{"id":413537,"date":"2026-01-15T01:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T01:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/413537\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T01:15:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T01:15:14","slug":"rugby-writer-turns-to-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/413537\/","title":{"rendered":"Rugby writer turns to crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The First Law of the Bush\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Former King Country rugby player Geoff Parkes is making a name for himself as a New Zealand bush crime novelist.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Geoff Parkes second historic bush crime novel has been published.<\/p>\n

Parkes, who grew up in Taumarunui, played for Piopio Rugby Football Club and for King Country in early to mid-1980s \u2013 his contemporaries include Te K\u016biti\u2019s Glynn Meads \u2013 before emigrating to Australia in 1988 where he now lives and works as a rugby writer and crime novelist.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just a good time,\u201d he said of his formative years. \u201cA good place to live, a good place to play rugby, a good place to play cricket in summer, water skiing on Sundays at Lake Taup\u014d, all that sort of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penguin Random House Australia published his second novel on January 6, The First Law of the Bush, 11 months after his first crime novel When The Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole.<\/p>\n

So how did Parkes end up writing New Zealand bush crime novels?<\/p>\n

\u201cI always wanted to write fiction, and it was just a matter of finding the time in and around work and other commitments,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For the last 12 years Parkes has written a weekly opinion column for Australian online sports website The Roar.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main thing I wanted to write about was the King Country region. A lot of it links to the Whanganui River that\u2019s sort of got a bit of a hold on people that lived close to the river and also the volcanoes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second thing was the era. I wanted to write about the 80s because I thought it was a fascinating time where we\u2019ve grown up in this very sort of British male dominated society where the women were expected to cook and look after the kids and they were really only starting to have careers and the men were work hard, play hard, drink hard.\u2019<\/p>\n

Parkes finds that era fascinating.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not enough for a book though so I needed a plot and so I decided that it would be a crime novel and base it around a shearing gang and a missing backpacker and so the crime sort of came third if you like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parkes\u2019 second novel, set a decade later in 1993, opens with the death of a worker on the Makatote Viaduct south of National Park and features the same lawyer as his first.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a more honest crime book,\u201d Parkes said. \u201cI\u2019m not just writing about where I grew up.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Zealand is one of the things that I really wanted to write about. The bush has such a strong identity. It\u2019s partly to do with age, how dense it is, how dark it can be and wet and all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Geoff Parkes at a book signing session in Paper Plus Taumarunui for the book signing! \u2018A World In (Union) Conflict; The Global Battle For Rugby Supremacy\u2019<\/p>\n

Parkes is a keen bush tramper.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m about halfway through my third book and it doesn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s so rushed or anything because as long as you keep chipping away at it steadily, you don\u2019t feel under pressure. I try to write most nights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parkes said he received emails from readers thanking him for bringing back memories of rural New Zealand of their youth. \u201cThe smell of the shearing shed, walking in the bush, and all that sort of stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone\u2019s got that shared experience of growing up in New Zealand. It\u2019s quite distinctive. It\u2019s certainly very different to Australia\u201d<\/p>\n

It sounds quite self-indulgent.<\/p>\n

\u201cA little bit, yeah, for sure. And more so in the first book. I think I got a lot of that out of my system. But the language is there. The way people talk and stuff like that. We know what it\u2019s like. We live in that, and there is a distinctive sort of language that rural New Zealanders use.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parkes gets back to New Zealand a couple of times a year, visiting his mother Joyce, 93, in Taumarunui.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The First Law of the Bush<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The First Law of the Bush Former King Country rugby player Geoff Parkes is making a name for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-413537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}