Need a cheat sheet on Joe O’Loughlin before you dive into the just-released Mulholland Books paperback edition of SHATTER or the upcoming BLEED FOR ME? Curious how a series writers keeps all the those character traits in order? Check out the below dossier on the principle characters from Robotham’s acclaimed psychological thrillers.
Name: Professor Joseph O’Loughin (commonly known as Joe)
Profession: Clinical Psychologist
Born: November 29, 1960, at Penrhyn Bay, Wales.
Height: 6’1”
Weight: 175 lbs
Eyes: Brown
Joe’s own descriptions of himself:
(BLEED FOR ME) I am not handsome in the conventional sense. I am tall and pale with watery brown eyes and when I look at myself naked I am reminded of a winter animal that sheds its fur in the hotter months and looks out of place until the cold returns. That’s one of the reasons that I don’t wear shorts or T-shirts or flip flops which Australians call thongs. I wonder what they call G-strings?
(SUSPECT) Not even my mother would call me handsome. I have curly brown hair, a pear-shaped nose and skin that freckles at the first hint of sunlight.
(SHATTER) Sadly, I inherited my father’s tangle of hair. If it grows half an inch too long it becomes completely unruly and I look like I’ve been electrocuted.
Early Education:
Joe was sent to boarding school from the age of eight, attending the exclusive Charterhouse School in Surrey, England.
A single memory comes back to me, with all the light and shade of reality. I am standing on the front steps of Charterhouse as my father hugs me and feels the sob in my chest. ‘Not in front of your mother,’ he whispers.
He turns to walk away and says to my mother, ‘Not in front of the boy,’ as she dabs at her eyes.
At Charterhouse he excelled academically but not on the sporting field.
Saturday mornings and soggy sports fields seem to go together like acne and adolescence. That’s how I remember the winters of my childhood – standing ankle-deep in mud, freezing my bollocks off, playing for the school’s Second XV.
God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting (my father) had a bellow that rose above the howling wind. ‘Don’t just stand there like a cold bottle of piss,’ he’d shout. ‘Call yourself a winger! I’ve seen continents drift faster than you.’
Tertiary Studies:
Joe did three years of medicine before changing courses to study psychology and behavioural science at London University. In 1985 he obtained his Masters degree in Clinical Psychology.
I stayed on at university determined to sleep with every promiscuous, terminally uncommitted first-year on campus, but unlike other would-be Lotharios I tried too hard. I even failed miserably at being fashionably unkempt and seditious. No matter how many times I slept on someone’s floor, using my jacket as a pillow, it refused to crumple or stain. And instead of appearing grungy and intellectually blasé, I looked like someone on his way to his first job interview.
Career:
Trainee psychologist, West London Health Authority, London
Merseyside Health Authority, Liverpool
West Hammersmith Hospital, London
Royal Marsden Hospital, London
Private Practice, London
Lecturer Behavioural Science Bath University
Police Work
2004 – SUSPECT
An unknown young woman is found dead with multiple stab wounds – all of them self-inflicted – and the police ask Joe to help them understand the crime. Are they dealing with a murder or a suicide? Reluctantly, he agrees but the victim turns out to be someone he knows: Catherine Mary McBride, a nurse and former colleague.
At the same time, Joe is grappling with a troubled young patient, Bobby Moran, whose violent dreams are becoming increasingly real. As Bobby’s behaviour grows increasingly erratic, Joe begins to ponder what he’s done in the past and whether there is a link between his terrible dreams and Catherine McBride.
2005 – LOST
When DI Vincent Ruiz is found floating in the Thames with a bullet in his leg and a bigger hole in his memory, Joe O’Loughlin is summoned. Accused of faking amnesia and under investigation by his colleagues, Ruiz’s only hope is to retrace his steps and try to remember what happened that night on the river.
2008 – SHATTER
A naked woman perched on the edge of Clifton Suspension Bridge with her back pressed to the safety fence. She’s suicidal, talking on a mobile phone, and Joe O’Loughlin is trying to talk her down. Turning to him, she says, ‘You don’t understand’, and lets go, falling to her death.
Two days later, Joe has a visitor – the woman’s teenage daughter. ‘My mother didn’t kill herself,’ the girl announces, ‘she wouldn’t …not like that. She was terrified of heights.’
2012 – BLEED FOR ME
Ray Hegarty, a highly respected former detective, lies dead in his daughter Sienna’s bedroom. She is found covered in his blood. Everything points to her guilt, but Joe isn’t convinced.
Sienna is his daughter’s best friend and Joe has watched her grow up and seen the troubled look in her eyes. Against the advice of police, he launches his own investigation, embarking upon a hunt that will lead him to a predatory schoolteacher; a conspiracy of silence and a race hate trial that is captivating the nation.
Family:
Father: Dr Joseph O’Loughlin (retired)
Joe refers to his father as God’s Personal Physician in Waiting because of his unfailing ego and sense of self-importance.
(SUSPECT) My father has a brilliant medical mind. There isn’t a modern medical textbook that doesn’t mention his name. He has written papers that have changed the way paramedics treat accident victims and altered the standard procedures of battlefield medics.
His father, my grandfather, was a founding member of the General Medical Council and its longest serving chairman. He established his reputation as an administrator rather than as a surgeon, but the name is still writ large in the history of medical ethics.
This is where I come in – or don’t come in. After having three daughters, I was the long awaited son. As such, I was expected to carry on the medical dynasty, but instead I broke the chain. In modern parlance that makes me the weakest link.
Mother:
(SUSPECT) Everything about my mother denotes her standing as a doctor’s wife, right down to her box-pleated skirts, plain blouses and low-heeled shoes. A creature of habit, she even carries a handbag when taking the dog for a walk.
She can arrange a dinner party for twelve in the time it takes to boil an egg. She also does garden parties, school fetes, church jamborees, charity fundraisers, bridge tournaments, car-boot sales, walkathons, christenings, weddings and funerals. Yet for all this ability, she has managed to get through life without balancing a chequebook, making an investment decision or proffering a political opinion in public.
Joe has three older sisters, Lucy, Patricia and Rebecca.
Joe’s Marital Status:
Estranged from his wife Julianne – the great love of his life.
Joe on Julianne:
(SUSPECT) I still remember the first time I laid eyes on her in a pub near Trafalgar Square. She was doing first year languages at the University of London and I was a post-grad student. She’d witnessed one of my best moments, a soapbox sermon on the evils of apartheid outside the South African Embassy.
After the rally we went to a pub and Julianne came up and introduced herself. I offered to buy her a drink and tried not to stare at her. She had a dark freckle on her bottom lip that was still utterly mesmerising…it still is. My eyes are drawn to it when I speak to her and my lips are drawn to it when we kiss.
I didn’t have to woo Julianne with candlelit dinners or flowers. She chose me. And by next morning, I swear this is true, we were plotting our life together over Marmite soldiers and cups of tea. I love her for so many reasons but mostly because she’s on my side and by my side and because her heart is big enough for both of us. She makes me better, braver, stronger; she allows me to dream; she holds me together.
(SHATTER) There is an abstract sort of intimacy in our conversations now. She is the same woman I married. Brown-haired. Beautiful. Barely forty. And I still love her in every way but the physical one where we exchange bodily fluids and wake up next to each other in the morning. Whenever I see her in the village I am still struck by wonder: what did she ever see in me and how could I have let her go?
Julianne on Joe
(SUSPECT) ‘If you’re such a brilliant psychologist, you should start looking at your own defects. I’m tired of propping up your ego. Do you want me to tell you again? Here’s the list: You are nothing at all like your father. Your penis is the right size. You spend more than enough time with Charlie. You don’t have to be jealous of Jock. My mother really does like you. And I don’t blame you for ruining my black cashmere jumper by leaving tissues in your pockets. Satisfied?’
Ten years of potential therapy condensed to six bullet points. My God, this woman is good. The neighbourhood dogs start barking and it sounds like a muffled chorus of ‘here, here!’
Joe on Fatherhood:
(BLEED FOR ME): I have learned some remarkable things since becoming a father and I appreciate how much there is still to learn. I know, for example, that a pound coin can pass harmlessly through the digestive system of a four-year-old. I know that regurgitated chicken flavoured ramen noodles and tomato sauce will ruin a silk carpet; that nail polish sticks to the inside of a bath and too much beetroot turns a toddler’s urine a neon crimson colour.
(SHATTER): Looking after young children is the most important job in the world. Believe me – it is. However, the sad unspoken, implicit truth is that looking after young children is boring. Those guys who sit in missile silos waiting for the unthinkable to happen are doing an important job too, but you can’t tell me they’re not bored out of their tiny skulls and playing endless games of Solitaire and Battleships on the Pentagon computers.
Joe on Charlie: (Born 1996)
(BLEED FOR ME) Charlie is telling me I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. I’m old. I’m stupid. I have no taste in clothes or music or friends. I don’t own the right language to talk to her. I don’t dread the same things or dream the same dreams. I’m caught in that in between place, unsure whether I can be a father or a friend, but not both.
Meanwhile, Charlie is like a separate nation state seeking independence, wanting her own government, laws and budget. Whenever I try to avoid conflict, choosing diplomacy instead of hostility, she masses her troops at the border, accusing me of spying or sabotaging her life.
Joe on Emma (Born 2005)
(BLEED FOR ME) We reach the terrace and Emma changes out of her uniform into a Snow White dress she has been wearing obsessively for the past two months. By now the neighbours will think she’s strange but it’s not worth arguing over. I’m sure she’s not going to be wearing it when she accepts her Nobel Prize.
I’m more concerned about her other ‘foibles’, which is a polite way of describing her neuroses. Last week she launched her dinner plate across the table because a meatball ‘touched’ her macaroni. What was I thinking, putting them on the same plate!
Joe on Parkinson’s
(SHATTER) It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch rather than a letter. A ghost movement. A shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets – who gets the CD collection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?
It began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. My body is now being operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.
(SUSPECT) Muhammad Ali has a lot to answer for. When he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics there wasn’t a dry eye on the planet.
Why were we crying? Because a great sportsman had been reduced to this – a shuffling, mumbling, twitching cripple. A man who once danced like a butterfly now shook like a blancmange.
We always remember the sportsmen. When the body deserts a scientist like Stephen Hawking we figure that he’ll be able to live in his mind, but a crippled athlete is like a bird with a broken wing. When you soar to the heights the landing is harder.
(BLEED FOR ME) Mr Parkinson will not kill me, but I will die with him unless the race for a cure beats his unrelenting progress. Some people think news like this would change their attitude towards life. They have fantasies of self-transformation, of climbing mountains or jumping out of planes. For some reason when dying becomes a reality (and no longer theoretical) it liberates them.
Not me. You won’t catch me running with the bulls in Pamplona or searching for the source of the Amazon. I’d rather a mundane end than a gloriously brave or stupid one.
Where Joe lives:
(SUSPECT) In real estate terms we live in purgatory. I say this because we haven’t quite reached the leafy nirvana of Primrose Hill; yet we’ve climbed out of graffiti-stained, metal shuttered shit-hole that is the southern end of Camden Town.
The mortgage is huge and the plumbing is dodgy, but Julianne fell in love with the place. I have to admit that I did too. In the summer, if the breeze is blowing in the right direction and the windows are open, we can hear the sound of lions and hyenas at London Zoo. It’s like being on safari without the mini-vans.
(SHATTER) We live in a village called Wellow, five and a half miles from Bath Spa. It’s one of those quaint, postcard sized clusters of buildings, which barely seem big enough to hold their own history. The village pub, the Fox & Badger, is two hundred years old and has a resident dwarf. How rustic is that?
I don’t know what I expected of Somerset but this will do. And if I sound sentimental, please forgive me. Mr Parkinson is to blame. Some people think sentimentality is an unearned emotion. Not mine. I pay for it every day.
(BLEED FOR ME) Home now is a small two-storey terrace in Station Street, less than half a mile from my old life. My terrace is darker than a cave because the windows are so small and is full of faded oriental rugs, wobbly side tables and old lady furniture. Charlie and Emma have to share a bedroom when they sleep over, but Emma often crawls into my bed with me, forcing me downstairs onto the sofa because her core body temperature is akin to nuclear fusion. I don’t mind the sofa. I can watch late night movies or obscure sports that don’t seem to have any rules.
Joe on Psychology
(SHATTER) ‘Forget everything you’ve been told about psychology. It will not make you a better poker player, nor will it help you pick up girls or understand them any better. I have three at home and they are a complete mystery to me.
‘It is not about dream interpretation, ESP, multiple personalities, mind reading, Rorschack Tests, phobias, recovered memories or repression. And most importantly – it is not about getting in touch with yourself. If that’s your ambition I suggest you buy a copy of Big Jugs magazine and find a quiet corner.’
(BLEED FOR ME) ‘A really effective psychologist is someone who commits. Who goes into the darkness to bring someone out. Years ago I told a friend of mine that a doctor is no good to a patient if he dies of the disease but that wasn’t the right analogy. When a person is drowning, someone has to get wet.’
KNOWN ASSOCIATES
Vincent Ruiz
A former Detective Inspector with the London Metropolitan Police, Ruiz retired in 2006.
Joe on Ruiz
(BLEED FOR ME) Broad like a bear with a busted nose and booze-stained cheeks, Ruiz has had three marriages and three divorces. World weary and fatalistic, I sometimes think he’s a walking, talking cliché – the heavy-drinking, womanising ex-detective – but he’s more complicated than that. He once arrested me for murder. I once rescued him from himself. Friendships have flourished on less.
(SHATTER) Ruiz is a former a detective inspector with the London Metropolitan Police. Five years ago he arrested me on suspicion of murder. A former patient of mine had been found stabbed to death beside the Grand Union Canal in London. My name was in her diary. It’s a long story. Water under the bridge is probably not the best metaphor given the circumstances. Let’s call it history.
Ever since then Ruiz has been one of those peripheral characters that drift in and out of my life, adding brightness to the beige. Before he retired, he used to invite himself to dinner, flirt with Julianne and pick my brains about his latest murder investigation. He’d tickle the girls, drink too much wine and spend the night on our sofa.
Julianne’s soft spot for Ruiz is bigger than the man’s liver, which says something about his drinking and her ability to attract strays and mavericks.
Ruiz on Joe
(LOST) Professor Joseph O’Loughlin has arrived to see me. I can see him walking across the hospital car park with his left leg swinging as if bound in a splint. His mouth is moving – smiling, wishing people good morning and making jokes about how he likes his martinis shaken not stirred. Only the Professor could make fun of Parkinson’s disease.
Joe is a clinical psychologist and looks exactly like you’d expect a shrink to look – tall and thin with a tangle of brown hair like some absent-minded academic escaped from a lecture theatre.
Knocking gently on the door, he opens it and smiles awkwardly. He has one of those totally open faces with wet brown eyes like a baby seal just before it gets clubbed.
‘I hear you’re suffering memory problems.’
‘Yeah, who the fuck are you?’
‘Very good. Nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’
He turns around several times trying to decide where to put his briefcase. Then he takes a notepad and pulls up a chair, sitting with his knees touching the bed. Finally settled, he looks at me and says nothing – as though I’ve asked him to come because there’s something on my mind.
This is what I hate about shrinks. The way they create silences and have you questioning your sanity. This wasn’t my idea. I can remember my name. I know where I live. I know where I put the car keys and parked the car. I’m tickety-boo.
Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist in Britain and Australia before his career as a novelist. SHATTER is in bookstores now, and BLEED FOR ME will be released in February 2012. Both will be available wherever books or eBooks are sold.
Michael lives in Sydney with his wife and three daughters. Learn more athttp://www.michaelrobotham.com.
