Walking through the gates of Northcote public golf course in Melbourne is like travelling back in time for the author Matthew Reilly. “When I was 12, my brother and I would go to a little public golf course in Sydney just like this,” he says. “It was called Northbridge golf club. Our dad took us.” As if this moment was scripted, the first players we encounter are a man with three boys, all of them around the same age Reilly was when he first got into the game. “That’s the half set you start with,” he says, gesturing towards the clubs of the smallest in the group, whose bag looks far too big for him. The sight brings a smile to Reilly’s face.
Reilly himself would be unlikely to write such a scene – it doesn’t have enough car chases or explosions. He has written more than 20 adrenaline-charged thrillers that collectively have sold more than 8m copies around the world. In 2022, he also ventured into the movie business, directing and co-writing the thriller Interceptor, which starred Elsa Pataky and was executive produced by her husband, Chris Hemsworth. The week Interceptor was released, it shot to number one on Netflix in 93 countries.
Reilly’s success means that he now plays slightly different courses. A decade ago, he moved to Los Angeles, where he is a member of a golf club frequented by celebrities. You wouldn’t guess it, though. He wears his success lightly and treats the amateurs playing on this sunny Tuesday morning as if they were professionals at a tournament, dropping his voice if there’s even a chance we might distract someone and constantly scanning the fairways to check we’re not in anyone’s way.
Reilly normally plays 18 holes once or twice a week – often with his wife, Kate – and recently the game has even become part of his writing routine. “This last American summer, I would write in the morning. I’d start about 7.15am and write till about 1.30pm, then I’d practise my golf in the afternoon. After four months, I’d finished the first draft of a book and my golf game was looking pretty good, too,” he says, laughing. (His golf game is better than “pretty good”– he has a handicap of one.)
Reilly has come back to Australia to promote his latest novel, The Detective. It follows a loveable private investigator on the autism spectrum who lives in the American south and uncovers a horrifying conspiracy involving politicians, judges, the police and the mega rich. Speaking in his home country about a distinctly American novel has made Reilly reflect on the differences between the two places.
“Australia and America speak the same language and have the same companies [names] on the buildings and in the shopping malls, but they’re very different,” says Reilly, whose Australian accent and straight-talking manner remains unchanged after his years abroad. “In Australia, there’s a sense of community and putting the group first. In America, it is always the individual first.”
Despite this, Reilly speaks with affection for his adopted home and the opportunities it has given him. “You grow a lot by leaving the nest.”
Reilly has always been ambitious. After his first novel was rejected by publishers, he self-published it, printing his name in huge letters on the cover as if he were a best-selling author, because that’s what he wanted to be. Soon afterwards, he was signed by an editor at Pan Macmillan. “I couldn’t have made Interceptor if I didn’t move to the States and become friends with [screenwriter] Stuart Beattie, who was pivotal. Once, I came back and went to my old golf club in Sydney. I saw some guys sitting at the same table, at the same time, doing the same things. It was a moment where you realise that you have grown and maybe others are staying where they are, which is their prerogative. No judgement. It’s just different.”
We pause behind a gum tree to watch a player tee off. He hits his ball out of bounds once, twice, then again. It’s unclear whether the player knows we’re watching. To spare his blushes, Reilly whispers, “we’ll run that way,” pointing to a sheltered path that will take us discreetly in another direction.
Reilly is not so delicate in the way he tackles hot-button issues in The Detective, which shines an unflattering light on the socio-politics of the US. In the novel, he occasionally inserts real-life examples into the fictional narrative to reveal that the action is set in an uncomfortably close parallel universe rather than a fantasy land. Among these is a quote from the politician Nikki Haley – who finished second to Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries – avoiding naming slavery as the cause of the US civil war.
It is challenging to write about these topics at a time when making political statements in the US can cause a social media firestorm, lead to legal action or even threats to commentators’ physical safety. But Reilly, who comes across as polite but determined, is unbothered. “I’m not nervous. I’m aware of it, but it’s the story I wanted to tell. Living in the States for 10 years, race is an issue there almost daily. The echoes of the civil war, which took place 160 years ago, are still there,” he says, then shrugs. “I can stand by everything that I’ve written. If people have a problem with it, maybe they’re on the wrong side of history.”
Writing the novel also gave Reilly an opportunity to reflect on himself. In a Q&A published at the end of some editions, Reilly says that The Detective’s protagonist, Sam Speedman, contains more of himself than any of his other characters. They share an obsessiveness, a hyper-observance and a type of literal thinking that means they often miss jokes. “All of these things would suggest that I might exist somewhere ‘on the spectrum,’” Reilly concludes in the Q&A.
As we cross another fairway, Reilly says his neurodivergence – if it exists – has not affected him enough for him to seek a formal diagnosis. However, he has friends and family members on the autism spectrum and he wanted Speedman to be a multi-faceted character whose condition has its difficulties, but also gives him gifts.
“I wanted to create a new kind of hero,” says Reilly. “My books are known for big, outsized heroes: Scarecrow was a marine and Jack West was an Australian super soldier. Sam is determined and has guts, he’s got a real sense of right and wrong, and he’s gentle.”
It was a struggle to get Speedman right – “I revised the first 50 pages more than any other first 50 pages,” says Reilly – so he has been touched at how autistic readers and their families have responded to the novel. The night before we meet, he hosted an event in central Melbourne. “A lot of people came up to the signing table and said, ‘my son has autism’ or ‘my family member is on the spectrum.’” So many people wanted to discuss Speedman that the signing lasted for two and a half hours.
Feedback is a little different in Reilly’s other line of work. Reilly is a film fanatic and collector of movie memorabilia (among many other things, he owns a DeLorean, the car made famous by Back to the Future), but his efforts to establish himself in the film world has had mixed success.
“If you can’t handle rejection, you shouldn’t be in the movie business,” says Reilly, smiling wryly. “I have sold books to Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, Warner Brothers and only Interceptor, which was an original script, got made.” Until recently, his novel Ice Station was set to be made into a TV series for Paramount+, but the project was dropped after Paramount’s merger with Skydance. The rights have reverted to Reilly. “We’ll get back on the horse, get on selling it again.”
As we loop back towards the first hole, Reilly reels off a list of projects he has coming up on top of pitching Ice Station: developing other scripts, a Speedman sequel and another Scarecrow novel. Perhaps what is most notable about Reilly is how exhilarated he is by what he does. After decades in the business, he remains almost childlike in his love of books, of films, of the idea of entertaining people. A few knock-backs in Hollywood haven’t dampened his enthusiasm.
“When it works, it’s the most exciting thing in the world,” he says. “I had a meeting at Lucasfilm at Disney. That was exciting. You take a selfie of yourself in the lobby of Lucasfilm. You think, ‘is this professional?’ Screw it. I took a photo.”
The Detective by Matthew Reilly is out now through Pan Macmillan.
