Michael Robotham was a 22-year-old journalist working for a Sydney newspaper when he began writing his first novel in the early 1980s.

"[It] was going to be my great Australian novel … [and] win me every prize in the world," Robotham tells ABC Arts.

He finished it six years later, when he was living in London. It came very close to being published.

Set in a small country town based on his hometown of Gundagai in the Riverina region of NSW, the novel had the working title Blessed Are the Meek.

"I missed out by a single vote in an acquisitions meeting for a major publisher," Robotham says.

"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."

He consigned the manuscript to his bottom drawer and spent the next decade working as a journalist and then as a ghostwriter.

Robotham returned to Australia in the 90s, but when he eventually began writing a new novel he recalled the advice he'd been given and 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. It has since sold more than 1 million copies worldwide and was adapted for television in 2022.

Now, two decades later, Robotham has finally set a book in Australia.

Tell Me Something True, Robotham's 20th novel, is a "seriously rewritten and re-imagined" version of that first manuscript.

"All the story and the characters remain the same, but it's been in the bottom drawer since the 1980s," he says.

A tale of brotherhood

Robotham wrote the first version of Tell Me Something True on a Remington typewriter, so the first step of the rewriting process was transferring it to a computer.

When he cast an appraising eye over the original story, he 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.'"

He also found that the world had moved on in many ways.

"There was no such thing as a sensitivity reader all those years ago," he says.

"It's amazing how you'd put things in books 20 years ago that you wouldn't put in a book today."

But the most significant change was structural. The original story unfolded chronologically.

"Back then, it was the story of Arlo Hackett and his brother Luke … and into their life I dropped this very feisty, opinionated teenage girl, Saxon, who arrives in a stolen car," he says.

"I wasn't writing it as a crime novel. I saw it as a coming-of-age novel and a story about brotherhood and family."

In the published version, Robotham created a second storyline set in the present as Arlo returns to his hometown of Yulara after his release from prison.

To contemporary readers, Tell Me Something More belongs to a well-established tradition in Australian publishing of mysteries set in the bush, also known as outback noir, kicked off by Jane Harper's 2006 novel, The Dry.

But, as Robotham good-humouredly points out, his novel predates the trend by decades.

"I did this first," he says. "Well before the others did it, I'd done it."

Small-town secrets

Robotham describes Tell Me Something True as his most autobiographical work.

"It's my most personal book in a sense," he says. "There are scenes in it that are lifted straight out of my childhood."

Robotham's father was a teacher, and the family moved often when he was a child.

His primary school years were spent in Gundagai, a town of 2,000 people on the Murrumbidgee River known, among other claims to fame, as the resting place of 19th-century bushranger Captain Moonlite.

While Robotham says the town is easily recognisable to anyone familiar with its geography and history, he 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 says.

"I didn't want people playing a guessing game as to whether I based any of this on real-life characters."

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 says.

"They're full of secrets and yet they're places where it's almost impossible to keep a secret."

In Tell Me Something True, the newly freed Arlo attempts to resume life in Yulara, but encounters hostility from the town's residents, many of whom he's known his whole life.

His mother is in a nursing home and the house he grew up in is in disrepair.

With nowhere else to go, he sets about fixing up the house.

As he reflects on his past, told in flashbacks, he begins to question the events that led to his imprisonment.

"Initially you're asking readers to accept a narrator who spent 12 years in prison for being an accessory to a terrible rape and murder," Robotham says.

"And you're thinking, 'How am I going to go along with this? Do I want to spend time with this man?'

"But as his story unfolds, you realise how badly wronged he's been."

Literary influences

Robotham says he can see his early literary influences in Tell Me Something True, from John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978) and Hotel New Hampshire (1981) to John Steinbeck's 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men.

Also an enthusiastic reader of Australian fiction, Robotham's number one choice in the Top 100 Australian Books was Illywhacker by Peter Carey.

Shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize, the novel tells the story of the memorable and idiosyncratic Herbert Badgery.

"He's a 139-year-old con man who relates the story of his life, and you can't believe a word of what he says … and I loved that," Robotham says.

"I read that in my 20s and thought Peter Carey was a genius."

Robotham is also an admirer of Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, his former colleague-turned-fellow novelist.

"It's an astonishing piece of research," he says.

"I'm in awe of people who write historic fiction. The idea of capturing that period of history of the plague years in that tiny, isolated village in Britain — I thought she did a remarkable job."

Robotham acknowledges we're at a crucial moment in global publishing thanks to the encroachment of AI.

"There was something like a million extra books published in the last year because they've been generated by AI. There's going to be a tsunami of AI slop," he says.

"But I'm a realist … It might make mistakes now, but AI will get better."

Robotham is currently 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 SWF Homegrown at the State Library of NSW on October 10.

ABC Radio National will count down the Top 100 Australian Books on air on October 17 and 18.