Oh dear, I really wanted to like The Baltic Business and ‘Beverly Hills’ Browning, the latest productions from the Peter Cortis word factory. Like thousands of other Australians, I’ve become addicted to Cliff Hardy, and summer means my annual fix of an evening breeze through sex and sin and nasty pollies under the sunny skies of Sydney. Cliff may have been an undisguised Philip Marlowe lookalike, but then, I’ve always had a yen for Chandler’s view of the world. And anyway, at least Cliff Hardy was ours, spoke Oz with style in recognisable locales, and reorganised the moral order of Sydney with an appropriately Australian sense of the limits of possibility.