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.
| ISBN: | 9781476670867 |
| Publication date: | 30th June 2018 |
| Author: | Stephen Knight |
| Publisher: | McFarland & Co Inc |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 311 pages |
| Genres: |
Literary companions, book reviews and guides Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers |
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.
Australian Crime Fiction features in the following genres: Literary companions, book reviews and guides, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Australian Crime Fiction is available in Paperback
Australian Crime Fiction was written by Stephen Knight and published by McFarland & Co Inc
Australian Crime Fiction has 311 pages
£44.96