TROY HUNTER’S Gus and the Missing Boy is a page-turning mystery. Good Reading for Young Adults caught up with him to find out the inspiration behind his story.

ABOUT THE BOOK

True crime buff Gus Green has always felt out of place in the world. He’s overweight, gay, his injured mum’s primary carer, and he only has two real friends: sporty Kane and feisty Shell, who are both dealing with their own problems.

Gus’s life is flipped on its head one day when he finds a missing persons website with a digitally aged picture of a missing boy who looks eerily like him. Could he be a kidnapping victim? It would explain a lot about his patchy background, but what would that make his mum – his kidnapper?

As Gus and his friends dive into the mystery, their investigation reveals more questions than answers. Can they unravel the case before his world falls apart? And what will they do if the truth is too much to handle?

Q&A WITH TROY HUNTER

Gus and the Missing Boy is your debut novel. What inspired your foray into crime writing?

I was a typical bookworm growing up, so the desire to write a book has always been there. I used to like reading mystery books like ‘The Three Investigators’ and ‘Hardy Boys’/’Nancy Drew’ as a kid, then graduated to Agatha Christie as a teenager, so mysteries and crime were always my thing I started writing short stories in high school and then in my 20s, and sometimes I’d win competitions!

I did the Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT and was focused on writing for quite a while, but then life and career took over in my 30s. I kept coming back to crime, as a reader at least. It was about 10 years ago that I started writing again properly and returned to that idea about the website and about writing a crime novel.

What sparked the idea for Gus and the Missing Boy?

It started with a missing kid website I stumbled across twenty years ago. The site had page after page of photos of these missing kids. I could see that desperate families were getting photos ‘aged up’ each year to show the age the kid would be now, still holding out hope that their child would be found one day. It really struck me as sad. At the same time, I also remember thinking, what if I found my own photo here?! What would happen if my whole identity was suddenly called into question?

So this idea sat in the back of my mind for years…

How did you go about crafting the central mystery in this story?

Once I had the discovery of the website as the inciting incident, then I thought about the subsequent identity dilemma it would create. So I started to craft characters for this story to go through that experience and started to think up different kidnap scenarios and different reasons why someone might kidnap a child and how to keep that secret over the years.

I also knew I wanted to have an amateur sleuth, not connected to the police, as the ‘detective’. I wanted to have that mystery element with suspects and clues and red herrings, but with an amateur sleuth getting in way too deep.

How did you go about developing the various characters and their motivations?

The main character Gus was the hardest to develop as his first person voice had to carry the reader through the story and you have to like him enough to want him to solve the crime, despite him doing some dumb things. He also had to already have an unusual family situation, and enough insecurity, that the website photo could seem plausible enough to make him start to investigate further.

His friends were important too as they needed to be different to him, but also complementary, and loyal and fun. I wanted them to have a sense of history with him. I also wanted each of them to have a goal at the start of the story that motivates them and to reach that goal somehow by the end.

Plus, channelling Agatha Christie, I tried to give each of the suspects a possible motive for kidnap and have enough clues and red herrings in the story so that any one of them could have done it.

Did you draw from your own life to help shape any of the characters or scenes?

All of the characters probably have some element of me within them somewhere. Gus is probably the closest to me as I had an unusual family situation growing up and was fat and questioned everything!

I did grow up over the road from train lines, with storm tunnels and peppercorn trees, so they were based on reality. Also, there’s a scene with a drunk person being wheeled home in a wheelbarrow that did happen to a family member of mine (not me)!

What was the most challenging part of writing this novel?

This book was originally an adult novel set in the 80s, told in third person from two different characters’ points of view – very different to what it is now! So the biggest challenge for me was turning that story into this contemporary, first person YA story.

The change came about because I went to a ‘publisher speed pitching’ session at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. It was so packed that I ended up in the YA pitching queue for a publisher by mistake. So I had to quickly reframe the adult pitch in my head to a YA pitch – and they liked it! So then I had to go away and rewrite the whole manuscript from top to bottom, to send it in to them. While I ultimately didn’t get a book deal from that publisher, that rewriting and reframing helped simplify the story and voice and streamline the structure, so it all came together well after that.

What kind of research did you do for this novel?

I read a lot of crime websites and stories! I consulted a police detective about kidnappers, motives, police procedures, and the likely legal outcomes of different scenarios. I also spoke to a friend who is a nurse about the medical aspects of the story. I spoke to people who suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. I also spoke to people who had self-harmed. And I spoke to several people who questioned their gender and identity. These aren’t things I necessarily have lived experience of.

What do you hope readers take away from your story?

I hope they enjoy seeing fat, queer kids as the heroes of the story, and that friendships and found families come in all shapes and sizes.

While the story covers some heavy topics, I also hope they enjoy trying to solve the ‘whodunnit’ and ‘whydunnit’ aspects of the story, in true Agatha Christie fashion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Troy Hunter is an adult and YA fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in a variety of publications and journals. He lives in Melbourne and works as a marketing and communications consultant. Gus and the Missing Boy is his first novel.