Category Archives: Australian crime fiction

Blackwattle Creek – a rereading of the Ned Kelly award winner 2013

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

BlackwattleBuried beneath the hysteria of last Saturday’s federal election was another vote, the 2013 Ned Kelly awards for Australian crime writing. It was a night of firsts: the first year e-books were eligible, the first time the Neddies have taken place in Brisbane, and the first under the umbrella of the recently formed Australian Crime Writers Association.

But for Geoffrey McGeachin, the recipient of the top award, Best Fiction, it was very much a matter of second time around. His winning book Blackwattle Creek focuses on Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, a policeman in fifties Melbourne. The first in the Berlin series, The Diggers Rest Hotel, took home the Neddie for best first crime fiction in 2011.

Read the rest of this piece here at the Guardian Australia’s Oz Culture Blog.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Ned Kelly Awards

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Book review: The Dying Beach

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

the-dying-beachThere’s two things I love having on this site – special guests and crime fiction set in Asia.

Today’s post has both. 

Crime writer Robert Gott was kind enough to drop by and review my partner Angela Savage’s wonderful new book, The Dying Beach.

Gott is the author of the William Power trilogy of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, and Amongst the Dead. More recently, he also authored the crime novel The Holiday Murders, out now through Scribe Publications.

Angela Savage’s The Dying Beach, the third novel in the series featuring Jayne Keeney, is a beautifully built book. Its parts slide together smoothly, with a satisfying, elegant ‘click’ of finely-tuned logic.

Apart from the working out of the whodunit component of the plot, The Dying Beach offers insights into Thai life and culture that go far beyond information gleaned from a Lonely Planet guidebook.

Savage knows this world well enough to negotiate the thousand subtle landmines a farang, or foreigner, might step on. It is fascinating watching what Savage calls, ‘the fraught dynamics of being a foreigner’, play out. Her private detective, Jayne Keeney, speaks fluent Thai which gives her, and by extension us, privileged access to the lives of the Thai people who inhabit the book.… Read more

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Posted in Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Crime fiction and film from Thailand

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Crime writers find fertile ground in the red dirt of Western Australia

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

ZeroWhen 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.
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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, David Whish-Wilson

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The death of a bookshop: a tribute to Melbourne’s Kill City Books

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 26 Comments

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I love poking around in second-hand bookshops. The more disorganised and dishevelled, the better. I can’t remember the last time I found one with a curtained off section where they stashed the adult stuff, the pulp fiction and true crime, but those ones were best of all.

It’s always sad to hear about the closure of a second handbook shop and they’ve been closing with alarming frequency in Melbourne over the last few years.

The latest casualty is Flinders Books, which had operated out of the basement at 119 Swanston Street, for 18 years. Before that it had reportedly been a trading card shop, and going back even further, a rest and recreation area for military personnel after World War II.

Basement Books, located at 342 Flinders Street is, as far as I know, the last second-hand bookshop in the Melbourne CBD.

The reasons behind the closure are nothing new: changing book buying habits, including the rise of e-books, coupled with a massive rent increase, all of which, according to the owner, made the business impossible to sustain at its current location.

As if the end of a good second-hand bookstore is not sad enough, the passing of Flinders Books has a wider historical significance. For the last eight years of its existence it also hosted the remnants of Kill City Books, once Melbourne’s premier bookshop specialising in crime fiction and true crime.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Chester Himes, Crime Factory, Crime Factory Publications, Crime fiction, Forgotten Melbourne, James Ellroy

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Ghost Money makes long list for Ned Kelly crime writing awards

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

Ghost MoneyThe long lists for the 2013 Ned Kelly awards for Australian crime writing have been released.

My novel, Ghost Money, has made the long list for best First Fiction, along with a number of other excellent books.

Ghost Money continues to get excellent reviews. So, if you haven’t bought a copy, why not do so.

For those who don’t know the plot, here’s the pitch:

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.

But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.

Ghost Money is a crime nove about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices they make, what they do to survive.

It’s available here in digital format for $4.99 and hard copy for $10 plus postage.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Ned Kelly Awards, Noir fiction

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