Urban legends
This time, the artist turned his tendency for deconstruction on himself. For a dozen years or so, bisected by the millennium, Chad Taylor was one of the most exciting voices in New Zealand literature. His tales of office workers, street-walkers and burglars caught up in offbeat events laced with mystery, violence and sex in vivid renderings of Auckland earned him literary fellowships at home and translations and rave reviews from major publications abroad.
“Effortlessly cool”, “wonderfully urban”, “hallucinatory”, chorused the international critics, as they attempted to distil how Taylor toyed with and subverted crime fiction conventions in books such as Heaven, Shirker, Electric and Departure Lounge.
If Paul Thomas had torn New Zealand crime writing from its cosy traditions with his Ihaka trilogy in the 1990s, then Chad Taylor had flipped it upside down and shook it until it fizzed like a bottle of L&P on a hot summer’s day.
