Athenæum Club Melbourne: A New History of the Early […]

Well Anyway by Dal Stivens, introduction by Harry Heseltine Arcadia, […]

“Poor Clarke is on the voyage out to Australia, his […]

Marcus Clarke’s preface to the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon […]

When I was an undergraduate my tutor used to look […]

Gordon, Clarke and Kendall Concerned about the birds gathering on […]

Torn Apart, by Peter Corris; Allen & Unwin, 2010, 240 pages, $29.99.

Torn Apart is the thirty-fifth book from Peter Corris featuring Cliff Hardy. Older, possibly wiser, bruised and somewhat battered, Cliff has now lost his private investigator’s licence. In the previous novel, Deep Water, he suffered a heart attack. What else can go wrong?

How about being confronted by his doppelganger? “The Doppelganger” features in one of the earliest pieces of crime writing published in Australia, a story by Marcus Clarke published in the Australian Monthly Magazine in August 1867. It is cheering to find tradition perpetuated, and well-worn themes refusing, like Sherlock Holmes, to lie down and die. It is part of the appeal of crime fiction, the return of the familiar. The psychiatrist Charles Rycroft theorised that the addictive nature of reading detective novels arose from an obsession with the primal scene, returning to the site of seeing your parents having sex. Though Cliff Hardy is never that much into voyeurism, prurience or weird stuff. In the ranks of contemporary criminal investigators, he remains comparatively clean cut. Not for Corris the serial post-mortems, serial killers and child abusers threatening to colonise the genre.

My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey, by Ross Fitzgerald; New South, 2010, 240 pages, $34.95.

“The truth is that, quite often, a little bit of me goes a long way,” Ross Fitzgerald writes towards the end of My Name is Ross. It is a characteristically disarming observation. Fortunately he stopped drinking forty years ago. But this account of his years of drinking and pill-popping nonetheless fills a substantial volume. And a harrowing account it is. But, again characteristically, it is relieved with wit and verve.

The temptation, and Fitzgerald is clearly not one readily to refuse temptation, must have been to present this as a latter-day rake’s progress, a jolly saga of men behaving badly. “Such a lark! Stole two boots and a brass hat. Hung a notice of a bal masqué on the railing of a Baptist chapel, and stuck a board with ‘Mangling done here’ on the Hospital gate,” as Dudley Smooth put it in a piece by Marcus Clarke in the 1860s. “Ho, for the breakage of lamps, the carrying away of signs, the petty larceny of gilt hats and wooden boots!”

Of the Director of the Writers’ Centre’s preoccupations, the most […]