Stories are like tattoos – Neal Drinnan’s, The Devil’s Grip: A true story of shame, sheep and shotguns?


About the book:

Seven shots ring out in the silence of Victoria’s rolling Barrabool Hills. As the final recoil echoes through the paddocks, a revered sheep-breeding dynasty comes to a bloody and inglorious end.

No one could have anticipated the orgy of violence that wiped out three generations of the Wettenhall family, much less the lurid scandals about Darcy Wettenhall, the man behind the world famous Stanbury sheep stud, that would emerge from the aftermath.

Almost three decades later, the web of secrets and lies that led to this bizarre and seemingly motiveless murder spree are unravelled with the help of Bob Perry, Darcy Wettenhall’s secret lover for a decade prior to his murder.

From the bucolic majesty, privilege and snobbery of the Western District’s prized pastoral lands and dynasties to the bleak, loveless underworld of orphanages, rodeo stables and homeless shelters, The Devil’s Grip is a courageous and thought-provoking meditation on the fragility of reputation, the folly of deception and the power of shame.

A chitty-chat with Neal:  

The Devil’s Grip and my Sweet Bitter Cane had oddly similar genesis.  Both works were inspired by a person saying, when they’d heard we were writers, “Have I got a story for you.”  I remember that moment, staring at the ice in the bottom of a whisky glass, thinking – this could go one of two ways.  What did you think in that moment? 

Well, when Bob told me about his story, I started to wonder if it was actually the sort of direction I wanted to go in and indeed if I’d be good at telling this story at the time. I can’t recall if I was drinking whiskey but I may have been drinking red wine!

This book represents quite a change for you, not only in content but concept.  How would you describe the genre? 

I’ve coined a term, ‘divergent narrative’ which describes a style of writing that alternates between the subjective and objective. I’m not the first to do it but I am the first to name it. Now I’ll listen out for it to see if academics use it in the future and if I’ll be credited with styling the genre. Watch this space.

What stirred you to select this rather than writing the story as a novel?  

I think there was plenty of material and plenty of stories from other sources and contributors to consider it non-fiction. It would lose something if I passed it off as a novel.

In many ways you have instilled plot on this work.  Was that hard to sort the events through that veil? 

Interestingly I had no idea there was a plot at first but then as I talked to people who revealed Darcy’s childhood in care and his family dynamics were revealed and different vignettes came to light, a plot sort of coalesced. His character began to reveal himself through his actions and I just had to add some obvious things to the obscure bits.

This is the first time you’ve dipped so boldly into historical writing.  Did you enjoy the research? 

It was a roller coaster in lots of ways but much easier given it was a collaboration. I don’t know what it would have been had I been writing about someone who didn’t want to be written about…

What was it like being constrained by historical events, not having the freedom to let your imagination wander to get out of pot/plot holes and corners? 

You quickly learn that facts can be as shifty as things imagined. In the end, the scope of this story proved to be much greater than I anticipated initially so I didn’t feel constrained.

Whilst the bulk of the events occurred in the last thirty to forty years, there were points at which you encountered people who weren’t prepared to talk to you, not wanting to rake over the bones.  I can only compared it to the numerous dead-ends in my research, where searching only finds that something simply wasn’t written down.  But in a novel, that is almost the point of liberty, taking off with imagination.  For you, that must have been frustrating. 

In the end those dead-ends feed into the very reason why something like the murders at Stanbury happened. Not talking about things or facing things is the tragedy behind this story. Respectable people want to stay respectable. This is not a story about respectable things.

It must be quite a change to establish characters and traits by direct description and reportage, rather than revealing them by showing the character in action.  Was this a liberty or a constraint? 

I don’t think I had to make characters up here, for the most part they are revealed by their own words and actions. Where I had to fill in the gaps, well, you have to imagine a bit but how far from the truth could any of my imaginings have been?

Another feature of the work I really enjoyed was that your exploration of this story, unleashed elements of autobiography/memoir, where you reassessed your evolution and the times you’ve lived through.  Was this voice hard to nestle into such a disparate story? 

I’m not sure they were so disparate in the sense that there was discord on all fronts at the time, I was just aligning them and it seems those parallel stories complement each other.

What adjustments did you made to your prose style?  Whilst there’s still your signature wit and sharp insights, were you aware of them as you were writing?  Was it a struggle to find this polyphonic voice? 

The biggest adjustment was to turn long tracts of research about things I wasn’t necessarily interested in into prose that I would find engaging and so would both sheep breeders and soddomites…Quite a challenge I’m sure you’ll agree.

Your last two novels have been self-published.  What was it like being back in the world of mainstream publishers? 

Gratifying and a great renewal to my vocation

You site this work as a collaboration with Bob Perry.  That, too, must have been an odd/new situation.  How did you structure working together? 

It has been the most wonderful and joyous collaborative project in my life. Bob is a magnificent friend and we have shared in this project equally. It’s been like nothing I have ever known.

So, in the future when someone says to you, “Have I got a story for you!”, what will you do? 

Well, I already have the story, ‘the someone’ this time just doesn’t know it yet.

I highly recommend Neal Drinnan’s, The Devil’s Grip: A true story of shame, sheep and shotguns

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