I’m expecting an out of town visitor soon. Like waaay out of town. The underside of the world, out of town. Cameron Ashley, one of three chief editors of the resurrected Crimefactory digital magazine, (the other two are fellow Australian Liam Jose and Arizona’s own Keith Rawson), will be traveling the United States for a few weeks this fall and under my hospitality for a portion of the time, (he’ll also be at NoirCon in Philadelphia in November where he’ll moderate a panel featuring Vicki Hendricks, Daniel Woodrell, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Seth Harwood). And he’s no slouch of a writer himself. Check out this story from Plots With Guns.
Crimefactory, along with a couple recent Australian films has got me looking into the crime culture of the former penal colony and, call me an ugly American, but I really wasn’t clued into the what all was going on down there.
First off, like I said, some films deserve to be called out. I just caught writer/director David Michod’s excellent Animal Kingdom and if you’re lucky enough to live in a city where it’s playing, do yourself a favor and check it out, but everybody can rush out tonight and purchase a copy of Nash Edgerton’s darkly shining gem The Square. Fans of modern noir films like oh, Blood Simple or Red Rock West will enjoy it. Recent Australian crime films have been quietly or tangentially asserting a solid sense of scale, (generally less bombastic than American crime films), and over the last decade, Chopper, Lantana, The Hard Word, The Proposition, and Little Fish, to name a few, are making me hungry for more.
Fans of Donald Westlake’s hard-boiled Parker novels, (under the pseudonym Richard Stark), will find an appealing parallel in Wyatt, the amoral anti-hero featured in several books from Garry Disher. Disher also writes the Hal Challis procedurals.
Leigh Redhead writes the Simone Kirsch private detective series about a stripper whose bad side you don’t want be on. These take a look at Melbourne and the world from inside the microcosm of strip clubs and massage parlors, portraying the working girls the way Redhead experienced them first hand. Though, she now lives in Viet Nam, she has a wealth of stories and details to draw from and bring this series to vivid life.
Peter Temple has garnered some acclaim, but not the audience he deserves outside of Australia where he’s won The Ned Kelly award five times. His books Broken Shore and Truth come equipped with glossaries to help our delicate sense of English get around the heavily accented speech and reference of the written word. Temple is also the author of the Jack Irish series.
So, there’s a start.
Are there some more Australian crime and mystery books or films I should ingest soon?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
