Australian Crime Fiction

A 200-Year History

Stephen Knight

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English

McFarland & Co Inc
30 May 2018

Biography; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers; Literary companions

Australian crime fiction grew from the country’s modern origins as a very distant English prison. Early stories described escaped convicts becoming heroic bushrangers, or how the system maltreated mis-convicted people.

As Australia developed, thrillers emerged about threats to the wealth of free settlers and crime among gold-seekers from England and America, and then urban crime fiction including in 1887 London’s first best-seller, Fergus Hume’s Melbourne-located The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

The genre thrived, with bush detectives like Billy Pagan and Arthur Upfield’s half-Indigenous ‘Bony’, and from the 1950s women like June Wright, Pat Flower and Patricia Carlon linked with the internationally burgeoning psychothriller. Modernity has massified the Australian form: the 1980s saw a flow of private-eye thrillers, both Aussie Marlowes and tough young women, and the crime novel thrived, long a favorite in the police-skeptical country. In the twenty-first century some authors have focused on policemen, and more on policewomen— and finally there is potent Indigenous crime fiction.

In this book Stephen Knight, long-established as an authority on the genre and now back in Melbourne, tells in detail and with analytic coherence this story of a rich but previously little-known national crime fiction.

By: Stephen Knight
Imprint: McFarland & Co Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 415g
ISBN: 9781476670867
ISBN 10: 1476670862
Pages: 269
Publication Date: 30 May 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Stephen Knight is a well-known authority on crime fiction and literature through the ages. He has worked at universities in Australia, England and Wales and is a research professor in literature at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Reviews for Australian Crime Fiction: A 200-Year History

"""This revised edition of Stephen Knight's study of Australian crime fiction first published 21 years ago is right up to the minute...he provides a sweeping, highly informed, academic but eminently readable look at the genre that he argues was long ignored at home due to a combination of traditional canonical assumptions in academia and restrictive publishing deals."" - Steven Carroll, The Age"