Top Crime Writers Discover Whanganui Treasures

Whanganui Regional Museum was recently host to three of the literary world’s top crime writers.

The trio were in Whanganui to deliver their ‘Crime After Crime’ group show. It was the second stop in a tour of seven New Zealand towns, brought about by publishers Hachette Aotearoa NZ.

Together with their publicity team, Val McDermid, J.P. Pomare and Michael Robotham were treated to a special tour of the Museum’s highlights by Public Programmes Presenter, Lisa Reweti.

The writers are well known to New Zealand readers. Scottish author Val McDermid has sold over 18 million copies of her books to date, with several television adaptions. Her writing is associated with a sub-genre referred to as ‘Tartan Noir’. Val says the visit to the Museum was important for people like herself, “Coming from the other side of the planet, it’s important to get an understanding of the culture because we don’t know much about it otherwise. It’s interesting to see, particularly with the river becoming a person - something which for us, is hard to get our heads around. That has been really illuminating.”

Australian writer Michael Robotham’s nine-book Joseph O’Loughlin series was a worldwide bestseller and is currently being adapted for the screen. He is well known for The Secrets She Keeps, now an award-winning TV drama, and his latest book Lying Beside You spurred author Stephen King to say, “The guy can’t write a bad book. This is one of his best”. Michael admired the strong local connection of the Whanganui Museum’s displays, “You don’t see many museums that reflect their locality so completely. So many of the pieces here come exactly from Whanganui and are associated with this place. The fact that so many of the pieces began their life here, belong here, and have links with here, makes it very special.”

Based in Australia, New Zealand-born writer J.P. (Joshua) Pomare won acclaim when his debut novel Call Me Evie won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel, and his second book In the Clearing will soon be brought to screens via Disney Plus. He is currently promoting his latest book, The Wrong Woman. Joshua was raised in Rotorua but his father, Bill Pomare spent his early years living in Whanganui and still has many friends here. Joshua says, “We’re all Ngāpuhi, but my father is really tied to this place.”

Lisa Reweti gave the group her talking tour of Māori taonga (treasures), the Māori Court, and the latest exhibition He Awa Ora – Living River, incorporating personal stories known from her own whanau histories. Val McDermid said, “It was interesting to hear Lisa’s own familial connection with the collection. You don’t often get that in a museum.” Michael Robotham agreed, commenting, “It was like taking a tour of Lisa’s attic!”

Lisa says she is delighted to be in a place where she can showcase Whanganui treasures to visitors from near and far, “I spent ten years at Te Papa, talking about other people’s treasures, to other people’s children, and I did it so that I could come back to Whanganui and talk about my own taonga with my own friends and cousins and my family’s children.”

The group all agreed that the Gottfried Lindauer gallery paintings were “amazing”, and Michael Robotham chose the immense waka taua (war canoe) Te Mata o Hoturoa as a favourite piece, “That canoe is astonishing. It’s striking. It could grace any museum anywhere in the world.”

The Crime After Crime Tour travels to the South Island later this week.

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