Crime Fiction

About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.

Crime fiction offers various pleasures but rarely those of innovation, and that is the case with these three very different books from three veterans of the genre – familiar pleasures. Degrees of Connection is a police procedural featuring a series character; Earthly Delights is an amateur sleuth cosy in which Greenwood breaks away from her series character, Phryne Fisher; and Blindside is a hardboiled who’s-got-the-loot thriller in which the police and the criminals are morally indistinguishable and largely interchangeable. Each solves some crime problems, of course; each devotes considerable time and energy to documenting their home city: Sydney, Melbourne and environs. And each uses films and film viewing as a lingua franca, a cultural currency exchanged among its characters (and readers).

Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.

Harold Bloom’s comment on one of Poe’s stories that ‘the tale somehow is stronger than the telling’ came to mind during my reading of the nineteenth century mystery, The Murder of Madeline Brown. In spite of unevenness in the writing and some irritating Latin affectations, the story has a haunting quality which lingered long after the reading.

In last year’s Cat Catcher, Caroline Shaw established her detective heroine, Lenny Aaron, as one of the most original characters in recent Australian crime (Cat Catcher was runner-up for the Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Award for best first novel). Gaunt, weird looking, an obsessive compulsive with a phobia about being touched and a serious addiction to over-the-counter drug cocktails, Lennie is in the tradition of dysfunctional and damaged investigators muddling their way through recent crime fiction.

Let us start with the similarities: two thrillers, set mainly in Sydney, each with a would-be snappy but jaded one word tide. On each a stiletto-heeled shoe is part of the cover design. There the ways seem to part. Dilemma is Jon Cleary’s forty-ninth novel in a career of six decades and marks the sixteenth appearance of Detective Scobie Malone. For Canadian-born, former model Tara Moss, Fetish is her first novel. HarperCollins is loyal to the old, supportive of the new. Or supportive up to a point. Both books needed much stricter editing, not only for typos (‘eluded’ for ‘alluded’ in Fetish, for instance: one hopes that is a typo), but to tighten structures that let suspense amble away.

Five pages from the end of Silver Meadow, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, an effect not only of the thrilling denouement, but also a genuine frisson of aesthetic delight at a perfectly judged conclusion. Silver Meadow is a book which deserves to be noticed, not only by devotees of the police procedural (it is at least as good as anything Rendell, James or Rankin have written) but also by anyone with an interest in narrative form, the politics of contemporary space and/or rampant consumerism. This is a ‘seriously’ good book about sex and shopping.

As the co-publisher of Mean Streets, Australia’s ‘crime, mystery and detective’ fiction magazine, I have, like Garry Disher, occasions when I wonder what the various terms actually mean and what separates them. It’s something Disher addresses in the author’s note to this very fine collection of stories which are amongst the best writing Disher has done. As Disher says:

A kidnapping forms the centrepiece of Alan Wearne’s Kicking in Danger, an Australian Rules mystery bearing the imprimatur of such diverse luminaries as Ron Barassi and Peter Craven. The only other football mystery I know about is Death in the Back Pocket, which failed to kick a goal, but thankfully Wearne’s tilt is much more successful. He is better known for his epic verse novel The Nightmarkets, but with this book he has shown his true colours, which are red and black. A true Bomberholic, he boasts an impressive store of club lore and trivia. In fact, sometimes the book seems to be merely an excuse for him to flaunt his knowledge and obvious love of the game.