Do we read crime novels because we know what is right and wrong, or for guidance through a world that appears ‘all grey’? The books of lawyer-turned-writer Dervla McTiernan prompt such questions.
Spanish authors (from left), Agustin Martinez, Jorge Diaz and Antonio Mercero, who have been writing bestsellers as Carmen Mola.
Quique Garcia/EPA
A true hoax provokes. It questions cultural biases, shattering conventions. But the curious case of the three men writing as a female author Carmen Mola does none of this.
Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train has sold 23 million copies, and the film adaptation was a box office smash.
DreamWorks Pictures/Universal Pictures via AP
There’s something disturbing about a story tracking a character’s mental decline for thrills. Happily, Paula Hawkins’ new novel, A Slow Fire Burning, joins a genre of books bucking this trend.
Crime fiction is the second most popular literary genre in Africa after romance. A reading of Kenyan author Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Black Star Nairobi reveals how it has disrupted the genre.
A group of leading black, queer and feminist academics held a colloquium to reconsider a seminal blackness studies text – offering new ways of thinking about the decolonial project.
Hard-boiled detective: Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973).
Allstar/Cinetext/MGM
The archetype can be traced back to 1920s detective fiction, when gruff, gun-toting, cigarette-smoking mavericks became heroic figures.
Australian crime fiction author Peter Corris published 102 novels in lifetimes, including 52 centred on the private investigator Cliff Hardy.
ALLEN AND UNWIN
With The Dying Trade, Peter Corris introduced Australia to one of its most successful crime heroes, Cliff Hardy.
Food can serve many functions in crime fiction, from being used directly as a weapon to expressing cultural belonging, gender or class.
from www.shutterstock.com
Food is an increasingly popular ingredient in crime fiction, serving up insights into the character of the detective hero and adding spice to the mystery.
Guy Pearce as the Chandleresque private investigator Jack Irish: in the early years of Australian crime fiction, convicts and bushrangers featured prominently.
Lachlan Moore
Australia’s rich tradition of crime fiction is little known – early tales told of bushrangers and convicts, one hero was a mining engineer turned amateur detective – but it reveals a range of national myths and fantasies.