Sand on the Gumshoe

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Apart from Arthur Upfield, Carter Brown and Peter Corris most Australians would be struggling to name many other home-grown writers of crime and detective fiction. Yet there is in fact a long Australian tradition of crime writing. The new crop of Australian crime writers are just returning the genre to the popularity it enjoyed for a century from the 1860s.

Maybe our convict origins have something to do with it, maybe it’s just human nature to be entertained by stories of violence and greed and the darkness of the human soul. Whatever the case, from the nineteenth century on, dozens of Australian authors have ventured into the genre to satisfy a hungry local market.

Australia has a surprisingly rich and varied tradition of crime writing embracing with varied degrees of success such branches of the idiom as detective stories, thrillers, mysteries, police procedurals and even gothic adventures. For much of our history, we have followed the traditions of British crime fiction. In recent years, however, the hard-edged commentary of the United States has become dominant.

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