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Stephen Dedman

Stephen Dedman is the author of five novels and more than 120 short stories published in an eclectic range of anthologies and magazines. He has taught Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia and the Forensic Science Centre, and he has reviewed crime fiction and true crime for The West Australian and other publications and worked in bookshops for more than thirty years. His most recent novel is Immunity.

Stephen Dedman reviews 'True West' by David Whish-Wilson

March 2020, no. 419 24 February 2020
True West is the latest historical crime thriller from David Whish-Wilson, author of The Summons (2006), Perth (2013), The Coves (2018), and the Frank Swann series. True West is set in Western Australia in 1988, the time when Jack van Tongeren’s Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM) was papering the city with hundreds of thousands of racist posters, and when John Howard and Ian Sincla ... (read more)

Stephen Dedman reviews 'Bowraville' by Dan Box

August 2019, no. 413 22 July 2019
Dan Box is a crime reporter for The Australian. In September 2014, Homicide Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin contacted him to ask him to write about the murder of three Aboriginal children from Bowraville in 1990–91. Box later began a podcast about the murders that earned him a Walkley Award, part of a process that would see him go from (in his words) reporter to campaigner to witness in t ... (read more)

Stephen Dedman reviews 'Eight Lives' by Susan Hurley

June–July 2019, no. 412 23 May 2019
Eight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death. ... (read more)

Stephen Dedman reviews 'Driving Into the Sun' by Marcella Polain

May 2019, no. 411 22 April 2019
In Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s. She recreates an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones, a time when Perth residents had just learned to worry about unlocked ... (read more)