AustLit

'By the 1970s Australian crime fiction was drifting.

'The genre had a long history, back to convict days, when it dealt with unfair convictions and brutal treatments, most famously in Marcus Clarke’s For The Term Of His Natural Life (1870-2).' (Introduction)

'Most countries produce crime fiction, but the versions vary according to national self-concepts. America admires the assertive private eye, both Dashiell Hammett’s late 1920s Sam Spade and the nearly as tough modern feminists, such as Sara Paretsky. Britain prefers calm mystery-solvers, amateurs like Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey or sensitive police like Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based John Rebus. The French seem to favour semi-professionals who are distinctly dissenting – in 1943 Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma stood up to Nazi occupiers nearly as overtly as to Paris criminals.'  (Introduction)

'Australian crime fiction grew from the country's modern origins as a very distant English prison. Early stories described escaped convicts becoming heroic bushrangers, or how the system maltreated mis-convicted people.

'As Australia developed, thrillers emerged about threats to the wealth of free settlers and crime among gold-seekers from England and America, and then urban crime fiction including in 1887 London's first best-seller, Fergus Hume's Melbourne-located The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

'The genre thrived, with bush detectives like Billy Pagan and Arthur Upfield's half-Indigenous `Bony', and from the 1950s women like June Wright, Pat Flower and Patricia Carlon linked with the internationally burgeoning psychothriller. Modernity has massified the Australian form: the 1980s saw a flow of private-eye thrillers, both Aussie Marlowes and tough young women, and the crime novel thrived, long a favorite in the police-skeptical country. In the twenty-first century some authors have focused on policemen, and more on policewomen- and finally there is potent Indigenous crime fiction.

'In this book Stephen Knight, long-established as an authority on the genre and now back in Melbourne, tells in detail and with analytic coherence this story of a rich but previously little-known national crime fiction.'(Publication summary)

'Crime fiction has many authors, very many readers, and also a number of myths. One is that the whole thing started with Poe, a view favored by those unaware of earlier authors who developed the form before the brilliant Philadelphian made myth out of mystery and detection. Another is that Raymond Chandler was a great popular private-eye author—in fact his first novel sold in sober hardback and he was always better-received among the English literati of his own origin, a context which gave class and confidence to his reshaping of Hammett's edgy populism. The myths also have it that Sara Paretsky was the first of the feminist mystery authors—in fact several others preceded her by a decade or more, but they have been effectively obscured by the firmness and flourish which in her Chandleresque way she brought to the form, or the anti-form. A negative myth is the topic of this chapter—why has no-one ever offered any explanation for the runaway success of the first novel by an author who went on to write many with nothing of the same success, who set it in far-away Melbourne, Australia, and yet saw his novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab take London by bibliocommercial storm in very late 1887, so much so it gained the title of the first best-seller in crime fiction? Unlike Fergus Hume's more than a hundred other novels, 40 more years of mysteries and sensational stories, the book has almost always been in print, usually in a cheap format and occasionally with a short, gesturing introduction. It has been at times mentioned as a freak and very rarely described in very limited detail. There is now from the Melbourne scholar Lucy Sussex a full account of the context, production and promotion of the book, and it seems time it came in from the critical cold.' (Introduction)

'Crime fiction–a product of the burgeoning metropolis of the 19th century–features specialists who identify criminals to protect an anxious citizenry. Before detectives came to play the central role, the protagonists tended to be lawyers or other professionals. Major English writers like Gaskell, Dickens and Collins contributed to the genre–Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was a best-seller in 1887–and American and French authors created new forms. This book explores thematic aspects of 19th century crime fiction's complex history, including various social and gender roles between different time periods and settings, and the imperial elements that made Sherlock Holmes seem dynamically contemporary.' (Publication summary)

'In The Politics of Myth, Stephen Knight studies nine figures still vividly alive, all of them appearing in twenty-first century film and television. Analysing how they relate to the major themes of Power, Resistance and Knowledge, he shows how fact and fiction mix to help us explore and understand the complexities of our world.

'Surprising mythic shifts occur across time. Robin Hood can be a tough anti-authoritarian, a genial aristocrat, a Saxon patriot; Queen Elizabeth I has been seen as a Protestant heroine, a love-lorn lady, even a grumpy manipulator. From Merlin's multiple manifestations and Sherlock Holmes's smoking habits to the ongoing arguments about Ned Kelly, this book explores the richness and the range of figures of myth. ' (Publication summary)

'Australians have always been welcoming to crime fiction (Knight, Continent of Mystery, ‘Origins and Sins’ 10–57). Bushranger ballads and squatter thrillers explored varied early wrongs, and rights; Victoria had two of the world’s first women crime writers, Ellen Davitt with Force and Fraud (1865) and Mary Fortune, whose many stories from 1866 often featured the detective skills of mounted trooper Mark Sinclair. Major authors Marcus Clarke and ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ published crime-related novels and Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), set and first published in Melbourne, became London’s first best-selling crime novel.' (Introduction)