Do you like your stories part myth, part magical gay murder-mystery cruise? Enjoy dragons in bow-ties and faraway worlds? Then perhaps Voyage of the Damned, the debut novel from local author Frances White is right up your street. We sat down with Frances to talk about finding your voice, getting published and being perceived as a writer.
Frances White, ever-giggling, is an absolute joy to be around. Her triumph of a debut novel, Voyage of the Damned, was released into the world back in January and I was lucky enough not only to get my hands on an early copy, but to chat with her a week before the launch too. When I asked how she was feeling about the release she said she was ‘half way between excited and very, very anxious’. Excited because ‘it’s a dream come true’ and anxious because ‘ahh, I’m going to be perceived!’ After reading the book though, I got the feeling that if this anxiety was coming from the book being perceived, she didn’t need to worry in the slightest - Voyage of the Damned is nothing short of genius.
Set in the faraway world of Concordia, the book follows a voyage of the Emperor’s ship, aboard which are the heirs of the land’s twelve provinces. As the heirs start being found murdered, our hero Ganymedes, a joker and a persistent underachiever must ‘become the hero he was not born to be’ and attempt to crack the case before all nautical hell breaks loose. Frances herself has coined the term ‘magical gay murder cruise’ to describe it and it’s what publishers call ‘not easy to shelve’.
Yes, Frances taught me this term. And yes, I will be using it to describe every weird and wonderful thing I come across from here on out. Part myth, part murder-mystery, the novel is both hilarious and heart-breaking. It has about as many twists as you can fit into one book, yet still develops deeply real and fleshed-out characters - and a lot of them! This is Frances’ first published book, but not the first that she’s written. I asked her what the story was behind that - had it taken her a while to find her authentic voice?
As the heirs start being found murdered, our hero Ganymedes, a joker and a persistent underachiever, must ‘become the hero he was not born to be’
“I think it takes a while,” Frances says. “It takes most writers a bit of exploring to find their voice because to get published you’ve got to get an agent first and then you’ve got to get a publisher. There’s a lot of hurdles to get over. And when you’re doing that you get so entwined in that world of ‘what do they want to see?’, ‘what should I be doing?’, ‘what books are being picked up?’, that it’s easy to think you should be doing what has worked for other people. You sort of end up writing for a box that might not necessarily fit.”
“It’s hard to take a risk in publishing,” Frances tells me. “Because publishers are usually a bit reluctant to take a risk. I’m really grateful that mine did, because they acknowledged that Voyage of the Damned is a bit, you know, quirky in that it doesn’t really fit anywhere. But they said ‘we love it, so we’re gonna go with it’.”
“I think for a while, I was still writing stuff I liked - I don’t want to pretend that those novels I wrote before had nothing to do with me. But it wasn’t until I was writing this one, when I was frustrated, that I thought ‘I just want to write something where I ignore all the voices and just go for it’. And I did.”
A beautiful depiction of young queer love forms the spine of the novel, and even without all the murder and magic, the book is worth reading just to hear the way that our hero Dee talks about his love interest. Voyage of the Damned is a 468-page stand-alone, but within this one volume it creates a fun and unique world that had me immersed by the end of the first chapter. It manages to offer a nuanced exploration of mental health, and the impact that secrets can have on our wellbeing, while also having characters express their frustrations through incredible phrases like ‘dragon’s dick’. Throw some dragons wearing bow-ties into the mix and what more could you ask for from a book?
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