Jeff Sparrow says death is “wonderfully democratic” while Helen Garner calls it the “clarifying stroke” that can define our lives. While Shane Maloney believes crime fiction has the most honest approach to closure, because you’re guaranteed a corpse. Lou Swinn wonders if writing about death is an attempt to find immortality but Maloney says “The book is a kind of immortality and then you go out of print.” Helen Garner talks about how she mourned the death of the best character in Seven Little Australians, but acknowledges that “in some books someone has to die”.