rom: The Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday, 7 October, 2000
by Keith Austin

he Life of Reilly

The dinner party conversation had turned to books. "Has anyone read that Ice Station?" asked one guest. "Complete crap, but I just couldn't put it down." A chorus of assent followed. Most of those at the table had also read it, yet few could remember the author's name or realised that he was Australian.

Matthew Reilly, 26, laughs loudly at the anecdote; "Yeah, I get that all the time." He can afford to laugh. In the four years since he self-published Contest, his first novel, Reilly has sold more than a quarter of a million copies of Ice Station and the equally successful follow-up, Temple. "But isn't that an oxymoron?" he asks with a grin. "If you can't put it down, how can it be crap?" It's a dichotomy that doesn't so much haunt as niggle writers like Reilly (Bryce Courtenay is another who comes to mind). They sell books by the truckload - Reilly had two on The Sydney Morning Herald's bestsellers of 1999 list - but the literary establishment tends to pooh-pooh them.

Reilly has the added disadvantage of looking like a post-adolescent Harry Potter. When we first meet outside the cinema complex at Fox Studios he is wearing casual clothes and a baseball cap over his neat, blond short back and sides. He is recognisable only because he is carrying a dog-eared paperback of Contest, littered with margin annotations and crossings-out - and not many people have a copy of Contest. At least not yet.

It's the paperback Reilly self-published in 1996 after being turned down by just about every publishing house in Australia. It was spotted in a bookshop by publishing executive Cate Patterson and the rest is history. For those of us who didn't get a look at Contest first time round, its publication in November will be our third chance to immerse ourselves in Reilly's breakneck prose.

Last year, having been told by his publicist that Reilly is an avid moviegoer, I made a date to see The Bone Collector, a serial-killer-thriller starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. As the credits roll and Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush warble the closing song, he declares in a loud voice: "That's it? What an ending! It's a cop-out. There are millions to be made in Hollywood." The thing is, he isn't joking. He really means it.

Over dinner in a restaurant nearby, Reilly explains his exasperation: "In the last 10 minutes we get this whole new plot stream ... what looked like a highly promising Silence of the Lambs rip-off turns into a revenge story? I think you always have to give the reader or the moviegoer a chance to figure it out. I call it the plant. It should be there at the start and then it flowers at the end.

"But to just spring it like that ... yeah, Hollywood is there for the taking." (Since then, Reilly has experienced Hollywood, doing the rounds of agents, meeting and greeting and hanging out with the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Steven Seagal at parties full of models. And it's still there for the taking.)

Reilly wants to write the script for a James Bond movie. This, I suggest, as we try to catch the waiter's eye, is a big ask. "Nah, piece of cake," he says, with mock seriousness. "You've got to remember that I was brought up on this stuff. My parents could write parenting books; what do you do to make a creative kid? You let him watch as much TV as possible; you take him to see every James Bond film. Watch them, read my books and spot the influences." Understandable, then, that Reilly's favourite film is Die Hard. And he reckons Speed was a "watershed film of the 1990s because it didn't stop, it had no breaks". In fact, it is the book of another non-stop action movie that set the younger Reilly on the first steps to a career as a blockbuster (a word he loves) author - Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. "Ultimately, though, I'd be reading those sort of books - Crichton, Tom Clancy - and finding them too slow. They're fast, but I thought it could be done faster. What if you wrote a book that just didn't stop, which just set things up for the reader and BANG! No breaks, nothing."

Across the street in a bookshop people are looking at copies of the newly released, bestselling Temple. At our table, we're still waiting to be served. Reilly smiles: "Yes, this is a measure of my success. Don't they know who I am?"

They certainly didn't when 20-year-old Reilly, living at home in Willoughby with his parents, published Contest. Much has been made of the phone call Pan Macmillan's Patterson made to Reilly's "office", only to find herself listening in as his mother hollered up the stairs that there was a call for him. It sounds apocryphal, but Patterson confirms it. "I was fine with all that," he says, "because that's what I was doing. I was working in an RSL on Friday and Saturday nights when I had two perfectly good university degrees, had written two-and-a-half books and was living at home with my parents."

Reilly puts his drive to write high-octane thrillers down to a simple need to "entertain", something inherited from his parents, Ray and Denise, long-time members of the Willoughby Musical Society, for which Reilly himself has performed. "I think that's what I decided to do with the books, too. They are my literary equivalent of standing up on stage and doing a tap dance. It's getting the crowd on their feet and getting that applause," he says.

Eight months after our first meeting, we are sitting in a white, average-sized apartment in Mosman with balcony and expensive views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Hard at work on Ice Station 2, Reilly has spent 2000 travelling the world to promote his work, researching the new book in the Utah desert, breaking his collarbone playing touch footy with mates and moving in with long-time girlfriend Natalie Freer, a psychology student at UNSW.

Reilly is welcoming and jovial, performing the guided tour and pretending to be horrified at the clothes his girlfriend has amassed in the spare wardrobe. He is wearing a neat sweatshirt, jeans and beige Timberland-style boots. In what would have been the second bedroom is Reilly's study. There's a PC on a white, L-shaped desk and a paperback book of guns next to the keyboard. One wall is decorated by a Star Wars Episode One poster and plastic Star Wars figurines strike poses on the desk. A Buzz Lightyear toy stands to attention on a filing cabinet.

As we settle down with a Pepsi and a lemonade, I ask him how Natalie copes. "Well, you'd really have to ask her, but I think she's used to it by now [the couple have been seeing each other for eight years]. She knows it's all a huge inspiration to me."

Contest, the book in which he was making notes the last time we met, is now with the publisher and Ice Station 2 is well on the way. Its predecessor has just gone on sale in the US, with Temple now released in New Zealand and South Africa. Plans for the coming year roll off his tongue. Temple here, Ice Station there, January in Britain, perhaps. It's then we come up with the figure of over a quarter of a million Matthew Reilly books sold to date - though his eyes are set on that million-copy mark.

If that's not enough, he wants to direct, too. In his teens he was constantly shooting short films on video with his brother. One was a seven-and-a-half-minute short about an axe murderer. "We edited it, did the post production, music, sound, and then invited all our friends over for a black-tie, red-carpet night with the movie as the centre-piece of the party," Reilly says proudly.

It's been a while since those days, but Reilly is enthusiastic, passionate, good humoured, a good-natured self-publicist, and self-deprecating enough to ward off accusations of being up himself. It is an important factor in his life: "I don't want to look like some successful arsehole."

Rarely is Reilly tongue-tied. Not until he is asked to put aside Matthew Reilly the author, someone he often refers to in the third person. What about the man behind the covers? It's the first time I've seen him lost for words. He seems genuinely confused when the million-dollar view is pointed out to him, as if seeing it for the first time. Four years ago he was writing in his bedroom at his parents'. It's been an amazing ride, hasn't it?

"Well, er ..." There is a long silence while he collects his thoughts. "Well, I hadn't really stopped to think about it that way ... ah ... yes ..." For once, he looks sheepish: "It's easier to talk about the books and all that interesting stuff that happens ..." Another silence. "I guess ... the years of writing in the bedroom were always intended to build up to something like this. It was like, 'I'm not going to be writing in my bedroom for the rest of my life' ... um ... I guess if you believe you're going to be a big success you're halfway there. All you have to do then is make it happen. And if you don't think you're ever going to get out of the bedroom, you won't."

That's an enormous amount of confidence, I suggest. Didn't he ever contemplate failure? That the grand plan might not work? "Failure," he growls with the deep, American tones of a schlock-horror movie voiceover, "is NOT an option." Then he laughs aloud and says: "I think you have to blame my parents there. They always told me I could do anything."

Now that he's been rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood elite, how has that "smack-bang middle-class" young man changed in the past four years? "My surroundings have changed, obviously, but not much else. It's nice being able to jump on a plane and fly around the world whenever I like, but I still hang out with pretty much the same crowd - and my friends keep me down to earth." He changed his photograph on the bookcover because his mates took to calling him "Mr Suave".

"I don't go to many fancy restaurants," he says. "I still prefer a chicken schnitzel sandwich, Pepsi and too much chocolate. I still have my Die Hard posters on the walls ...and you'll still find me in my daggy green and gold hat in the members' stand at the SCG when Australia play cricket."

Life for Matt Reilly - and to Reilly himself - seems as uncomplicated as his books. Sure, there are plot twists and turns, but what you see is what you get; the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. And the good guys always win.

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