Joanna Jenkins grew up on a small farm in country Queensland. After graduating from the University of Queensland in the late ’80s with degrees in English Literature and Law, she practised as a solicitor in ‘Big Law’, including for many years as a partner of an international law firm.
Her debut novel, How to Kill a Client, is a fast-paced funny crime novel about Gavin, a lawyer, who is found dead. No-one liked Gavin. The list of those who suffered from his cruelty was long enough to include pretty much everyone who had contact with him. There’s a long list of suspects to choose from.
What are you reading now?
At the moment, I’m reading Still Life by Sarah Winman but have been attacking the reading pretty hard in the last couple of weeks. Just finished Midnight Watch by David Dyer, The Sun Walks Down by Fiona MacFarlane, The Chase by Candice Fox and a truly wonderful memoir by Heather Rose called Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here.
What were your favourite books as a child?
I read anything in my parents’ bookshelves. I’d read the cornflakes packet if it was in front of me. At the start it was very anglicised. I loved Paddington Bear, and the ‘William’ books by Richmal Crompton about an extremely naughty 10-year-old boy. And, of course, there was Jane Austen.
There were the (also anglicised, not to say colonial) Australian children’s books, chief among them the one about Judy who (spoiler alert) is mortally injured by a falling gum tree while on a picnic. She had a grumpy father and a myriad of siblings. That’s right – it was called Seven Little Australians.
My parents’ bookshelves also housed Len Deighton and Helen McLean (spy thrillers). And then I moved onto Dickens.
Which books have made you laugh out loud?
The ‘Rumpole’ books by John Mortimer. These are the inner musings of an aging British barrister as he deals with the ‘old darlings’ on the bench and his pompous colleagues in chambers.
Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis. Archy is a cockroach who writes vers libre poetry in the first person on a typewriter in the dark of night by jumping head-first onto the keys. His nemesis is an alley cat called Mehitabel who claims she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Because of the difficulty he has accessing the Caps Lock key, Archy’s poems are all in lower case, until the night when the person who owns the typewriter (Marquis) leaves the Caps Lock key down. That poem is entitled ‘CAPITALS AT LAST’.
Which books have you never forgotten since reading them?
Hilary Mantel made me understand how powerful a fictionalised version of a true story can be if you look at it from the inside of a character.
The Aunt’s Story by Patrick White which I read when I was 18. I thought I would end up like the aunt, going mad alone in a hotel in Monaco. But being inside her head and, understanding that’s where a writer can write from, was transcendental.Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, were both about women coping during war, how they dealt every day with the mechanics of survival – getting food, avoiding rape – in a very practical way.
If given the opportunity to host a dinner party and invite six people, authors or not – alive or deceased – who would they be?
Hugh Jackman
Patrick White
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh
Dorothy Parker, because she coined the line ‘She runs the gamut of emotions, from A to B’. Katharine Hepburn, because that is who Dorothy Parker was talking about and also because she was fabulous. Ann Glossop, my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, who was convicted in 1790 of stealing nine yards of velvet in a trial which looked like a stitch up (pun purely accidental) so that I can cross examine her about her life. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh because she was a suffragette and was also the daughter of the maharajah who ‘gave’ the Kohinoor diamond to the British. Don Marquis because he must have been a Very Funny Man. Patrick White, to see if he was as irascible and rude as he was rumoured to be and, if so, to watch him slug it out with Dorothy Parker. And I’m going to cheat and ask Hugh Jackman so that he can calm the burgeoning conflict, by smiling and singing in tune.
Don Marquis
Katharine Hepburn
Dorothy Parker
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