The Final Call by Jen Shieff
Weaving together exceptional historical detail and social issues (in The Gentlemen’s Club), Shieff has been compared to the likes of Sarah Waters. She pierces the veneer of polite post-war society, lifting the skirts on class prejudice and other social ills. —Craig Sisterson
Buckle up for The Final Call, Jen Shieff’s third book, a standalone sequel to The Gentleman’s Club and The Vanishing Act – both finalists in the Ngaio Marsh Awards.
It’s 1979. Auckland is on the brink. Fashion and music are bursting through previous boundaries but prostitution is still illegal and male homosexuality is still a crime. Who is out to destroy Carmel O’Sullivan and her sister Tess, top call-girls in Rita Saunders’ gentlemen’s club? Is Tess embroiled in the heroin trade that has recently thrust New Zealand’s underbelly onto the world stage for the first time? Why is Carmel’s ex-husband Mike lurking about? Is Felix, the priest of the family, taking his moralising a step too far? What’s going on with Jonathan, their other brother, a respected barrister?
When Tess is murdered and younger sister Maxine is among the passengers on the ill-fated Air New Zealand flight to Mt Erebus, Carmel feels doomed. Rita’s right hand man, Hungarian immigrant Istvan Ziegler, loves Carmel, offering her the safety and respectability she craves, but he has to compete with Rita for Carmel’s affection and commitment. Carmel’s life is on the line in more ways than one.
The Final Call delves into the past to say things about a world that are still relevant forty years later, for prostitutes, homosexuals and independent women, as well as for brothers, sisters and lovers.
Jen Shieff was a senior government policy analyst for twenty years before leaving in 2015 to realise her long-held ambition of becoming an author. She began investigating historic crimes, real and imagined, envisaging a series of standalone stories, set ten years apart in the fifties, the sixties and the seventies. The Final Call is the third of these books.
All three of Jen’s books were influenced by Auckland’s famous madam Flora MacKenzie.
‘Flora appealed to me because of her independence, her outsider status, the waves she caused and her ability to survive slings and arrows. She, like my character Rita, had an unfailing belief in the value of the work she and her girls did and probably knew, decades before NZ’s parliament did, that it shouldn’t have been considered a crime.
‘In doing research for the book, I discovered that Flora left her landmark property in Ring Terrace, St Mary’s Bay, to the man who delivered her whisky. When I could find no public record of him, I invented him as Istvan Ziegler.’
Since fictional Istvan first appeared in The Gentlemen’s Club (2015), Jen has met the real whisky deliverer who requires anonymity but was willing to stories of his friendship with Flora which Jen has been able to incorporate into her subsequent books, The Vanishing Act (2018) and The Final Call (2021).
Jen has an MA in English Literature and Education from the University of Auckland. She lives in Turangi.
The Final Call by Jen Shieff | Mary Egan Publishing | $30
For a review copy, an interview with Jen Shieff, or for further information please contact: Penny Hartill, hPR, 021 721 424, penny@hartillpr.co.nz