The Survivors
by Steve Braunias

Steve Braunias – three parts Hildy Johnson to one part Evelyn Waugh and one part fox in a henhouse.

Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, is the star reporter in Howard Hawks’s 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, which is set in the golden age of ‘yellow journalism’, with Johnson set to escape her newspaper job for married life when editor Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant, suckers her into a last assignment.

Braunias doesn’t have the legs to be Rosalind Russell so perhaps is better compared to Jack Lemmon as Johnson in The Front Page, Billy Wilder’s 1974 version of the same story. Or better still to the actor playing Burns in that version, Walter Matthau.

Braunias has the inky fingers and crumpled comportment of an old school hack – before the profession got so serious and sanctimonious, when it was still rough-house and raffish. Cigarette in one hand and drink in the other, with a bottle of whisky no doubt in his filing cabinet, he would have fitted right into the press room where Hildy Johnson is first among equals in a group of reporters playing poker to kill time before an execution. They’re a convivial bunch but when the need arises pitilessly competitive. As Braunias – a frequenter of the justice world like Johnson – writes (of the convivial part at least): ‘Court reporting is one of the more collegial rounds in journalism.’

Braunias is first among equals on the press bench of courtrooms. But here he breaks with tradition. He would, he says, make a terrible court reporter in the orthodox sense. Instead, he has pioneered what, from what I can see, is an entirely new journalistic genre. He has taken the licence to lampoon of the parliamentary sketch writer and applied it to criminal trials. There are few, if any, examples of this being done elsewhere, even in retrospect after a trial has ended. Braunias does so in real time, with almost daily dispatches, currently for the New Zealand Herald. This requires remarkable navigational skills (on his or the Herald lawyers’ part) to get around the many restrictions contempt of court legislation imposes. At times he sails so close to the wind you can see it ruffling his hair.

Another thing that sets Braunias apart is that he has ‘always been partial to airs’, as he puts it in one of the three books (a trilogy, if you will) that draw on his journalism in this area: The Scene of the Crime: Twelve Extraordinary True Stories of Crime and Punishment (2015), Missing Persons: Twelve Extraordinary Tales of Death and Disappearance in New Zealand (2021) and now The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation.

One of his other jobs is literary editor of Newsroom. He’s done similar roles at the New Zealand Listener, Sunday Star-Times and The Spinoff, and possibly other publications I’ve forgotten. In these roles he’s always been the one to beat and no one ever has. As both editor and writer (reviews, interviews, think-pieces), his breadth and depth of reading and knowledge of New Zealand literature past and present, his nose for bullshit and appreciation of its antithesis (in prose and in people), his appetite for mischief and provocation, have ensured the liveliest and most compelling literary sections in the country. What’s more, he’s reinvented himself for the new digital and literary age not once but twice, at first The Spinoff and then Newsroom.

Braunias’s literariness is fundamental to the quality of his writing about crime and related topics. Don’t be deceived by his nonchalant (mis)demeanour – he’s one of our hardest-working journalists, full of curiosity with a meticulous eye for the minutest detail and zealous in seeking out the extra fact or angle to make a story stronger. For instance, one of the many incidental pleasures of these books is the nature writing you get along the way (‘in damp earth at the side of the house, a runner bean was tied to a bamboo pole. It wasn’t running very fast. It looked ready to give up’).

Good writing – and life – is in large part an accumulation of incidentals. It’s also style. Braunias is as capable as the next writer of a dull line and a rushed recourse to cliché. And he has his linguistic tics (‘PR trout’, ‘ambient IQ’, ‘wretch’, etc) that make me think of Julian Barnes’s comment about being edited by the New Yorker and being pulled up for using ‘crepuscular’ before – not in the same article, mind, but a couple of articles before. What Braunias is incapable of, though, is journalese. You could never mistake his writing for that of anyone else on those press benches. Where others of us might spend months trying to work up a line only for it to fall flat on to the page, Braunias studs these stories with gems, as though he pulls them out of a hat. Just one example: ‘Old, stooped, with an expression on his face of a man who was anxious about his next footstep, he wore a blue shirt buttoned to the neck and he looked like he had swallowed his teeth.’

This is where Evelyn Waugh comes in. But where Braunias really reminds me of Waugh is in his streak of comic cruelty. Waugh was once challenged for being so mean and yet a Catholic. To which he replied, imagine how much meaner he’d be if he weren’t a Catholic. Braunias’s meanness has become part of his self-mythology. In The Survivors, he refers at one point to being ‘loathed’, almost as a badge of honour. And in a way it is. The world of New Zealand letters can be so damned cosy, like a group hug. It has never known what to make of Braunias’s bracing intellectual honesty and unpredictability. He doesn’t play the game; he can’t help himself. He’s that fox in the henhouse of New Zealand politesse and prudence.

Braunias demonstrates much kindness throughout these stories – to victims, their families and the families of defendants. But sometimes his quick wit is too quick and gets the better of him, the puns and one-liners sitting uncomfortably amid the surrounding material. In places, those powers of observation might have been suppressed too, instead of pointing out the bad breath or tendency to repeat themselves of non-combatant interviewees just trying to help him. Bystanders, beware, lest you become Braunias’s collateral damage – bystanders ranging from academics (‘old, white, unsuccessful’) to the Auckland suburb of Titirangi (‘Dreadful place’) to jurors apparently flirting with each other.

Ironically, given he dismisses ‘the bullshit science of body language’, Braunias retains a touching commitment to the value of physical description. He must be the only man left writing who would describe a woman as ‘slender’ or ‘blonde’ and he’s quite the fat shamer with ‘There was a lot of him’ or the description of an expert witness as ‘stout’, as well as endless goes at convicted murderer Mark Lundy’s weight (between pages increasing his shirt size, either in error or jest, from XXL to XXXL). He almost had me feeling sorry for Lundy, for this at least. We can’t all be as slender (sic) as Mr Braunias.

In first Missing Persons and now The Survivors, Braunias has drifted further and further from strictly courtroom settings and crime as a subject, with missing persons and survivors enabling him to encompass a more diverse group of characters, including a ‘wandering German genius’, a young man with Down syndrome and Frank Sargeson’s one-time (i.e. a single time) and life-changing lover Len Hollobon.

Not that criminals aren’t diverse. Happy families are all alike; every criminal family is criminal in its own way. Throughout these books, whether considering (again and again) Mark Lundy, or the Louise Nicholas case, or Natalie Bracken, who spontaneously became the getaway driver for a cop killer, Braunias avoids stock characterisations and ridiculous reductions such as ‘evil’. He digs pass the obvious to the darkness – and moreover greyness – beyond. He knows about unknowability and allows for doubt. More than once, he upends received wisdom about someone or something.

Braunias has his likes and dislikes among the (sometimes recurring) cast of criminals, witnesses, victims, lawyers and judges (bromancing Justice Simon Moore in particular). Collegiality isn’t just for the press bench; there is a collegial air to the whole court system, with Braunias a familiar figure among those involved, including staff and his fellow court-goers.

By their nature, many of these stories are intrusive. Once the press bench has fulfilled the function of ‘open justice’, what is left other than prurient interest? In The Survivors, Braunias extends his intellectual honesty to himself and acknowledges ‘the suspicion that I had descended into that feeble little spectator sport of dark tourism’. It is, he says, ‘a kind of moral trespassing’. The mere fact he writes this suggests there is much else going on too. These stories are more than bread and circuses. He grapples with philosophically challenging legal concepts such as the ‘innocent agent’ and ‘proviso’. There are two of the best character studies I’ve read – that of Derek King and his sexual hellscape of defiled underage homeless youths (in The Scene of the Crime), and better still that of ex-journalist Murray Mason (in Missing Persons), to say anything more about which would be to undermine the skilful way Braunias unravels his secrets.

Only once does Braunias stray into the truly lurid. Having, in his account of the Grace Millane murder, fastidiously phrased how he describes killer Jesse Kempson’s post-death photographs of her genitals, he goes and ruins it with a passing mention of that case’s prosecutor in an account of another case altogether, now referring to how the prosecutor had held up ‘photos that Kempson had taken of her p—-‘. I hope Braunias spent as long thinking about using that word as I thought about not using it.

For those of us amused and perplexed by Braunias’s constant celebrations of his writing successes in his Newsroom pieces (what’s that all about – tongue in cheek, tongue up his own arse or an extended piece of performance art?), it’s interesting to note that in The Survivors he’s started to include his name in interviewee quotes, as in: ‘And do you know, Steve, I have told that story to so many people …’. It’s journalistic custom to remove these when they occur. This example is in a piece about music entertainer Jock Hume, who Braunias posits has adopted the guise of The Singing Cowboy to disappear from his day-to-day self. What’s the opposite of disappearing? Being noticed? Don’t worry, Steve, we see you.

Braunias says The Survivors is his last true-crime book – the final of what will be a trilogy. All that darkness has got to him. I don’t doubt it. It’s got to me and I’m only reading the books. But I’m not so sure he’s done with it. His New Zealand Herald sketches from the six-week Philip Polkinghorne murder trial have been required reading and suggest he’s not finished yet. At the end of His Girl Friday and The Front Page, Hildy Johnson doesn’t escape the clutches of Walter Burns and ends up back in the newsroom. Will Steve Braunias escape the clutches of crime?