is the complicated relationship between the brothers, as Tommy's developing conscience threatens his bond with the older Billy, who has committed to Sullivan's cause. One turning point for Tommy is his attachment to an aboriginal woman whose family has been slaughtered by their posse.
While this book has a historical point to make, it also works as a suspenseful mystery and a resonant bildungsroman.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Howarth, Paul: ONLY KILLERS AND THIEVES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2017. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A516024587/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
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Only Killers and Thieves
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p28. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Only Killers and Thieves
Paul Howarth. Harper, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-269096-8
A quest for frontier justice drives the events of Howarth's devastating and impressive debut, set in the Australian outback in 1885. Sixteen-year-old Billy McBride and his 14-year-old brother, Tommy, are orphaned when, they believe, their rancher father's disgruntled aboriginal stockman guns down their parents and younger sister in cold blood. Enlisting the help of neighboring rancher John Sullivan (with whom their father had a prickly relationship) and Edmund Noone, an inspector with the Native Mounted Police, the boys embark on a manhunt. Things quickly go awry when their confederates use evidence Billy fabricated as a pretext to slaughter the alleged culprit's entire tribe. This atrocity is emblematic of the novel's theme concerning the strained relations between white settlers and the natives whom they have displaced from their lands. Howarth skillfully uses the fraying relationship between the two brothers--Billy embraces vigilantism with vengeful zeal, while Tommy is revolted by both the carnage and its effect on his brother--to illustrate the moral issues at the heart of his story. The narrative is empowered further by his searing descriptions of the outback, a drought-ridden landscape of desiccation and death that provides a backdrop as bleak and merciless as the characters who move against it. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Only Killers and Thieves." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575613/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=4ff8d732. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575613
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HOWARTH, Paul. Only Killers and
Thieves
Katherine Magyarody
School Library Journal.
64.5 (May 2018): p108+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
HOWARTH, Paul. Only Killers and Thieves. 336p. HarperCollins/Harper. Feb. 2018. Tr $26.99. ISBN 9780062690968.
Set in 1885 Queensland, Australia, this taut and harrowing narrative begins with 14-year-old Tommy uncovering a brutal crime, the murder of his parents and the wounding of his sister. He begins to believe that the investigation is spiraling out of control when the notorious Inspector Noone of the Queensland Native Police accuses the local Kurrong tribe of the crimes. Recruited to Noone's tracking party, Tommy becomes increasingly convinced of the man's corrupt, unfettered power as well as the Kurrong's innocence. This fast-paced story explores the psychology of complicity in uncomfortable detail: Tommy faces harsh punishment for voicing dissent in a time and place where white masculinity is defined by collective assertions of dominance over racialized bodies. Graphic violence and dire moral concessions ensue. Throughout, Howarth creates a strong sense of place, with Tommy's diction and syntax shaping readers' perception of the unforgiving social and natural landscape. Because of the focus on Tommy's perspective, the Indigenous characters only appear when Tommy tries--and often fails-- to reach out to them. An author's note lists useful historical resources. VERDICT For readers seeking morally complex revenge plots or a fictional gateway into international histories of colonial violence.--Katherine Magyarody, Texas AOM University, College Station
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Magyarody, Katherine. "HOWARTH, Paul. Only Killers and Thieves." School Library Journal,
May 2018, p. 108+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A536988091/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c401b2f4. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536988091
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Book World: The 1880s outback is no
country for young men
Mark Athitakis
The Washington Post.
(Feb. 6, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Mark Athitakis Only Killers and Thieves By Paul Howarth Harper. 336 pp. $26.99 ---
The hero of Paul Howarth's blood-soaked debut novel, "Only Killers and Thieves," is a 14-year- old boy who can't do anything right, and that includes burying his dad. It's 1885 in the scrubland of Queensland, Australia, and Tommy has come home with his older brother, Billy, to find his parents murdered and his sister grievously wounded. At the spare funeral ceremony - no coffin, just corpses bundled in sheets - his grasp slips. "The body tumbled and rolled and the bedsheet unraveled, and Father lay exposed in the earth, bloated and white, riddled with a veiny fungus, ravaged by the flies."
Howarth is a Briton who lived for six years in Australia, but prose like that arrives direct from Cormac McCarthy's dusty Southwest: the rolling, Biblical run-on sentences, the evocations of violence, the suggestion that we clumsy humans are stupidly doomed to decline and death. Even so, Tommy is the stand-up guy in this Down Under Western. Because he can't do anything quite right, he's admirably out of the step with the ruthless and racist world he has been thrust into. It's a world Howarth depicts artfully, although he also takes a discomfiting giddiness in the violence he has conjured up.
The Queensland setting is parched and expansive and feels overrun with Black Hats. Chief among them is John Sullivan, a rapacious squatter who forced Tommy's family into privation by secretly cutting off their water supply, starving their livestock. Supporting him is Inspector Edmund Noone, head of the region's Native Police, which for much of the 19th century deputized aborigines to effectively help exterminate themselves. Both men and their cronies never go wanting for a race-based justification for their actions.
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"The only thing they understand is the gun," Sullivan opines. "You kill enough, they'll get the message."
"Remember Darwin: a species adapts or it dies," Noone says. "We must not allow them to adapt. If we take their land, their women, kill their men, sooner or later they will simply expire. It is science."
It's tempting to roll your eyes at the transparent bigotry in lines like these, as if Sullivan and Noone were twirling their mustaches, begging us to hiss at them. That simplicity weakens some central plot points. We're meant to believe that Tommy, naive but also alert and inquisitive, never really doubts that a native farmhand he respects murdered his parents. He's similarly credulous that his dying sister, a witness to the incident, will be treated by a doctor due to arrive, oh, any day now.
But Howarth is more nuanced when it comes to broader themes of power and masculinity. Although Billy is just two years older than Tommy, he embraces his role as the new family elder with gusto, staying close to Sullivan, attempting to keep up with his new cohort's drinking and shutting down his kid brother at every turn. "All I'm doing is seeing us through this," Billy insists. "We're minors. ... They'd make us wards if they found us, put us in some lockup or Mission house, no better than the [expletive] blacks."
The heart of the novel is an expedition deep into the outback that's ostensibly a search for the murderer but is in fact a grotesque hunt for aborigines. The boys are forced to witness members of a native family captured, chained, raped and murdered. Howarth's language turns symphonically lurid at such moments: "The lightning crackled above them and the echoes of grunting and whip cracks came whispering through the ravine." Tommy is press-ganged into having a hand in the violence himself, of course, setting the stage for a redemptive third act.
Howarth is skilled at taking the old forms of the Western - the thrill of the chase, the Manichaean nonsense of "civilized" and "savage" - and reshaping them to address contemporary concerns. That's only fitting. Ever since John Wayne died, we've been well trained on how to question those old John Wayne tropes, which demonized Native Americans and lionized white privilege. The very title is designed to flatter this wisdom. It refers to the casual characterization of aborigines, but we're not far into the story before we know who it really refers to.
Like every Western, Howarth's spotlights how arbitrary frontier justice can be. But he also asks: How much less arbitrary is a purportedly civilized society? "Every law, every custom, every rule by which we live is made up by someone, conjured from thin air, then written down and by some sort of magic enacted into law," Noone says. "It is so malleable, Tommy." For the farm boy, it's as valuable a lesson as how to dam a river or how to fire a gun. As long as people are inclined to scapegoat, there'll be people who'll use the law to legitimize it. Tommy's heroism resides in his ability to pursue a more noble purpose. But the bloody, bullying milieu of Howarth's imagination reveals how difficult it can be to make that leap.
---
Athitakis is the author of "The New Midwest," a critical study of the region's fiction.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Athitakis, Mark. "Book World: The 1880s outback is no country for young men." Washington
Post, 6 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A526487687/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5bb8f42c. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526487687
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February 2018
Only Killers and Thieves
Vengeance in the outback
BookPage review by G. Robert Frazier
The story of a frontier family’s murder by a tribe of native peoples and the ensuing quest for vengeance has been written before. It’s a staple of many Western novels. What sets Only Killers and Thieves apart is its locale: not the late 19th-century American West but the untamed wilderness of the Australian outback.
The novel begins innocently enough, with teen brothers Billy and Tommy McBride on a hunting expedition. Debut novelist Paul Howarth entrenches readers in the scene and its grim mood from the opening sentence: “They stalked the ruined scrubland, searching for something to kill.” Later, when the boys discover their parents slain and their young sister, Mary, barely clinging to life, they must swallow their father’s pride and seek help from his nemesis, a deeply racist land baron called John Sullivan.
While Sullivan’s doctor and wife tend to Mary, the teens accompany Sullivan and a posse of Native Queensland police to rout the aboriginal Kurrong tribe believed to be responsible for the McBride murders. Consumed by hate and a lust for revenge, Billy embraces Sullivan’s view of superiority over the land’s native inhabitants, even as the more sensitive Tommy questions everything.
Only Killers and Thieves is brutally violent and shocking, from its depiction of racial bias to its savage realism, but at its heart, it is a coming-of-age novel. Howarth includes many parallels to the novel’s Old West counterparts: a family trying to tame the land and create a livelihood for themselves amid a harsh, unforgiving climate; a rival landowner who threatens to control them at every turn; and the constant threat of attack by the region’s indigenous population. Howarth manages to infuse the old tropes with a depth of emotion and moral complication that will stay with readers long after closing the book.
This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Only Killers and Thieves: A Novel
Image of Only Killers and Thieves: A Novel
Author(s):
Paul Howarth
Release Date:
February 5, 2018
Publisher/Imprint:
Harper
Pages:
336
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Sam Millar
“Only Killers and Thieves is a powerful debut.”
Perhaps, no other country comes as close to mirroring the American Wild West as early Australia, and in particular, the country’s vast, untamed outback of survival and endurance during the late 19th century. Paul Howarth’s debut novel, Only Killers and Thieves, reinforces and helps authenticate that perception.
The year is 1885 in the parched plains of Queensland, and a devastating drought is bringing death and horror to the land and livestock, threatening to destroy the lives of the McBride family and others.
Two young brothers, Billy and Tommy McBride “not quite men, tiny in a landscape withered by drought and drenched in unbroken sun” are about to stumble onto a terrible event that will change their young lives forever.
The boys have been out hunting for food for their family, but in their eagerness to please their loving but at time overbearing mother, they have committed a cardinal sin of crossing the boundary line of their neighbor, local hard man and rancher John Sullivan, and his vast estate, one hundred times the size of the McBride’s land.
“They’d been walking less than a mile when Tommy saw the first horse coming over the rise. He threw out a hand and grabbed Billy by the shirt, and pulled them both down to their knees, his eyes on the horse all along. It was heading east to west, only five hundred yards away, and was ridden by a very tall man, sitting fully erect in the saddle, wearing a slouch hat and longcoat flapping open at the sides.”
Eventually, more riders emerge in the near distance, sinister, like a scene from the Book of Revelation. Sullivan is leading them alongside Inspector Edmund Noone, head of the region’s Native Police, an infamous arm of British colonial power charged with the “dispersal” of indigenous Australians to “protect” white settler rights. Behind one of the riders, three aborigines are chained to the neck on a force march of death.
However, instead of four horsemen from the Apocalypse seven is the number for this racist brutality and torture, as one of the aborigines is murdered in cold blood, for "entertainment."
The boys return home, but say nothing of what they have just witnessed in case it brings their family into needless conflict with Sullivan and his murderous marauders.
As time goes by, their father and his hired help go out to the land to see how badly the livestock has fared in this hellish weather. It is then that the fate of the other two aborigines is discovered:
“From its branches, ropes creaking, two bodies hung. Both had been mutilated, both had been burnt. Two knotty, dark medallions, dangling. carrion birds hunched in the branches above their heads and flies crawled over their charred skin. gently they swung in the wind.”
The bodies are eventually taken down for burial by the aborigine stockman working for McBride. The same aborigine with hate in his eyes for what the white settlers have done to his people and his land. Despite being hired by McBride, the anger in the man’s eyes let’s McBride know that he regards him as nothing more than another white oppressor.
This slaughter soon becomes the catalyst for murder and revenge.
In later days, just as hope threatens to fade into the land’s dusty cavities, a miracle happens: rain in all its glorious wetness and life-giving power descends on the land bring growth and wonder. When the rain finally comes, it is a miracle that renews their hope for survival. But returning home from an afternoon swimming at a remote waterhole filled by the downpour, Tommy and Billy meet with a shocking tragedy.
Thirsting for vengeance against the man they believe has wronged them, the distraught brothers turn to Sullivan who quickly gathers a posse led by Noone and his Queensland Native Police. As they ride across the barren outback in pursuit, their harsh and horrifying journey will have a devastating impact on Tommy, tormenting him for the rest of his life.
Only Killers and Thieves is a powerful debut. Paul Howarth brings early Australia to life, bloody warts and all, in an epic tale of murder, revenge, and colonial oppression, with very little room for redemption. The story and his words will stay with you, long after you have finished the book.
Sam Millar is the author of The Dark Place. His most recent novel is On the Brinks.
Only Killers and Thieves
by Jesse Hughey • February 9, 2018
Photography: Courtesy Harper/HarperCollins
A British author’s debut novel brings echoes of the American Wild West to the Australian outback.
Up next on the reading queue is the debut novel from Paul Howarth, Only Killers and Thieves, a family saga of revenge set in colonial Australia’s equivalent to the Old West, the unforgiving outback.
Only Killers and Thieves was released earlier this week by publisher Harper/HarperCollins, and it’s already garnered some impressive critical praise. The Library Journal compares it to Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses in a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it a “devastating and impressive debut,” and in its starred review of the book, Kirkus Reviews deploys an adverb that’s always promising when used to characterize how a writer describes brutal subject matter: “unflinchingly.” Laird Hunt, author of The Evening Road, makes a McCarthy comparison, too, saying the book’s characters would be at home in Blood Meridian.
The book begins in 1885, with the McBride family nearing ruination on their drought-stricken land. After the rain finally comes, two brothers, 14-year-old Tommy and 16-year-old Billy, return from swimming in a remote waterhole to discover tragedy. They set out for vengeance with the ruthless landowner who once employed their father, gathering a posse with members of the infamous Queensland Native Police in pursuit of the Aboriginal former employee they believe to be responsible.
In a “behind the book” note included in the PR material HarperCollins sent with a copy of the novel, Howarth says he was inspired when he read about the Queensland Native Police, a branch of law enforcement tasked with “dispersing” Australia’s Aboriginal people from white land, “across an ever-expanding frontier” — an attitude toward Indigenous people that’s all too familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history. After years of living in Australia and traveling across the country, Howarth set out to explore how a child could grow up “good” in such a brutal time and place.
All characters in the book are fictional, but the setting brings to mind our April 2016 story on Australian cattle king Si
An Indies Introduce Q&A With Paul Howarth
Posted on Tuesday, Feb 20, 2018
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Only Killers and Thieves by Paul HowarthPaul Howarth is the author of Only Killers and Thieves, an Indies Introduce Winter/Spring 2018 selection and a February 2018 Indie Next List pick.
“Paul Howarth’s Only Killers and Thieves is a Western set in Australian colonial times,” said Alyson Turner of Source Booksellers in Detroit, Michigan, who was a member of the bookseller panel that chose Howarth’s debut for the Indies Introduce program. “It is a coming-of-age story that explores colonization in Australia and the impact of colonization on the native population whose land they are settling. The book is mix of horror, family, and empire.”
Howarth, who grew up in Great Britain, spent six years living in Australia before moving back to the U.K., where he earned his master’s degree from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing program. Here, Turner and Howarth discuss how the landscape and history of Australia inspired the author’s debut.
Alyson Turner: What kind of research did you do and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Paul Howarth, author of Only Killers and ThievesPaul Howarth: I came to the subject and setting for this book through my own reading of Australian history, having moved there from the U.K. in 2008. I was interested to learn about settlement, beyond the familiar story of it once having been a British penal colony, and soon realized that the history of Australia was as rich and bloody as those tales of the American West so familiar from fiction and film.
Which meant that by the time I came to write the first notes for what would eventually become Only Killers and Thieves, I already had a good grounding in the period as a whole, including the widespread conflict between British settlers and Indigenous Australians. I did need to do specific research into the Queensland Native Police, and was very grateful for one book in particular: The Secret War, by the historian Jonathan Richards (University of Queensland Press), a comprehensive study of all aspects of the force. Online resources were also very useful — for example, the National Library of Australia maintains a database of period newspapers and other publications.
In terms of setting, I have traveled fairly widely throughout Australia and seen firsthand some of the landscape I was writing about, and my own photographs or online images were a good memory jog when needed. I was also very careful to ensure the flora and fauna were both accurately depicted and relevant to where the book is set.
Smaller details I tended to research as I wrote. What did people wear in that place, in that time? What did they eat, smoke, drink? What weapons were in use? How did those weapons work, what was their range? All these little things needed to be accurate, and I made sure that they were.
Overall, it’s hard to say how long I researched the book. It was a cumulative process that lasted a number of years.
AT: Do you enjoy reading Westerns?
PH: To an extent, yes, though as always it depends on the individual book. For me, it’s more a question of theme, setting and sensibility than genre; I enjoy the intersection of landscape, history, and grand-scale storytelling you find from authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Philipp Meyer, etc. There is something about the elemental struggle of man vs. nature, good vs. evil, choice vs. fate that appeals to me, but those struggles can just as easily be found in a post-apocalyptic novel, science fiction, or a contemporary setting. Genre isn’t something I pay a lot of attention to, either in my reading or when I sit down to write.
AT: How did you select the names for your characters?
PH: Often purely on instinct. Sometimes I’ll just know the name, or follow my gut and take the first name that pops into my head, others I’ll trawl through a list of names on screen until I find something that works. Names change, too, particularly in the early stages — a character can develop to the point where the original name no longer fits. It really is a question of fit — sometimes the name will need to have a certain number of syllables, or sound: Locke, for example, needed a blunt, hard name. Noone was an important name to get right, and is not actually intended to be a pun or play on the word “no one,” as some may think. I remember seeing it somewhere and thinking how menacing it sounded, but without the ‘e’ it looked wrong on the page, hence “Noone.” The Aboriginal characters needed particular thought, because their names have in almost all cases been given to them by white people, which adds its own layer of significance. Hence, we have the traditional (Arthur), the biblical (Joseph, Benjamin, Matthew), and, in the case of the Native Police troopers, the careless or faintly absurd (Rabbit, Pope).
AT: America and Australia share the same history of being used by the British as homes for penal colonies. Do you think that made for a special kind of violence or unrest in colonial times?
PH: I’m not sure it’s particular to penal colonies — violence was a hallmark of colonialism in whatever guise it took — or in fact whether a penal colony breeds inherent violence at all, since people were transported for as little as stealing a loaf of bread. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that penal colonies tended to be so far from Britain, and in places as vast and ungovernable as America and Australia, that there was a widespread lack of accountability, a sense that the rule of law no longer applied. Maybe among settlers there was also a certain anti-establishment mindset, a scrabble for advancement, as people tried to break free of their old lives and start again. And then, of course, there was the state-sponsored violence against indigenous people, which had nothing to do with the penal colonies at all.
AT: The book shines a light on family, empire, and manhood. Were you hoping your storytelling would make historical points as well?
PH: There are always points to be made in fiction, but good fiction shouldn’t be too overt about it in my view: that is best suited to essays, journalism, and narrative nonfiction. So my focus was always on the storytelling, on attempting to recreate a particular period in British and Australian history and populate it with characters who would draw the reader in and bring the history to life. If I could do that, then perhaps readers might learn something, find modern-day resonance, or make connections of their own, which I hope they do. Of course, I’m not immune to the subject matter of the book, and am naturally bringing a 21st century eye to the material, which inevitably influences the writing, the depiction of the history, the themes, etc. Ultimately, though, the novel should speak for itself.
Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth (Harper, 9780062690968, Hardcover Fiction, $26.99) On Sale Date: 2/6/2018.
Find out more about the author by following him on Twitter.
ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.
An Indies Introduce Q&A With Paul Howarth
Posted on Tuesday, Feb 20, 2018
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Only Killers and Thieves by Paul HowarthPaul Howarth is the author of Only Killers and Thieves, an Indies Introduce Winter/Spring 2018 selection and a February 2018 Indie Next List pick.
“Paul Howarth’s Only Killers and Thieves is a Western set in Australian colonial times,” said Alyson Turner of Source Booksellers in Detroit, Michigan, who was a member of the bookseller panel that chose Howarth’s debut for the Indies Introduce program. “It is a coming-of-age story that explores colonization in Australia and the impact of colonization on the native population whose land they are settling. The book is mix of horror, family, and empire.”
Howarth, who grew up in Great Britain, spent six years living in Australia before moving back to the U.K., where he earned his master’s degree from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing program. Here, Turner and Howarth discuss how the landscape and history of Australia inspired the author’s debut.
Alyson Turner: What kind of research did you do and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Paul Howarth, author of Only Killers and ThievesPaul Howarth: I came to the subject and setting for this book through my own reading of Australian history, having moved there from the U.K. in 2008. I was interested to learn about settlement, beyond the familiar story of it once having been a British penal colony, and soon realized that the history of Australia was as rich and bloody as those tales of the American West so familiar from fiction and film.
Which meant that by the time I came to write the first notes for what would eventually become Only Killers and Thieves, I already had a good grounding in the period as a whole, including the widespread conflict between British settlers and Indigenous Australians. I did need to do specific research into the Queensland Native Police, and was very grateful for one book in particular: The Secret War, by the historian Jonathan Richards (University of Queensland Press), a comprehensive study of all aspects of the force. Online resources were also very useful — for example, the National Library of Australia maintains a database of period newspapers and other publications.
In terms of setting, I have traveled fairly widely throughout Australia and seen firsthand some of the landscape I was writing about, and my own photographs or online images were a good memory jog when needed. I was also very careful to ensure the flora and fauna were both accurately depicted and relevant to where the book is set.
Smaller details I tended to research as I wrote. What did people wear in that place, in that time? What did they eat, smoke, drink? What weapons were in use? How did those weapons work, what was their range? All these little things needed to be accurate, and I made sure that they were.
Overall, it’s hard to say how long I researched the book. It was a cumulative process that lasted a number of years.
AT: Do you enjoy reading Westerns?
PH: To an extent, yes, though as always it depends on the individual book. For me, it’s more a question of theme, setting and sensibility than genre; I enjoy the intersection of landscape, history, and grand-scale storytelling you find from authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Philipp Meyer, etc. There is something about the elemental struggle of man vs. nature, good vs. evil, choice vs. fate that appeals to me, but those struggles can just as easily be found in a post-apocalyptic novel, science fiction, or a contemporary setting. Genre isn’t something I pay a lot of attention to, either in my reading or when I sit down to write.
AT: How did you select the names for your characters?
PH: Often purely on instinct. Sometimes I’ll just know the name, or follow my gut and take the first name that pops into my head, others I’ll trawl through a list of names on screen until I find something that works. Names change, too, particularly in the early stages — a character can develop to the point where the original name no longer fits. It really is a question of fit — sometimes the name will need to have a certain number of syllables, or sound: Locke, for example, needed a blunt, hard name. Noone was an important name to get right, and is not actually intended to be a pun or play on the word “no one,” as some may think. I remember seeing it somewhere and thinking how menacing it sounded, but without the ‘e’ it looked wrong on the page, hence “Noone.” The Aboriginal characters needed particular thought, because their names have in almost all cases been given to them by white people, which adds its own layer of significance. Hence, we have the traditional (Arthur), the biblical (Joseph, Benjamin, Matthew), and, in the case of the Native Police troopers, the careless or faintly absurd (Rabbit, Pope).
AT: America and Australia share the same history of being used by the British as homes for penal colonies. Do you think that made for a special kind of violence or unrest in colonial times?
PH: I’m not sure it’s particular to penal colonies — violence was a hallmark of colonialism in whatever guise it took — or in fact whether a penal colony breeds inherent violence at all, since people were transported for as little as stealing a loaf of bread. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that penal colonies tended to be so far from Britain, and in places as vast and ungovernable as America and Australia, that there was a widespread lack of accountability, a sense that the rule of law no longer applied. Maybe among settlers there was also a certain anti-establishment mindset, a scrabble for advancement, as people tried to break free of their old lives and start again. And then, of course, there was the state-sponsored violence against indigenous people, which had nothing to do with the penal colonies at all.
AT: The book shines a light on family, empire, and manhood. Were you hoping your storytelling would make historical points as well?
PH: There are always points to be made in fiction, but good fiction shouldn’t be too overt about it in my view: that is best suited to essays, journalism, and narrative nonfiction. So my focus was always on the storytelling, on attempting to recreate a particular period in British and Australian history and populate it with characters who would draw the reader in and bring the history to life. If I could do that, then perhaps readers might learn something, find modern-day resonance, or make connections of their own, which I hope they do. Of course, I’m not immune to the subject matter of the book, and am naturally bringing a 21st century eye to the material, which inevitably influences the writing, the depiction of the history, the themes, etc. Ultimately, though, the novel should speak for itself.
Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth (Harper, 9780062690968, Hardcover Fiction, $26.99) On Sale Date: 2/6/2018.
Find out more about the author by following him on Twitter.
ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.
Two Australian boys seek revenge for their parents’ murder in this blood-soaked tale
By Mark Athitakis February 1
The hero of Paul Howarth’s blood-soaked debut novel, “Only Killers and Thieves,” is a 14-year-old boy who can’t do anything right, and that includes burying his dad. It’s 1885 in the scrubland of Queensland, Australia, and Tommy has come home with his older brother, Billy, to find his parents murdered and his sister grievously wounded. At the spare funeral ceremony — no coffin, just corpses bundled in sheets — his grasp slips. “The body tumbled and rolled and the bedsheet unraveled, and Father lay exposed in the earth, bloated and white, riddled with a veiny fungus, ravaged by the flies.”
(Harper)
Howarth is a Briton who lived for six years in Australia, but prose like that arrives direct from Cormac McCarthy’s dusty Southwest: the rolling, Biblical run-on sentences, the evocations of violence, the suggestion that we clumsy humans are stupidly doomed to decline and death. Even so, Tommy is the stand-up guy in this Down Under Western. Because he can’t do anything quite right, he’s admirably out of step with the ruthless and racist world he has been thrust into. It’s a world Howarth depicts artfully, although he also takes a discomfiting giddiness in the violence he has conjured up.
The Queensland setting is parched and expansive and feels overrun with Black Hats. Chief among them is John Sullivan, a rapacious squatter who forced Tommy’s family into privation by secretly cutting off their water supply, starving their livestock. Supporting him is Inspector Edmund Noone, head of the region’s Native Police, which for much of the 19th century deputized aborigines to effectively help exterminate themselves. Both men and their cronies never go wanting for a race-based justification for their actions.
“The only thing they understand is the gun,” Sullivan opines. “You kill enough, they’ll get the message.”
“Remember Darwin: a species adapts or it dies,” Noone says. “We must not allow them to adapt. If we take their land, their women, kill their men, sooner or later they will simply expire. It is science.”
[You might also enjoy Philipp Meyer’s ‘The Son’]
It’s tempting to roll your eyes at the transparent bigotry in lines like these, as if Sullivan and Noone were twirling their mustaches, begging us to hiss at them. That simplicity weakens some central plot points. We’re meant to believe that Tommy, naive but also alert and inquisitive, never really doubts that a native farmhand he respects murdered his parents. He’s similarly credulous that his dying sister, a witness to the incident, will be treated by a doctor due to arrive, oh, any day now.
Author Paul Howarth. (Sarah Howarth)
But Howarth is more nuanced when it comes to broader themes of power and masculinity. Although Billy is just two years older than Tommy, he embraces his role as the new family elder with gusto, staying close to Sullivan, attempting to keep up with his new cohort’s drinking and shutting down his kid brother at every turn. “All I’m doing is seeing us through this,” Billy insists. “We’re minors. . . . They’d make us wards if they found us, put us in some lockup or Mission house, no better than the [expletive] blacks.”
The heart of the novel is an expedition deep into the outback that’s ostensibly a search for the murderer but is in fact a grotesque hunt for aborigines. The boys are forced to witness members of a native family captured, chained, raped and murdered. Howarth’s language turns symphonically lurid at such moments: “The lightning crackled above them and the echoes of grunting and whip cracks came whispering through the ravine.” Tommy is press-ganged into having a hand in the violence himself, of course, setting the stage for a redemptive third act.
Howarth is skilled at taking the old forms of the Western — the thrill of the chase, the Manichaean nonsense of “civilized” and “savage” — and reshaping them to address contemporary concerns. That’s only fitting. Ever since John Wayne died, we’ve been well trained on how to question those old John Wayne tropes, which demonized Native Americans and lionized white privilege. The very title is designed to flatter this wisdom. It refers to the casual characterization of aborigines, but we’re not far into the story before we know who it really refers to.
Like every Western, Howarth’s spotlights how arbitrary frontier justice can be. But he also asks: How much less arbitrary is a purportedly civilized society? “Every law, every custom, every rule by which we live is made up by someone, conjured from thin air, then written down and by some sort of magic enacted into law,” Noone says. “It is so malleable, Tommy.” For the farm boy, it’s as valuable a lesson as how to dam a river or how to fire a gun. As long as people are inclined to scapegoat, there’ll be people who’ll use the law to legitimize it. Tommy’s heroism resides in his ability to pursue a more noble purpose. But the bloody, bullying milieu of Howarth’s imagination reveals how difficult it can be to make that leap.
Mark Athitakis is the author of “The New Midwest,” a critical study of the region’s fiction.
Read more:
The 10 best thrillers and mysteries of 2017
Only Killers and Thieves
By Paul Howarth
Harper. 336 pp. $26.99
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