Crime Fiction

Marion Halligan is a long-established fiction writer with an impressive list of publications. Even readers with only partial familiarity will recall that many of her novels have been informed by autobiographical material reflecting personal leanings and experiences, particularly her fondness for France, food and cooking, and the profound grief she sustained when her husband died. But in 2006 she changed direction, plunging into crime fiction with The Apricot Colonel, to which she has now produced a sequel. Both are written in the first person by a narrator called Cassandra Travers, a book editor.

In her fourteenth novel, in a career that began in 1980 with Fortress, Gabrielle Lord returns to the series of books that feature the troubled and trouble-attracting private investigator, Gemma Lincoln. Shattered, the fourth in the series, is the most densely and effectively plotted of them. Gathered here are key people from earlier novels: Gemma’s lover, the undercover policeman Steve Brannigan; her best friend, Sergeant Angie McDonald; a former street kid called the Ratbag; Gemma’s sometime colleague Mike Moody. Still shadowing Gemma’s life are the memories of the murder of her mother and, much later, her successful but nearly fatal efforts to clear her father of that crime.

Murder in the Dark is a worthy addition to the vast Phryne Fisher collection. Fans of this well-researched series will be pleased to rediscover the usual St Kilda cast, and will welcome the diverse, if not always likeable, supporting cast of profligate party-goers, polo-playing cowgirls, sultry American jazz musicians, rather luscious young men and the occasional goat.

Fisher, the waspishly slim, ever-fashionable and cunning detective, is endowed with looks as deadly as her pearl-handled Beretta. Despite holding a high social ranking in 1920s Melbourne, she enjoys breaking societal rules as much as author Kerry Greenwood does generic ones (using an unconventional figure as her heroine). If she were male, Fisher’s drinking, smoking, casual sex and choice of profession would be a less entertaining stereotype. Aficionados of the series will enjoy the latest misconstrual of Fisher’s behaviour and femininity: a male character always manages to underestimate her abilities, intelligence or openness to all members of society.

After twenty years in the Tokyo police, Inspector Aoki knows the ‘beeping of the excrement detector in his brain was a definite warning that shit was coming down the freeway’. His declaration is indicative of this convoluted plot. Aoki, after seventeen months heading an excruciating investigation into the corrupt ‘Fatman’, a high-profile government official, discovers that his case has been irrevocably shut down. Quicker than you can shout ‘yakuza’, his journalist associate is murdered, his father dies of heart failure, his wife commits suicide and Aoki is placed under observation in a psychiatric hospital. Suspended from duty, he is sent to recover at the Kamakura Inn, an exclusive mountain retreat outside the city. But his sojourn is far from therapeutic, and Aoki is soon wrestling both the temptation of beautiful geisha and the danger of a bloodthirsty murderer running loose through the guest house.

This crime novel is about as topical as it gets, starting with the killing of a Melbourne underworld figure. Tough yet tender Detective Rubens McCauley is framed for the hit. McCauley fights to save his life and restore his name to the former level of disrepute it once enjoyed. In the course of McCauley’s quest for the truth, he teams up with hottie Constable Cassie Withers. In the tradition of many crime stories, we wonder if they will connect in other ways. We are set up nicely for a sequel, and ‘Huzza!’ for that.

Nicholas Jose’s new novel, Original Face, begins violently. On the first page, a man is – expertly, and with a small knife – skinned alive, his face removed. We are in Sydney and the assassin’s name is Daozi, which in Chinese means knife. Jose’s seventh work of fiction traces the sometimes-brittle nature of identity as it plays with an ancient Chinese riddle: ‘Before your father and mother were born, what was your original face?’ It’s a confidently crafted pastiche; a kind of film-noir literature with a tender twist of Buddhist philosophy.

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 police procedural (PP) can be.

Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.