When Dave Warner’s City of Light appeared in 1995, Western Australia’s crime writing scene resembled one of the late night streets of seventies Perth described so vividly in his book: totally devoid of life.
City of Light, which jointly won the 1996 WA Premier’s prize for fiction, focused on a rookie police constable, Snowy Lane, swept up in an investigation into the murders of several young women by a serial killer dubbed ‘Mr Gruesome’. The case entangles Lane in a web of financial and political corruption spanning the seventies to late eighties.
“As far as I knew at the time, there were no other contemporary crime novelists setting work in WA and nothing had been set there since Arthur Upfield,” recalls Warner.
You can read the rest of this piece here on the Guardian Australia’s Australian Culture Blog.
These sound great Andrew – It’d be interesting if you had a chance to interview some of these authors for Pulp Curry.
Congrats on the Guardian article and your film festival reports are appreciated as well.
Thanks for the feedback. I did a two-part interview with David Whish-Wilson a couple of years ago when his first book came out. Search for it on the site and you’ll find it.
Cheers,
Andrew
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