Michael Robotham's Tell Me Something True: A Small-Town Mystery Decades in the Making

Acclaimed author Michael Robotham's latest novel, Tell Me Something True, marks a significant departure from his previous works, as it is his most autobiographical yet. The book is a 'seriously rewritten and re-imagined' version of his first manuscript, written in the early 1980s.

Robotham was a 22-year-old journalist working for a Sydney newspaper when he began writing his first novel. "[It] was going to be my great Australian novel … [and] win me every prize in the world," he recalls. He finished it six years later, when he was living in London. The novel, set in a small country town based on his hometown of Gundagai in the Riverina region of NSW, had the working title Blessed Are the Meek.

However, the manuscript missed publication by a single vote in an acquisitions meeting for a major publisher. "I was told that it was really the setting … They just felt it was a little bit too hard for them to market, because this was obviously well before Jane Harper and Liane Moriarty and few Australian-set books had ever done well internationally," Robotham explains.

After consigning the manuscript to his bottom drawer, Robotham spent the next decade working as a journalist and then as a ghostwriter. He returned to Australia in the 90s, but when he eventually began writing a new novel, he set it in the UK. That book, The Suspect — the first instalment of what would become the popular Joe O'Loughlin series — triggered a bidding war at the London Book Fair before it was published in 2004.

Now, two decades later, Robotham has finally set a book in Australia. Tell Me Something True, his 20th novel, leans into the tradition of small-town mysteries. "All the story and the characters remain the same, but it's been in the bottom drawer since the 1980s," he says.

When rewriting the original manuscript, Robotham transferred it to a computer and recognised both strengths and weaknesses in his work. "I read some sections and thought, 'Wow, that guy could really write! Whatever happened to him?!' And then I read other sections that I thought, 'Oh, that's so naive. That was a 20-year-old … who was very self-indulgent and full of himself.'"

The published version of Tell Me Something True features a second storyline set in the present, as Arlo returns to his hometown of Yulara after his release from prison. Robotham describes the novel as his most personal book, with scenes lifted straight out of his childhood.

His primary school years were spent in Gundagai, a town of 2,000 people on the Murrumbidgee River known for its history and geography. While the town is easily recognisable, Robotham chose not to use its name in print, renaming it Yulara instead.

In small towns, "there is only one high school and one high school principal and only one senior police officer," he notes. "I didn't want people playing a guessing game as to whether I based any of this on real-life characters."

Robotham's protagonist, Arlo Hackett, "pleads guilty because he believes he should have stopped the crime happening." As the popularity of outback noir attests, a small town is a fertile setting for a fiction writer. "Small country towns are very slow to forgive," Robotham observes. "They're full of secrets and yet they're places where it's almost impossible to keep a secret."

Robotham cites his early literary influences, including John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978) and Hotel New Hampshire (1981), as well as John Steinbeck's 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men. He is also an admirer of Australian fiction, with his number one choice in the Top 100 Australian Books being Illywhacker by Peter Carey.

Robotham acknowledges the current challenges in global publishing, particularly with the rise of AI-generated content. He is part of a lawsuit in the US accusing tech companies of stealing authors' work to train their language models.

"I hate the idea that we're going to probably cave into the AI companies and give them some sort of right to Australian copyrighted material," he says. "To me, it's like someone robbing your house and then saying to you, 'Don't worry about it, I'll give you your toaster back'."

Michael Robotham will be at Sydney Writers' Festival's Homegrown at the State Library of NSW on October 10.