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Dean Biron

Dean Biron

Dean Biron teaches in the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University. Hewas co-winner of the 2011 Calibre Essay Prize.

Dean Biron reviews 'Promise' by Tony Cavanaugh

July–August 2012, no. 343 09 July 2012
Promise is set on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, although it might as well be Siberia so far as any claims to historical or social verisimilitude are concerned. Just about every stereotype ever devised in the name of crime fiction has been assembled here, resulting in a story so over the top as to stretch credulity beyond breaking point. ... (read more)

Dean Biron reviews 'Closer to Stone' by Simon Cleary

April 2012, no. 340 01 April 2012
About a third of the way into Simon Cleary’s Closer to Stone, all of the preceding distinctively phrased metaphors and similes, all of the fragrant, lucid imagery – along with some that is rather less than lucid: how, exactly, does one pick up a drink and take a ‘deep sip’? – begin to meld into a compelling whole. Narrator Bas Adams, scouring the immense unknown of the Sahara Desert in s ... (read more)

Dean Biron reviews 'Comeback' by Peter Corris

February 2012, no. 338 20 January 2012
Peter Corris’s Comeback, the thirty-ninth or some such book in his Cliff Hardy series, is yet another to be plucked from the apparently bottomless ocean that is the crime fiction genre. Ageing private detective Hardy – as adept with his fists as he is tactful with the ladies – skulks around a Sydney crammed with scabrous cops, fat-cat entrepreneurs, hired muscle, slinky prostitutes, and myri ... (read more)

Dean Biron reviews 'The Boundary' by Nicole Watson

September 2011, no. 334 23 August 2011
Diego Maradona is the greatest football player I have ever seen, but as a coach he sits somewhere between a comic opera and a train wreck. Philip Larkin was one of Britain’s finest poets, but to read his music criticism is to wish someone had heaved his typewriter into the nearest river. Ronald Reagan qualified as an A-grade B-movie actor, yet as president – the biggest acting role on the plan ... (read more)

2011 Calibre Prize (winner): 'The Death of the Writer'

May 2011, no. 331 20 April 2011
In February 1878 in Marseilles, France, Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski, a twenty-year-old Polish seafarer tormented by depression, lifted a revolver to his chest and pulled the trigger. The suicide attempt failed: the bullet, whether by chance or design, penetrated the young man’s body without disrupting any vital organ. Korzeniowski recovered quickly and, only a few weeks later, too ... (read more)
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