Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Three new Australian crime novels by Anne Buist, Kimberley Starr, and J.P. Pomare

by
May 2020, no. 421

Three new Australian crime novels by Anne Buist, Kimberley Starr, and J.P. Pomare

by
May 2020, no. 421

Some years ago, a crime-writing friend of mine was at a writer’s festival with Lee Child. After a few drinks, my friend asked Child how he’d gone about preparing to write his Jack Reacher novels. Child’s reply was something along the lines of not putting pen to paper before he’d spent six months reading all of the successful crime novels he could find, and before parsing out exactly what made them popular with readers. Once this was done, he sat down to write. The rest, of course, is history.

If Child were setting up shop here in contemporary Australia, the chances are strong that one of the key elements he’d take from commercially successful novels of recent years would be a rural setting. This makes sense, in that it’s partly Australia’s vast and varied landscapes that make the country unique and of interest to overseas readers in particular. Neither does the rural turn of much recent Australian crime fiction point toward a formulaic bent – there exists a great variety of representation of character and place.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.