Blanche d'Alpuget on her racy new detective novel: ‘All my books have had quite a bit of sex'

The Guardian

18-03-2025

'I always like sex,' Blanche d'Alpuget says with her customary candour. 'All my books have had quite a bit of sex in them. Without that, we're not here.'
Although she is better known to most Australians as the perennially glamorous second wife of the late prime minister Bob Hawke, D'Alpuget, now 81, has been writing since she was 30, with 15 published books under her belt.
'It's a compulsion. It is so pleasurable. I love doing it so much,' she says. 'You sit down and start writing and everything else disappears. Time disappears and the world disappears. You're just in this other world in your head.'
There have been biographies, novels, essays and numerous awards. Her bestselling 1982 book Robert J Hawke: A Biography, researched and written when they were broken up, won the New South Wales Premier's literary award and remains the definitive work on the former prime minister. Her novels Monkeys in the Dark, Turtle Beach, Winter in Jerusalem and White Eye won the Pen Golden Jubilee award, the Age novel of the year award and the South Australian Premier's award.
Most recently came a quartet of hefty historical novels about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine which – amid the intrigue, brutal battles and powermongering of the 12th century – contained plenty of imaginatively prurient sex (King Henry II in particular was a rutter extraordinaire).
But her latest, The Bunny Club, is something of a departure: a racy detective novel set among the harbourside glass castles of Sydney's eastern suburbs and the equestrian estates of the southern highlands. It opens with an ageing morning television host who is fighting to keep her job, Evelyn Sinclair, suddenly found dead in an astoundingly grisly crime scene: hanging upside down from the ceiling, tied up using shibari, the Japanese art of rope bondage.
'I came across shibari and did a lot of reading about it,' D'Alpuget explains. Someone had defecated in Evelyn's bed, too. 'I didn't mind the gruesome deaths, I liked writing them,' she says with a chuckle.
The resulting investigation takes detectives Lang Taylor and Iris Wu into a seldom-seen side of Sydney, including the world of Anton de Villiers, a French aristocrat who has found his calling in the 'unusual humanitarian work' of male escort. As he says, 'I absolve my clients of fear and guilt and make them feel loved'.
De Villiers brings the eroticism to the novel and becomes a hapless catalyst for much of the action that follows: a sometimes gruesome comedy of errors involving surveillance, sex work, the dark web and a cast of characters drawn together in a plot that feverishly twists and turns.
The Plantagenet series 'was a hell of a lot of work', D'Alpuget says. 'I wanted to do something contemporary because I didn't want to do a whole lot of research.' But crime writing, she came to realise, has its own demands.
'I'd never done one before and I had no idea how to do it. It took an enormous long time to find out how to write one. I had to learn from my mistakes.'
Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning
The Bunny Club involved plenty of research, too: she had to mine an anesthetist friend for information on untraceable poisons and speak to detectives, medical people, lawyers and tech workers. 'I would get to a point where I realised, 'I don't know anything about this, I'll have to find someone who can explain it,'' she says.
'All my other novels have been a sort of witness to history, set in Indonesia, Malaysia, Israel. They've all been about drama and wars. This is a completely new thing for me.'
The eastern suburbs, however, is terrain she knows well. D'Alpuget grew up there – the only child of Josephine Curgenven and Louis d'Alpuget (a journalist, author, yachtsman and boxer) – and went to the exclusive all-girls private school Sceggs Darlinghurst.
D'Alpuget writes with a knowingness about the wealthy people who inhabit this world and what some of them will do to get and hold on to money and power. Spending so much time around politicians surely gave her some insight, too. 'All my characters are a melange of oneself and people one's known,' she says.
That includes the woman at the heart of the plot: morning TV host Evelyn Sinclair. 'I've been interviewed on television by a lot of people over the years. One gets an idea of the sort of pressures they are under. It's not an easy job,' D'Alpuget says.
But De Villiers, she tells me, came from the internet. 'If you look up straight male escorts for women, you will find a whole lot of them,' she says. 'They are probably mostly in the eastern suburbs because that's where they are most easily afforded.'
Sign up to Saved for Later
Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips
after newsletter promotion
D'Alpuget may have been writing for five decades, but her work has often been overshadowed by her relationship with Bob Hawke – for both the scandal of his divorce from his beloved first wife Hazel and for being his blond, sparkly consort. But these days when she is on her afternoon walk through the city parks to the harbour, total strangers will smile at her. 'It's so nice.'
Hawke and D'Alpuget met in the early 70s and had a lust-fuelled on-off affair – 'Bob was dramatic and I'm quite fiery myself' – until they finally married in 1995. For a long time afterwards, she stopped writing: Bob was a full-time job.
'We were travelling all the time and I was the director of the companies [RJ Hawke and Associates and Third Advent Pty Ltd], so I had a lot of work to do all the time we were married,' she says.
She has spoken before about how intimate and tender their relationship was in the very last part of his life. After Hawke died in May 2019, at the age of 89, her grief went inwards. 'I certainly wasn't coping well … I'm almost certain that getting breast cancer was a response to grief.
'I did spend nearly all of 2020 either having chemotherapy, or surgery after surgery. I've got nerves of steel so I don't have mental meltdowns, but I will have physical ones. And that has been so my whole life.'
She was back in her 'happy place', writing again, when she got Covid and pneumonia in 2020 and 2021. After being in fog during those years of illness, she has finally got her imagination back – 'better than ever, really' – and now she's on a roll. 'There are at least four or five characters in the Bunny Club I would use in another book – characters I particularly liked,' she says.
D'Alpuget, I posit, seems to be indestructible. 'Well, not in the end,' she says. 'None of us is.'
Blanche d'Alpuget launches The Bunny Club at Manly writers' festival on 28 March.