WITH the release of Colin King’s novel ‘Deep Down’, the third in a series following the unsettled career of Detective Sergeant Rory James, the author has made good on his intention to write a Grampians-based murder mystery.

Launched in Cavendish last month, Mr King’s own bushland “writer’s retreat” property at Mooralla, roughly 20 kilometres to the north-west, forms the inspiration for the opening of the book, with a smoky-quartz crystal fossicking site nearby.

“I am not a fossicker, but we do visit the site from time to time,” he said.

“Often there are fossickers present who are more than happy to chat and show off their finds.

“Some of the holes - which are only permitted to be dug by hand - are astonishingly deep. Even more amazingly, when they have finished digging the massive hole, they are required to turn around and fill it in before they leave.

“Of course, the filled hole is no longer ‘un-worked’ ground, so it is guaranteed never to be dug up again.”

Mr King said it would be “the perfect place to hide a dead body”, and so sets the scene for his troubled main character to solve a mystery that ends up getting much bigger than first thought.

“He's a detective in the homicide squad who's back from sick leave with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) because he ended up killing somebody in the line of duty,” Mr King said.

“There are bones found … so they send along an Indigenous archeologist.

“She sort of hangs around because her brother had gone missing a few years earlier and that investigation had been underdone and she wants him (Det Sgt James) to take another look at that, which he does.

“The cases become intertwined.”

Mr King worked in Hamilton in the 1970s and 80s with the Department of Agriculture and more recently wrote a history of the parish where his property is located.

“The history I wrote of the local area also included pioneer-war massacres that happened nearby on squatters’ holdings and in the Grampians,” he said.

“I knew this could be a sensitive matter for squatters’ descendants who still farmed those original holdings. I seized on this as motive for my present-day murder.

“These were the elements around which I decided to craft a novel.”

Even though “it was in the back of my mind for decades”, writing novels was something that crept up on Mr King, as around the time of his retirement he discovered the pleasure of documenting a trip to Europe and “couldn’t tear myself away from the keyboard”.

The high-level position he had held “doing cabinet papers and writing for ministers” had given him the skills to do something more personally satisfying.

“I was able to use those skills for good rather than evil,” Mr King joked.

Dividing his time between his home in Bendigo and Mooralla, he said he doesn’t expect to be famous or rich from his writing but is grateful for the opportunity to do something so enjoyable, with plans for audiobook versions in the works too.

‘Deep Down’ will be available at Bellcourt Books and the Cavendish Bridge Café, as well as at a Redgum festival stall today.