Crime Fiction

Known in certain quarters as ‘the godfather of Australian crime fiction’, Peter Corris is certainly persistent. Prior to this, he has written thirty-seven novels involving the wily, irrepressible Cliff Hardy. The Dunbar Case showcases an older but still sprightly Hardy, who deals with maritime mysteries, amorous women, and a notorious crime family.

Matthew Condon is a writer who confounds expectations. He followed his prize-winning epic novel The Trout Opera (2007) with Brisbane (2010), a meditative exploration of the city’s rich history. In The Toe Tag Quintet, he turns his hand to crime. This is not a novel but a series of novellas about a detective’s exploits following his retirement to the Gold Coast. The stories are consecutive but distinct, a mosaic structure not unlike the one Condon used to great effect in his début collection, The Motorcycle Cafe (1988).

The Midnight Promise, Zane Lovitt’s début novel, is billed not as a detective story, but as a detective’s story. It is a minor grammatical change that makes for a major shift in the focus of the tale. Here there is no major dramatic revelation – no car chase, forensic science, femme fatale. Instead, the reader is offered a character study of a man slowly succumbing to depression, apathy, and alcoholism; worn down by his cases and by his inability to maintain his independence from them.

Promise is set on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, although it might as well be Siberia so far as any claims to historical or social verisimilitude are concerned. Just about every stereotype ever devised in the name of crime fiction has been assembled here, resulting in a story so over the top as to stretch credulity beyond breaking point.

Proudly popular fiction, Dead Heat is a romantic thriller set in a north-western New South Wales National Park. Organised crime in fiction generally operates in a large city or on the coastline, but author Bronwyn Parry sets her plot in the bush. The inclusion of bushland and animals creates unique plot obstacles and possibilities for both the criminals and the authorities, and it is affirming to read of places often overlooked in fiction: Gloucester and Barrington Tops, Coffs Harbour, Tamworth, Inverell, and Newcastle.

In After the Darkness, the third novel by Victorian writer Honey Brown, suburban couple Bruce and Trudy Harrison have their lives upended by a brutal attack while holidaying on the Great Ocean Road. This is only the tip of the narrative iceberg. Indeed, their ordeal at the hands of an opportunistic psychopath happens with such speed that the reader feels as disoriented as the victims do. Brown focuses on the Harrisons’ escape and return to their comfortable small-town life, as they grapple with the knowledge of their own desperate actions.

For many years I have looked forward to the ongoing exploits of Kerry Greenwood’s sassy heroine Phryne Fisher – the marvellous descriptions of period detail and fashion, the historical background of her ripping yarns – and have wilfully ignored occasional anachronisms of language or behaviour.

A century later, the Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes industry shows no signs of abating. In recent months alone, there have been Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, a new Holmes adventure, and the big, dumb action movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; a television series, Sherlock, set in the twenty-first century, appeared in 2010; and in 2005 Julian Barnes’s George and Arthur investigated the relationship between an unjustly accused solicitor, George Edalji, and Doyle who took up his cause.