Review: The Survivors, by Steve Braunias

“For thousands of years, we’ve made up stories about things largely because we haven’t understood them,” says Dr Alex Bartle in the twelfth and final chapter of Steve Braunias’s superb new collection of true stories, The Survivors. The Christchurch sleep medicine specialist is talking specifically about the writings and theories of Volker Pilgrim, who feared vampires stealing his sleep, and whose fascinating story bookends The Survivors, with Braunias describing Pilgrim late on as “the governing principle of the entire book, the exemplar of surviving your own life on your own terms”.

But the timeless idea of reaching for stories to explain the unknown, seeking to understand our world and varied lives moving through it, surviving on our own terms or otherwise, applies broadly.

Steve Braunias is a heck of a storyteller, and The Survivors adds further evidence to that unassailable verdict. It’s a fascinating collection that draws us into lives that have attracted Braunias’s curiosity. There’s troubled French exchange student Eloi Rolland, unlucky in love, who vanished early one morning while travelling to Piha to collect black sands as a souvenir for his mother. His disappearance was elbowed from the headlines by COVID lockdowns, leaving his family back home in France distraught and helpless, and Eloi stuck “in the limbo of the missing”.

Chao Chen and Lele He, hardworking Chinese migrants eking out meagre existences in bleak bedsits, sacrificing to send money home, only for a misunderstood passing comment from an employer to lead to Courtroom 6 at the Auckland High Court. Chen a killer, He a victim. “No one was there to see it. No friends, no family; just the usual employees of death, and the jury.” And Braunias, who years before became an accidental ‘employee of death’. The case of Stephen Ewart, the would-be arsonist who burned himself alive, and in death became a rare ‘Innocent Agent’ in a crime, having been manipulated by a femme fatale who only faced justice due to snowboard instructor and wedding planner turned tenacious Detective Libby Willis. The case of a getaway driver for a cop killer. Two cases of children killed, which Braunias describes as “the two worst cases” he’d ever covered, yet from the overwhelming gloom of those terrible acts, he witnessed a moment rare and beautiful.

Such pithy summaries don’t do the stories justice. Each of the tales soaks us in small details and acute observations, providing a window into variegated lives.

Many of the stories arise from Braunias’s attendance at the Auckland High Court, a place that became his regular haunt after a tense editorial meeting in 2008, when, searching for something to contribute, Braunias blurted out he’d like to cover ‘the trial of berserk amphetamine-fried samurai-sword madman and killer Antonie Dixon.’ He admits in the introduction, that he unexpectedly ‘found a new calling’, writing about real crimes ‘as a kind of literature’.

Braunias also canvasses lives entwined with historic court cases, including “wretched” and loathed writers D’Arcy Cresswell and John Yelash; painter Len Hollobon who was once imprisoned for having sex with a young Frank Sargeson; and Auckland lawyer Bob Narev, who Braunias met after acquiring a 42-volume set of transcripts of the Nuremberg trials. Chapter Five, ‘Zones of Interest’ is one of the most affecting of the collection, as Braunias grapples with his own role as voyeur of horrors inflicted on others, as he reads and takes notes from the Nuremberg trial transcripts. “The volumes are demonic, a collection of bad spells for extermination.”

Perhaps more than anyone else in the book, Narev epitomises ‘survivor’.

While The Survivors digs into some extremely dark areas of humanity, it never reads as too bleak. There are many moments of humanity and light. That’s particularly evident in the four stories not seeded by courtrooms or police investigations, but also by Braunias’s curiosity about fascinating people surviving the troubles of their lives in differing ways.

There’s Tim Fairhall, 'that much-loved supermarket-trolley jockey of Te Atatū,' who won a gold medal in butterfly at the 2007 Special Olympics in Shanghai, and has had to cope with love and loss. An aging Jock Hulme, who emerged from tough beginnings to 'enjoy a life of fantasy' bringing joy to thousands across New Zealand for decades as The Singing Cowboy. And lastly the bookending chapters on Volker Pilgrim, a scion of aristocrats who mingled with the likes of Hermann Goering, who grew up to become a leading gay intellectual in 1970s Germany before repeatedly vanishing from his own life, spending his final years in Auckland hostels as Max Melbo. A sleep-deprived hoarder who looked homeless. Impoverished and itinerant, kind and gentle. Crackpot, genius, both?

Braunias confesses he was “among the worst in the business” at traditional court reporting, with its focus on news, total accuracy, and distilling the day’s events. Instead, he was “immediately attracted to the background music of every trial – high comedy, low awfulness, the songs of death”. Now ground down by senseless horrors, particularly a trio of 2023 trials including a meth-related killing that was claustrophobically West Auckland, Braunias says he’s putting away his true crime pen. He began to despair, to not care. This will be his final such book.

It’s a fitting swansong. He masterfully takes us into the lives of others who have tried to survive their lot, while grappling with his own place and his own surviving. “A journalist needs to reckon with their career-long pursuit of extracting things from people, and one of the themes of this collection is an ethical inquiry into taking, always taking,” he says.

A cracking read from a heck of a storyteller. Perhaps he’s taken a lot, but he’s given plenty too.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer, reviewer, and editor. He is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and editor of the Dark Deeds Down Under crime and thriller anthologies. Craig grew up in Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka a Māui/The Top of the South, and currently lives in London.