Sunday Arts Magazine

22 Mar 2021

Robin Gregory talks to the Sunday Arts Magazine team on her book “Traffic”.

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Robin Gregory talks to the Sunday Arts Magazine team on her book “Traffic”.

Applying the blow torch to sex-trafficking: Robin Gregory, Traffic

Traffic (Clan Destine Press), the debut novel by author, Robin Gregory, applies a blow torch to sex-trafficking.

Melbourne Private Investigator, Sandi Kent, has her hopes for an easy December dashed when two complicated cases crash into her lap.

First, she is hired by her sexy but volatile ex-girlfriend, Cassy Joynson, to rescue a young South Korean woman from an illegal brothel. And then – in a curiously parallel case – she’s engaged by a lawyer friend seeking defence angles for a Colombian immigrant charged with murdering a sex worker.

As Sandi juggles the demands of her clients (and her desperately low bank balance), she becomes embroiled in the city’s seamy underworld of human trafficking, drugs and murder. And soon more lives, including her own, are at risk …

Gregory was prompted to write Traffic by an incident at a community health centre where she was working some years ago.

“A young Asian woman came in, fearing for her life. She’d been bought and brought as a sex slave and the man who had acquired her, married her to solve any visa issues. The only place where she was able to go was church and that’s where she fled from her husband,” Gregory said.

“The minister’s wife accompanied her to the centre – she had been sheltering with a friend for a few days but a longer-term solution was needed. Her husband had hired someone to hunt her down. A black car ominously remained outside for the better part of the day while we struggled to find her a refuge. We eventually had to call on the police to escort her to safety.”

Gregory started researching sex-trafficking and connected with Project Respect, an organisation which offers support to women who have been trafficked and advocates on their behalf.

“Sex trafficking is surprisingly prevalent, even in legal brothels, but prosecutions are few and far between. The sex workers are often reluctant to go to the police. They rightly fear that, if they speak up, they’ll be deported and lose any slim hope of a new and better life in Australia. Getting evidence that will stand up in court is very difficult.”

“I decided that it was a problem that Private Investigator Sandi Kent should confront. Sandi has been around for twenty years – she featured in a story of mine that was shortlisted in Sisters in Crime’s Scarlet Stiletto Awards – and remarkably hasn’t aged!”

Gregory said that Sandi, who supplements her meagre PI income by teaching swimming part-time, has a lot going for her.

“Sandi is in her late twenties. She is strong, she is brave – sometimes recklessly so – and like many women of her age, experiences the crashing waves of love. In Sandi’s words her relationships ‘start well and then sourly plummet’. Her relationships with her mother and sister are fraught but she does have a wonderful best friend – Stewart, a gay man who Sandi ropes in as a sidekick,” she said.

“Part of my motivation all those years ago in making Sandi a lesbian was that there we so few of us represented in novels or on the screen – and, if we were, we inevitably met a ghastly end. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. Sandi will appeal to a mainstream audience.”

In the course of her research, Gregory didn’t actually venture inside any brothels but, like her PI, she did actually spend time parked outside both legal and illegal brothels. Like her, Sandi is also a student of Spanish, a skill which she is able to utilise to great effect when investigating the Columbian man charged with murder.

“One of my other missions in my novel was to represent Melbourne’s diversity in all its glorious complexity,” Gregory said. “I like to think I’ve succeeded.”

Gregory is well on her way with a second Sandi Kent novel.

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