The Last Cliff Hardy Novel

Win, Lose or Draw
by Peter Corris
Allen & Unwin, 2017, 246 pages, $29.99
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I admit that I still feel a guilty sense of indulgence about reading so much crime fiction. But then I remind myself that I am not alone. P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht and W.H. Auden were similarly all addicts, if that’s the word. And I suspect it might be.

And addicts need continuity of supply. A crucial feature of crime writing is regular production and delivery. Peter Corris has been no exception. Win, Lose or Draw is the forty-second volume in the Cliff Hardy series. For thirty-seven years Corris has been supplying our regular fix, up there with the masters and mistresses, as satisfyingly prolific as Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell, Robert B. Parker and Michael Connelly.

Win, Lose or Draw involves the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, the daughter of a multi-millionaire businessman. The businessman’s wife is spaced out, off the planet; the son is disturbed, hostile and in deep trouble; the businessman may or may not be honest. Unstated possibilities of what might have happened to Juliana and to what degree it might or might not involve the family create a disturbing context, all the more powerful for being left implicit.

All the expected and satisfying generic components are here. There is the familiar Sydney setting of the prosperous eastern suburbs of the businessman, and Cliff’s ungentrified corner of Glebe, locations Corris has made his own. But a possible sighting of the girl takes Cliff out of his usual territory to Norfolk Island. Has the girl been abducted for a ransom or has she simply run away? Is she part of a sex trafficking operation or has she simply hooked up with a suspected drug smuggler? The possibilities hang in the air like, to quote Raymond Chandler, “the honeyed reek of well-cured marijuana”. Episodes in Coolangatta and Byron Bay explore the world of yachties, druggies and drifters and soon bump up against organised crime and bent police. To tell more would be to tell too much, but true to form Cliff gets knocked around by bad guys and harassed by police, and drinks too much.

Is Cliff showing signs of age? Can he still pack a punch and receive a few in return without too much pain? In Deep Water he suffered a heart attack. In Torn Apart he had lost his private investigator’s licence. That Empty Feeling, the previous Cliff Hardy novel, opened with Cliff leafing through the Sydney Morning Herald and wondering whether he likes its downsized tabloid format: “I decided I didn’t care one way or the other—the paper was mostly gossip and stories that didn’t matter much now and wouldn’t matter at all tomorrow.”

Yes, he is getting older. Or one-time newspaper man Corris is getting older. But as for many of their age, Cliff’s and Corris’s, there are still some pleasures to be found in newspapers, like turning to the obituary pages and seeing the names of old acquaintances. It was the obituary of “what the media called ‘a colourful Sydney identity’” that grabbed Cliff’s attention. And he recalls a case from the 1980s, a world before e-mails and the internet and mobile phones and CCTVs and the rest of the ubiquitous apparatus of the surveillance state.

In the time Corris has been writing the Cliff Hardy novels, the world of the private eye has in technological terms change massively. Back in the 1980s when Cliff first appeared, the PI had to do it all by leg-work, even if the legs were much of the time on the accelerator and brake pedals of the iconic old Falcon, instead of beneath a desk in front of a computer. Private investigators now inhabit a different world from the days of Chandler and Hammett, as the News of the World phone hacking scandal revealed. Now it is all about data retrieval, following villains by listening to the messages on their mobile phones and looking at where they travelled on their Opal card and what time their car was logged by a speed camera or by the Harbour Bridge toll.

With Win, Lose or Draw we are back in present time. But, alas, for the last time. This is the final Cliff Hardy book. Since 1980, when he made his debut in The Dying Trade, Cliff’s adventures have been providing an engaging commentary on contemporary Australian life, becoming increasingly popular as the series developed. Yet except for the film of The Empty Beach starring Bryan Brown, Cliff never made it on the big or little screen. One problem is that Cliff is a loner, the classic hard-drinking, one-time hard-smoking solitary. But for films and television the investigator needs a partner, someone to talk about the case to, in order to clarify it for the viewers and advance the action. Cliff’s first-person monologue drives the novels perfectly, and it might have worked in a movie of the 1930s or 1940s, but most contemporary directors are frightened of depending on voice-over. So he remains firmly a print creation—though also available in talking books and e-books.

Cliff ends up in pretty good shape in this last novel. He hasn’t been given a heart attack like Morse or plunged over the Reichenbach Falls like Sherlock Holmes. He has aged, but only moderately. It is reassuring to think of him still out there in the mean streets and sun-drenched posh suburbs, not getting as much work as he used to, taking it easy.

The consistent production of these marvellous entertainments has earned Corris the title of “the godfather of Australian crime fiction”. And though the novels have now come to an end, as “The Godfather” Corris continues to write his column of reflections on crime and other fiction in each issue of the online Newtown Review of Books. We wish him and Cliff well. We shall be thinking of them.