AustLit

'Charles Dickens died at his desk in 1870, aged 58, with his crime novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. Robert B. Parker also went out in harness – in 2010, aged 77 – so that there would be no more adventures (by his hand anyway) for the private detective Spenser and his peerless companion, Hawk, although at least readers were spared any more of the insufferable Susan Silverman. Michael Dibdin only reached sixty. The tally of his Aurelio Zen crime novels halted at eleven. Philip Kerr was two years older, his death coinciding with the publication of the thirteenth outing of Bernie Gunther, Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018) (a fourteenth novel is happily in the publisher’s hands). The career of Australia’s foremost crime writer (to call him the Godfather confuses the subject with the craft), Peter Corris, ended in 2017, the year he turned 75, because increasing problems with his sight (caused by diabetes) meant that he could no longer write.'  (Introduction)

'It begins with an anecdote, related at third hand. David Crouch opens his incisive and intermittently exhilarating account of the colonial author, radical and agitator William Lane with Vance Palmer describing how, during ‘a sweltering summer in Brisbane,’ writers Sydney Jephcott and Francis Adams were startled by a ‘ghastly apparition’ on the ‘dusty roadway’ before them. Jephcott takes the limping figure for Mephistopheles. Adams hisses ‘”shut up! It’s Billy Lane”.’ For many in late colonial Australia, Lane was the Messiah rather than the Tempter. Crouch does not venture a biography. Lane is lightly sketched—club-footed, adamantly teetotal, fiercely industrious, geographically restless and—especially through his own weekly magazine the Boomerang—‘able to pour his ideas into the moral marrow of colonial print culture.’' (Introduction)

'The long subtitle of Marilla North’s entertaining revision of her book Yarn Spinners (first published in 2001) declares this to be 'A story of friendship, politics and a shared commitment to a distinctive Australian literature, woven through the letters of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Miles Franklin and their congenials'.' (Introduction)

'For Emma Viskic, the challenge of her second novel, And Fire Came Down, is to build on the success of her prize-winning 2015 debut, Resurrection Bay. Appearing again is one of the most intriguing recent protagonists of Australian crime fiction: the deaf private investigator Caleb Zelic, a man self-destructively redoubtable and the cause — as he fears — of harm all around him.' (Introduction)

'In October 1999, in his 84th year, Morris West died at his desk, as Charles Dickens had, as Robert B. Parker would. His final work, published posthumously in 2000, was The Last Confession, his account of ­Dominican friar and cosmologist Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy by the Inquisition in 1600 and whose career and example had long fascinated West.' (Introduction)

'Two of Australia’s finest writers began by publishing poetry before switching to fiction in the 1970s. David Malouf’s debut novel Johnno appeared in 1975; Roger McDonald’s Gallipoli novel, 1915, four years later. McDonald has taken his time since, assaying rich yet untouched or little regarded seams of the nation.' (Introduction)

'For longevity and versatility, Garry Disher has few Australian equals. His tally of books is now more than 50. He has specialised in crime from both sides of the argument. Thus far, eight books feature thief and burglar Wyatt, while there are seven for police officers Challis and Destry. Disher’s latest novel is a signal departure in one way, though lawlessness is central to its business.' (Introduction)

'International recognition was accorded to Lucy Treloar for her first novel, Salt Creek (2015), when it was short-listed for the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. (Hannah Kent was the second Australian author to be short-listed, in the next year, for her novel The Good People). Thus Treloar was placed in the nominal company of the great writer who invented the historical novel and whose literary influence—at least in the nineteenth century—surpassed all others.' (Introduction) 

'Hiroshi's fortunate fate is to find himself protected in the Aboriginal mission.'In depicting an intimate sideline to the story of the breakout of more than 1000 Japanese prisoners from their camp in Cowra on August 5, 1944, Anita Heiss' Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms explores different territory from her predecessors...'(Introduction)