Fed: All the ingredients there for Venables' latest novel

AAP General News (Australia)
08-13-2004
Fed: All the ingredients there for Venables' latest novel

By Jonathon Moran, National Entertainment Writer

SYDNEY, Aug 13 AAP - Bruce Venables' second novel has all the ingredients for a good
read - it's exotic, erotic, enticing and dangerous.

The policeman turned actor/author's latest offering, The Time Of The Dragons, is a
fictional piece set in pre-World War II Hong Kong with slight echoes of his own life.

"You can't write anything without lending something of yourself to it and I went to
Hong Kong as a young policeman between 1976 and 1979," Venables said from his Bondi beach
home.

"That sense of the orient has really never left me.

"It really was a wonderful time for me, exotic, erotic, exciting and dangerous - it
was just what a young man needs."

The Time Of The Dragons, is based on the character of Inspector Richard Brewster,
an idealistic young Englishman who comes to love life on the island.

The novel follows Brewster's journeys from the pirate enclaves of the South China Sea
to the opulent mansions of Victoria Peak.

It also traces his experiences during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai to the Battle of Britain.

Venables lived in Hong Kong for three years, working as an inspector in the Royal Hong
Kong Police Force but any other similarities to Brewster end there.

"It is an absolute tale of fiction," he said.

"The only similarities with my real life is the fact that he was a young man who joins
the police force."

Venables said his experiences in Hong Kong were some of the best of his life.

"Fortunately people grow out of it but at that stage I had a moustache, a machine-gun
and a beret and I thought I was wonderful," he said.

Venables retired from the police in 1984, choosing to pursue a career in film and television.

He has written numerous scripts and has appeared in many television shows such as Blue
Heelers, Wildside, Water Rats, Always Greener and Murder Call.

His film credits include Paperback Hero with Hugh Jackman and Claudia Karvan and Evil
Angels with Meryl Streep.

His first novel, A Necessary Evil, was a story of vice and corruption in Sydney during
the rock and roll years of the 1950s and 60s.

"I like to write escapist literature that picks people up and drags them along and
sweeps them along through the corridors of time," Venables said.

Researching his latest novel was not always easy.

"The Japanese flattened the joint," Venables said.

"It was a burnt out shell in 1945 when it was recaptured and anything that happened
prior to that is hard to research because all of the government records are gone."

The Time of the Dragons is the first offering in a trilogy series, with successive
books to trace Brewster's life up to the present day.

"The next book will be the years from 1941 through until the 1970s and the third will
follow after that," he said.

"We had to make them complete books so they were complete novels in their own right."

Venables is well into the second novel, with the first five chapters written.

"I am currently in 1967 in Portuguese Macau - a very violent year in Hong Kong history," he said.

"There were communist inspired riots bought about by the red guards and the cultural
revolution so the next one will be a pretty volatile story too."

Venables has been back to Hong Kong several times and still has many friends there.

His last trip was in 1997, before Britain handed the colony back to China.

He would dearly love the book to be made into a film.

"I actually write my chapters filmicly," he said.

"My chapters end with an expectation that something is going to happen in the next
chapter - sort of cliff-hangers."

Venables wouldn't have too much trouble casting the film either.

He would pick any number of Australian actors such as Richard Roxburgh, Geoffrey Rush
or John Howard.

"I could see them all in roles in it," Venables said.

"Good strong actors too, bloody good strong male actors and that is what it would need
because when I write characters in a book, I like to make them much larger than life."

Writing is said to be a lonely profession but for Venables, it is a career that has
brought him and his wife Judy Nunn closer together.

Nunn, who is best known for her long running acting role as Ailsa on Home and Away,
is also a writer and has several books under her belt.

The pair share ideas and often work together.

"Jude gives me her chapters hot off the press and I give her mine," Venables said.

"(When) Judy and I (are) here on our own, the conversation to an outsider would be
bizarre - we talk about the characters as if they are real."

"I feel dreadfully sorry for somebody who is single and writes and they spend all of
this time with these fictional characters."



*****

The Time Of The Dragons is published by Random House Australia, available at a RRP of $29.95.



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