Most thrillers end abruptly. Some immediately after the guilty character is divulged, others with an unexpected twist to keep one thinking. However, Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor has a prolonged conclusion. After the murderer is revealed, there are several chapters that contain not only a wrap up of all the characters, but what happens to them years later. Normally this would irritate me, but with Dirt Town it is sumptuous indulgence. Like discovering there is a second tray of chocolates in a Cadbury’s box.
The book is Scrivenor’s debut and it is winning prizes and accolades galore, for good reason. It’s outback noir, a genre that is mushrooming mostly because the writing feels new and innovative. Queen of this genre, Jane Harper, who wrote the much-lauded and beloved novel The Dry, gave a firm thumbs up: “A heart-wrenching mystery, Scrivenor’s remarkable sense of place brings Dirt Town to life. A stellar debut.”
The premise is simple — the workings and secrets of a small town are exposed when something unthinkable happens. Twelve-year-old Esther Bianchi goes missing on her way home from school at the end of November 2001. The town is Durton, New South Wales, nicknamed Dirt Town — barren, depressed, dusty and hot. The book’s tagline reads: “Dark crimes happen in dying places ... ” And indeed, a lot of crimes are happening.
The story unfolds through multiple points of view. There’s Ronnie, Esther’s best friend: “It’s impossible now to unlink my memories of Esther from each other. Like train cars with their couplings, soldered together, each memory of her brings with it another one, surging forward, on and on in a long, clattering line. Since we were small, she’d been there as important and unremarked as the house you grow up in”; Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels, who investigates: “The knowledge would make her feel the crushing weight of what it was to live in such a small town. Everything and everyone touching everything else”; Constance, Esther’s grief-stricken mother: “Constance sat at the kitchen table as the uniformed officers searched. It was ridiculous, but even as she sat there, she still felt like they might find Esther in the house — the way certain things won’t turn up until a second person looks for them”; Scrivener's “Greek chorus”, which she calls “We”, the collective children of the town: “For every girl child there seemed to lurk a dead-eyed man, hair receding prematurely, with a car and the offer of a lift and a plan and a knife and a shovel. Did we create the man by imagining him or was he idling there in his car regardless.”; and Lewis, another of Esther’s friends, who is afraid to come forward with information: “The urge to come clean snapped through him. To run after Ronnie and say he’d go, he’d go right now. He could tell the police he’d gone to the creek alone, that he’d snuck out of school early, which was why he hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, but that he’d seen a man with Estie and that man wasn’t her dad.”
There are many suspects, one of them Esther’s father, who is arrested. But Sarah is not convinced and neither are “We”.
Sometimes a thriller comes along that elevates the genre. This is one of them. Great for those long load-shedding slots.
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