Australian Crime Fiction

Stephen Knight has written a 200 year history of Australian crime writing dating from the early 1800s until 2017. Early Australian crime writing, not surprisingly, featured convicts and bushrangers.

However it was Fergus Hume's book, The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886) that first captured the attention of the reading public in England and Australia.

This study of Australian crime writing is divided into five time periods - 1818-1914, 1915-1945, 1946-1979, 1980-1999 and 2000-2017. Perhaps the best known Australian crime author after the First World War was Arthur Upfield who set most of his books in an Australian rural landscape with the main character being Detective Inspector Napoleon 'Bony' Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force. But it is particularly since 1980 that Australian crime fiction has become established.

Authors such as Peter Temple have won overseas awards. Temple published nine novels including four in the Jack Irish series.One of the features of Australian crime fiction is the Australian setting which is recognisable to Australian readers but very different environments for readers from overseas.  Peter Corris set his private eye books in Sydney with the main character being Cliff Hardy. Gary Disher sets his crime investigations in Victoria, often around the Mornington Peninsula region. A writer who often, but not always, sets his novels in Western Australia is Dave Warner. Jane Harper is a recent author whose books have received critical acclaim. The first three have been set in country Victoria where the atmosphere created by the setting is definitely important part of the novel. Kerry Greenwood has set her Corinna Chapman series in inner Melbourne. Geoffrey McGeachin has set his novels focusing on Charlie Berlin in Victoria.

Stephen Knight divides each section of his study into types of crime writing. For example in section 5 (200-2017) he divides categories of books into private investigators, police, amateur detectives, psychothrillers, indigenous crime fiction historical crime fiction, other voices as well as the crime novel.

Writers of historical crime include Kerry Greenwood with her Phyrne Fisher series and Marshall Browne with his series of books set in Melbourne at the end of the nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. Sulari Gentill has written a series of books about her main character, Rowland Sinclair, and his friends set in the 1930s.

For anyone interested in Australian crime fiction this book by Stephen Knight provides an excellent intoduction to the genre which should encourage readers to find and enjoy books by Australian authors.