Peter Corris

Two of the greatest Australian crime writers died within six months of each other in 2018. Peter Temple authored nine novels, four of which featured roustabout Melbourne private detective Jack Irish, and one of which, Truth, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010. Temple died on 8 March 2018, aged seventy-one. Peter Corris was more prolific, writing a staggering eighty-eight books across his career, including historical fiction, biography, sport, and Pacific history. Forty-two of those highlighted the travails of punchy Sydney P.I. Cliff Hardy. Corris died on 30 August 2018, seventy-six and virtually blind.

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.

Of all places on earth, Pitcairn Island must surely have the strangest history. Everyone knows about the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 (not a bad year for uprisings) and about the settlement founded by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts on this remote Pacific island. Now Peter Corris has created a fiction based on a distant family connection between Fletcher Christian and Corris himself, through his Manx ancestry.

Just in case anyone hasn’t head of Cliff Hardy, Peter Corris leads off his new collection of short stories featuring the Sydney private eyes, Forget Me If You Can, with ‘The Hearing’ – an informative little piece in which Hardy, his license suspended, undergoes an interview with a ‘psycho-sociological profiler’ to see if he is a fit and proper person to carry on snooping. In compressed form Corris gives us the essential Hardy: aggressive, cynical, hard-bitten, rude or charming (depending), middle aged, battle-scarred, divorced, ex-smoker, drinks too much, as honest as the job allows. You get a good sense of the man’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which are expanded on in the dozen stories that follow.

Place has always been an intrinsic element in the detective story from the Paris of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (despite the fact that his knowledge of the city came from an exhibition and not reality) to the London of Holmes to the village of Miss Marple to San Francisco of Hammett. In many cases it is as important a component as the detective character itself, or at least the detective is so entwined in his or her geography as to be impossible to conceive without it. This aspect of the detective novel probably reached if not its penultimate then its most obvious demonstration in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and has continued through the LA detective tradition that Chandler founded (with considerable outside help from Hammett). The liveliness of that tradition together with the fact that Los Angeles is home to Hollywood have made it the most mapped city in public consciousness.

This is The Great Tradition. Spade, Marlowe, Archer, Spenser. Peter Corris has relocated it, given it another place and another name and done it all with verve and flair. In ten adventures, Cliff Hardy lurches around Sydney in the rusty armour of his Falcon (except on one occasion when he goes to his spiritual home, California). While Corris does not achieve as much in the short stories as he does in the novels (but then that is true of Hammett), he does present Cliff Hardy as alive (miraculously) and well (apart from batterings and hangovers) and doing good (if not entirely within the meaning of the act).