Books, bodies & buildings

The multiple lives of Auckland crime writer Ben Sanders

On Mondays and Tuesdays, Ben Sanders is a structural engineer, dealing with numbers and equations and helping build houses. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday he writes internationally acclaimed crime novels, dealing with guns and crooks and swift murder. Mike White meets the multi-talented 32-year-old Aucklander as he releases his new book, Exit .45.

Ben Sanders will always remember that courier van, that bloody courier van. Some overworked Toyota diesel, pulling up outside his parents’ place in Torbay early one morning in 2008 while he was still in bed, because it was university holidays.

The slide and slam of the van’s door, as the engine clacked and idled.

Eighteen-year-old Sanders knew the driver crossing the threshold to his front door was holding one of two things: medical supplies for the diabetes he’d dealt with since he was a kid, or the rejected and returned manuscript of his novel, The Fallen, that he’d sent to a publisher, with plenty of postage and hope.

He lay in bed praying it would be his diabetes supplies.

It was the manuscript.

Nestled inside the envelope was a note from Random House publishing editor Harriet Allan.

‘‘I’ve still got it,’’ says Sanders. ‘‘She writes a brilliant rejection letter. By definition, it’s saying, ‘No’. But it was crafted really nicely to say, ‘It’s not totally devoid of merit – but not for us.’

‘‘And yeah, I was disappointed. But I was so ambitious and enthusiastic, I just remember thinking, the next one – I’ll get it across the line.’’

The Fallen wasn’t Sanders’ first attempt at a novel.

When he was 15, he spent nights writing a story set in America about a guy who witnesses a bank robbery, then goes after the crims.

Growing up on Auckland’s North Shore, Sanders’ house was full of books, and they were regular borrowers from the local library.

‘‘Mum disputes this, but I remember the rule being that if we read for 30 minutes, we could watch 30 minutes of TV. Whatever the rule was, we had to read before we could watch telly, which, in hindsight, served us well.’’

At intermediate school, Sanders had been introduced to crime writing through Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and that led to authors Lee Child and Michael Connelly – and he was away.

Away in his bedroom, writing his own book, driven by the thrill of the plot, seized with quiet certainty it would be a ripping success.

‘‘I don’t think I told anyone other than Mum and Dad – I needed Mum to print off the manuscript.’’

When his parents, town planners David and Gael, read it, they were encouraging, diplomatic, realistic.

Sanders never sent it to a publisher.

The fact it ended up in a shoebox at his parents’ place, rather than the New York Times bestseller list as he’d imagined, was an early lesson in the realities of being a writer.

But it didn’t deter Sanders or dull his keenness.

He wrote another novel, while still at Long Bay College. That one has disappeared, Sanders says, maybe on some misplaced hard drive taken to the tip during a summer sort out.

As college continued, Sanders’ teachers were faced with the rare combination of a student who loved English, yet also excelled at maths and science.

But any guidance counsellor dilemmas were answered by Sanders himself, who realised it might be 20 years before he made it as a writer. So, in the meantime, he figured he’d go to university and study civil engineering.

‘‘I sort of thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like a good job for me. It just felt like a prudent backup plan, basically.’’

But his university days were still bookended by writing. An early morning walk with the family dog, and an hour’s commute on the bus to the city, were time for plotting.

Then, after a day wrangling classroom calculations, writing fiction in the evening came as a release.

Sanders finished The Fallen during his first year at Auckland University. And when the rejection letter from Random House came, he simply carried on, and spent the next six months revisiting and revising it, before sending it to another publisher.

And then waiting again, dreading the call of the courier.

In early 2009, Sanders was working as a student engineer in Takapuna.

‘‘It was about half past nine on a Friday morning, and I got a call, and it was Lorain Day who was the publishing manager at HarperCollins. And she said, ‘We really enjoyed your book, and I’m going to recommend it to be published.’

‘‘That was a moment.’’

There’s a moment in Sanders’ new book, Exit .45, in a cheap New York bagel shop, involving a guy with a ponytail and a gun, a flower delivery guy called Benny, and a mob guy called Frank Cifaretti. And an ex-cop turned vigilante called Marshall Grade.

There is a salmon and cream cheese bagel sprinkled with capers, and a game of Russian roulette. Nobody dies, but someone can’t chew bagels afterwards.

It’s riveting writing, and a passage Sanders knew he’d got right, when he finished it.

‘‘I love those scenes that just really sweep you up as a writer and I really am just fully sucked into it.’’

There’s action and wit, and inevitable blood.

‘‘I think the public bar for gruesomeness is pretty high. And it’s pretty clear from how the book is packaged – the title, the cover, the blurb – I think people know what they’re in for.

‘‘But you don’t want to be accused of writing something that’s gratuitous and over the top, so it’s a balance – you want something that shocks people and keeps them engaged, and reminds them what the stakes are, without making them lose their lunch.’’

The Fallen and Sanders’ two subsequent novels, written while he was completing his bachelor of engineering degree, were set in Auckland, and based around a detective, Sean Devereaux.

When Sanders was picked up by a big American publisher, they suggested he set his books in the States, to increase his audience.

American Blood, published in 2015, introduced the character of Marshall Grade, who’d been undercover with the Mafia, had his cover blown, and gone into hiding in sprawling and arid New Mexico.

‘‘It was a big, beautiful, bloody mix of those classic heroes – Jack Reacher, Jason Bourne, James Bond – and the frontier aspect of No Country for Old Men,’’ says Sanders. ‘‘Everything that I’d love to read, brought together in that one book.’’

The book was a hit with audiences too, and was optioned by Hollywood studios, with Bradley Cooper slated to play the lead role. Eventually the project was shelved, but it raised Sanders’ profile and sales dramatically.

And Marshall Grade survived, and surfaced again in 2017’s Marshall’s Law.

Exit .45 is the latest book to feature Grade, the slightly OCD, jigsaw-loving, hardman you’d want to have around in times of trouble. This time, Grade has pitched up in gritty, gun-happy New York, a city Sanders has visited several times and grown to love.

‘‘When I first went there, it was a long way out of my comfort zone, so to deal with that I’d keep to a routine. I’d go to Strand Books down on Broadway, then I’d walk through Union Square and catch a 6 train up, and walk around Central Park, and then walk down town. And by doing that, over and over again, I got a really great impression and knowledge of certain parts of New York.

‘‘So being able to go back to those neighbourhoods when writing, is cool.’’

Setting his books in America has worked well for Sanders, whose visits there have always been a mix of research and relaxation, always travelling with an author’s eye.

‘‘I’m not looking to write books that are trying to understand the fabric of American society. What I want America for is a really interesting backdrop where the characters and the story are what you’re showing up for.

‘‘I couldn’t attempt a Jonathan Franzen book set in the States – I just don’t have the social experience of it.

‘‘But I’m writing different novels.’’

‘‘I’m not looking to write books that are trying to understand the fabric of American society. What I want America for is a really interesting backdrop where the characters and the story are what you’re showing up for.’’ Ben Sanders

And he is. Sanders makes no pretence about it – his books are for entertainment. ‘‘I’m proudly, and intentionally, middle-brow.’’ And he writes about crime not because he’s some latent psycho or true-crime obsessive.

‘‘I’m actually not particularly interested in crime. I don’t mean I’m uninterested in it, but the reason I’m writing in this genre is because I’m looking for suspense.

‘‘And the way I get that suspense is by having a plot line that involves crime, because it means people’s lives are at stake. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s suspense in its most potent form – people you like who seem to be in great danger.’’

Craig Sisterson, founder of the Ngaio Marsh crime writing awards that Sanders has been a finalist in three times, says as well as great plots and characters, Sanders’ books have style.

Sisterson reviewed Sanders’ first book in 2009, and has followed his career ever since, and says Sanders’ initial raw promise is undoubtedly more polished now.

‘‘Ben’s an exceptional, still young, crimewriting talent. He’s already very good, and I think he’s just going to get better and better, which is astonishing to think about.

‘‘Something I see in Ben, that I see in some other authors who are older, he’s continually pushing himself to do things slightly differently. He’s trying to get better, book on book on book.

‘‘We have a growing community of crime writers in New Zealand, with some exceptional talent. Ben’s definitely one of our leading talents of the past decade.’’

Sisterson points out that at 32, Sanders is younger than crime-writing megastars like Lee

Child, Val McDermid and Michael Connelly were when they wrote their first books. Exit .45 is Sanders’ eighth.

And he’s just finishing his ninth, set in wintry New Mexico, with a new cast of characters, not including Marshall Grade.

‘‘If all my books were about Marshall, I’d be with him full time – it just gets a bit much. Having written three Marshall books, I can hear him very clearly, and he’s very real to me. So I think, well, OK, no offence, but for the next 12 months, I’ll have a different voice in my head.’’

T

on one of his books, or Bradley Cooper playing Marshall Grade, still has some appeal.

‘‘But in terms of why I do it, day to day, the satisfaction I get from writing the book is the thing, and I’m not hanging out for a movie deal. It’s writing novels that I really love.

‘‘And films become a project by committee – I really like the pure, unilateral quality to the creativity of books.’’

Any big screen adaptation would also mean Sanders was tugged, somewhat reluctantly, from the moderate anonymity he presently enjoys with girlfriend Kate in a terraced house in Hauraki.

When his first book was published, most of those around Sanders were gobsmacked, amazed to see him appear on TV or in newspaper articles, because they had no idea this was part of his life. ‘‘I seemed to have writing categorised as something you shouldn’t admit to. So I didn’t really tell people.’’

His impression was that people didn’t spend a lot of time reading, so to spend a lot of time writing would seem a strange thing to do.

On his airport immigration card he now puts ‘‘writer’’.

‘‘But socially, when people ask me what I do, I say, ‘engineer’. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I still have this sort of aversion to talking about it.’’

The marriage of engineering and writing is deliberate.

It might seem a curious mix of logic and imagination, precision and endless options, the certainty of numbers and the complete freedom of words.

But Sanders says it works.

‘‘The creative work really feels like the antithesis of what I do on Monday and Tuesday – I literally just make it up as I go along. If I take that approach on Monday or Tuesday, there are potentially economic or life-safety implications.’’ He tried full-time writing for 18 months but found he missed engineering, designing beams and columns and bracing for houses, making sure an architect’s dream stood up.

‘‘I remember reading some advice from Martin Amis who said, ‘Writers need something to get them out of the house.’ And for me, that’s engineering. It gives me a little bit of real-world fuel that’s something outside of my own imagination.’’

Despite this, and despite the royalty cheques and joy of seeing another of his titles hit bookshop shelves, Sanders says he tries hard to continue seeing his writing as a hobby.

‘‘I really want to preserve the feeling that it’s a passion, and not a job. I don’t want to get into the mindset that I have to sit down and write 1000 words, because that’s when it becomes a grind.

‘‘It’s an interesting balance to try and strike, because I take it very seriously, and want to do it well, but at the same time, I’m trying to remove any feeling of obligation.

‘‘For me, the enjoyment aspect of it really is important.’’