Rick Thompson

Rick Thompson reviews ‘Crime Fiction: 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity’ by Stephen Knight and ‘The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction’ edited by Martin Priestman

February 2005, no. 268 • 01 February 2005

‘It is escape not from life, but from literature.’ (Marjorie Nicolson on the detective genre, ‘The Professor and the Detective’, 1929) I began reading crime fiction in the 1950s and became serious about it in the 1960s, searching out what scholarship there was then about its history and development, ... (read more)

Rick Thompson reviews ‘Snapshot’ by Garry Disher, ‘A Thing of Blood’ by Robert Gott and ‘Dirty Weekend’ by Gabrielle Lord

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277 • 01 December 2005

Garry Disher’s Snapshot continues his police procedural series about Mornington Peninsula detective Hal Challis, begun with Dragon Man in 1999 (before that, Disher wrote an excellent series of thrillers about a career criminal named Wyatt, starting with Kickback, 1991). Snapshot is 100 pages longer than Dragon Man, but, paradoxically, it is much more pared back, leaner and smarter about what a p ... (read more)

Rick Thompson reviews ‘Blindside’ by J.R. Carroll ‘Degrees of Connection’ by Jon Cleary and ‘Earthly Delights’ by Kerry Greenwood

May 2004, no. 261 • 01 May 2004

Crime fiction offers various pleasures but rarely those of innovation, and that is the case with these three very different books from three veterans of the genre – familiar pleasures. Degrees of Connection is a police procedural featuring a series character; Earthly Delights is an amateur sleuth cosy in which Greenwood breaks away from her series character, Phryne Fisher; and Blindside is a har ... (read more)