Honey Brown’s latest novel DARK HORSE galloped (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) to the top of the most reviewed crime novel list for Challenge participants over the past month, with 5 of the 19 reviews in this category. It’s wonderful to see a new release attracting such attention, with the reviews sharing a positive vibe and a genuine appreciation of the novel’s twist. It’s certainly enough to make me put the novel on my own wishlist, hopefully you’ll be tempted too.

DARK HORSE is the story of Sarah Barnard who becomes trapped on a mountain after a flash flood. She takes shelter in a hut undergoing restoration but is soon joined by a mysterious bushwalker who may represent danger…but even if he does the two are both trapped in the inhospitable Victorian high country until the weather improves.

AWW Challenge creator Elizabeth Lhuede said of the book

 I would have read it in one sitting, if I hadn’t had to sleep. I curled up in front of a glowing slow combustion stove and, while the weather went crazy outside, was swept into the drama. Brown has a style that I love: it’s immediate, the descriptions are fresh, the action is urgent. I could almost feel the Victorian alpine hills crowding in, felt every bump and jerk of the heroine’s ride up the mountain on her endurance-trained horse, held my breath at the enormity of what she faced going up, when she reached the summit and going down again. It’s that kind of book: suspenseful, urgent, adrenaline-pumping.

Over at the Newton Review of Books Karen Chisolm said

This is a particularly powerful thriller. From the first, the reader is wrong-footed, although it’s hard to know that’s what is actually going on. Bad things continue to happen, and even when something positive does occur, you know that the lull in the tension is just there to make you feel better about the fact that more bad things are just over that next ridge.

While Shelleyrae at Book’d Out was taken by the characters

Sarah’s reason for being on the mountain is seemingly clear while Heath is the enigma. He appears untruthful, giving vague answers to even the simplest of questions and as Sarah’s suspicion of him grows, so does ours. The tension builds as Sarah battles her intense attraction to Heath, who is young, fit and handsome, even though she suspects him to be dangerous. Brown skillfully develops a relationship between Sarah and Heath that is, if not entirely understandable, feasible, despite the obvious contradictions.

Bree at 1girl2many books was captivated by Brown’s setting

The atmosphere in this novel is amazing. Despite it being Christmas Day, it’s raining, the fog is heavy, it’s windy and it’s miserable. Sarah and Heath are almost always soaked to the skin, shivering and trying to warm up using the meager supplies that they have. The weather lends an ominous vibe to this book, it’s definitely the sort of weather where you expect bad things to happen.

and Brenda summed up everyone’s sentiments

Aussie author Honey Brown is a relatively new author to me, but I will definitely be reading everything of hers I can lay my hands on!

Some highlights of the other crime novels we’ve been reading over the past month include

a great, thematic review of Livia Day’s A TRIFLE DEAD from Marg at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader. Marg matches each aspect of the book to an element of great trifle, making readers hungry for both the novel and some dessert, finishing with this observation “Of course, the final element in any trifle is the beautiful glass bowl that enables you to see the various layers once they are all assembled together, without distracting the eye. In this case, I think that the cover is very effective and eye catching.”

I learned that romantic suspense doesn’t have to be mushy and in the process thoroughly enjoyed Bronwyn Parry’s DEAD HEAT where “The authentic and quite enveloping setting provides an excellent backdrop for the cracking yarn which belied my ‘life’s slower in the country’ belief by not letting me stop for breath even once. There’s a rogue cop, international drug cartel links and a quite alarming number of dead bodies for something partially labelled romance but it all hangs together very nicely“.

Kerrie Smith at Mysteries in Paradise included a review of Annie Hauxwell’s debut novel IN HER BLOOD which features a heroine addicted financial investigator as its protagonist. Kerrie enjoyed all the book’s unorthodox aspects “Set in contemporary London it took me into a world I hadn’t visited before and set up some connections I hadn’t thought about before: an agency that investigates financial irregularities and outsources information to London police; a fraud investigator with a drug addiction; a very nasty loan shark with connections to regular finance; a doctor who dispenses heroin under legitimate licence; an anti-drugs campaigner who provides addiction counselling.”

Rochelle Sharpe thought Rebecca James’ SWEET DAMAGE was a rollercoaster of a story with “… plenty of tantalizing twist and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat, but it is the characters in this book that really hooked me and reeled me in. Once you meet the anxiety filled, timid, agoraphobic Anna, you will be reading in a desperate rush to find out what her story is, what was so terrible in her past that she turned into the mess she is“. Interestingly Rochelle thinks the book fits more into the NA (New Adult) category than the YA audience it’s being marketed to.

If you’re after some ideas of more crime/mystery/thriller or true crime books to read then head over to the genre’s reviews page for this year’s challenge to see what else is being discussed.

Previous roundups for this category

• AWW2013 Crime Roundup #1
• AWW2013 Crime Roundup #2
• AWW2013 Crime Roundup #3

About Me
I’m Bernadette Bean. I’ve been reading avidly for as long as I can remember, blogging about reading since late 2008 at Reactions to Reading and co-hosting Fair Dinkum Crime, a site devoted to promoting and discussing Australian crime fiction, for the past couple of years. I read and reviewed 18 books as part of my own participation in the 2012 challenge. Some of them weren’t even crime novels!

There have only been ten new reviews of crime, mystery, thriller or true crime novels since the last roundup so I’ve decided to link to them all.

At booksaremyfavouriteandbest Kate reviewed Dawn Barker’s début novel FRACTURED  very carefully. There’s obviously a strong element of twist-y suspense in this novel and Kate ensured she gave away no spoilers, though she did let on that it’s a novel about a new mum under immense strain and I believe there were tears for the last forty pages (don’t say you weren’t warned). Brenda also reviewed this one and gave it five stars, saying that the author has done a great job of depicting the stresses that childbirth and post natal depression can cause for new mothers and their families.

Prize-winning reviewer Marilyn from Me, You and Books reviewed Malla Nunn’s LET THE DEAD LIE which is set in 1950′s South Africa in the early days of the apartheid regime. Among the many excellent points in Marilyn’s review is this one

The depiction of South Africa under apartheid by Nunn sets her mystery apart from others. Most of us think of apartheid as the stark division of white and black people, as it was envisioned by its designers.  The reality, as Nunn displays, was messier.  She grew up in Swaziland, on the borders of South Africa and sharing its racial restrictions.  Her parents had lived in Durban, where this book takes place, and they told her stories about living under apartheid; stories she incorporates in her books.  The line between black and white was never clear.  In between Europeans and Africans were “non-Europeans,” people from India and those of mixed lineage who might pass.   A person’s racial identity could be changed, and with a change came a different set of rules to be observed.

Diana Hockley thought Katherine Howell’s VIOLENT EXPOSURE, about the investigation into a woman’s brutal death which occurred at the same time as her husband vanished, was “…about the best crime novel written by an Australian that [she had] ever read“. Diana went on to hope that Howell was busy creating another in the series but I can happily report there are two more so far and they keep getting better! Diana wasn’t quite so keen on Howell’s first novel FRANTIC though.

For her first foray into this year’s AWW Challenge Josephine Pennicott reviewed fellow author Kate Morton’s THE SECRET KEEPER.  I loved the way this review didn’t just look at the book’s content but every aspect of it including the title, cover image and end papers (it’s been so long since I saw a book with end papers…I was immediately filled with nostalgia). As well as providing a great flavour of this partly historical crime fiction with much of the story taking place during the London blitz Josephine gives a really strong sense of what her reading experience was like (and if you’re tempted by Josephine’s review you might like to check out her own partly historical gothic crime novel set in Tasmania which I reviewed for last year’s challenge).

Leonie thought Helene Young’s WINGS OF FEAR, in which female pilot Morgan Pentland comes under suspicion for leaking information about a sensitive border watch program, was a good find with the author’s love for Far North Queensland shining through and well characterised, strong females being a standout feature of the book.

I came across a début novel by Sue Williams called MURDER WITH THE LOT. It’s a humorous look at life in a small (fictional) town in rural Victoria where fish and chip shop owner finds a body but it disappears before anyone else sees it so she spends most of the rest of the novel trying to prove she’s not going doolally  It’s a treat of a novel of a kind we don’t see a lot of here in Australia.

Brenda reviewed Sandy Curtis’ DANGEROUS DECEPTION in which the main character awakes in severe pain which he first takes for a heart attack but then realises his twin brother must be in pain somewhere. With this great premise it’s not surprising that Brenda thought the book “…a gripping, brilliant tale”.

I reviewed Felicity Young’s second historical fiction novel set in Edwardian England, ANTIDOTE TO MURDER. It features a female doctor, Dody McCleland, who is accused of performing an illegal abortion and must clear her name. I was particularly taken with the setting…

 the sense of time and place is beautifully conveyed. Readers are soon enveloped in the stifling, uncomfortable London of 1911 where the summer sees a long heat wave and various worker’s strikes (trains, rubbish collection and so on). In Dody’s well-off layer of society women fight for the right to vote and be treated equally in the workplace while poorer, working-class women struggle to be allowed to treat their bodies as their own as they carry the lion’s share of the fallout from pregnancies that society or finances deem unmanageable. Meanwhile, at a political level, there is great concern over the possible infiltration of England by German spies and swift action is demanded.

There seems to be something here for everyone…romantic suspense, comic caper, thriller, psychological suspense, historical crime fiction and police procedural…it’s wonderful to see such a broad range of sub genres being written by a diverse mix of Australian women writers.

If you’re after some ideas of more crime/mystery/thriller or true crime books to read then head over to the genre’s reviews page for this year’s challenge to see what else is being discussed.

Previous roundups for this category

• AWW2013 Crime Roundup #1
• AWW2013 Crime Roundup #2

About Me
I’m Bernadette Bean. I’ve been reading avidly for as long as I can remember, blogging about reading since late 2008 at Reactions to Reading and co-hosting Fair Dinkum Crime, a site devoted to promoting and discussing Australian crime fiction, for the past couple of years. I read and reviewed 18 books as part of my own participation in the 2012 challenge. Some of them weren’t even crime novels!

Earlier this month the lovely people at Scribe held a competition for people who participated in last year’s Australian Women Writers Challenge in which they selected the three best reviews, as nominated by all of us, submitted as part of last year’s Challenge. I love what the judge, Annabel Smith, wrote about her selection criteria

The best reviews were those that went beyond an analysis of the technical prowess of their authors and engaged with the broader issues raised by the books, considering them within social and political as well as literary contexts. In addition, the three reviews I chose as the winners conveyed a certain personality and flair with language which rendered them valuable as texts in their own right, as well as reflections on the texts of others.

So, instead of counting the numbers I thought for this month’s roundup of the crime genre I’d see if I could find a review or two in the crime category so far this year that meets those criteria and share them with you in some depth.

The first one that struck a chord with me was at Canberra-centric blog Dinner at Caphs. In 2013 Dani is only reading books set in Canberra (a feat only slight;y easier than it would be for me to read books set in my home town of Adelaide). Among the gems she has uncovered is Marion Halligan’s gentle mystery novel from 2006 entitled THE APRICOT COLONEL The heroine of the novel is book editor Cassandra Travers who Dani introduces us to with these thoughts

Cassandra gets her caffeine fix at Tilley’s. In my alternate life I am young and cosmopolitan and have a job in the arts ….and I live walking distance from Tilley’s, where I can be certain that one of my community of young and cosmopolitan friends will be any time I feel like walking in. Cassandra, it turns out, is living my alternate life.

I love the way this tells you a little something about the character and a little about the reviewer. Not only does it make the review more personal but it also, in a really positive way, can tell you if the book is not going to be for you. If, for example, the cosmopolitan, coffee drinking life is not something you’re into then you know this is not one for you and no one has said anything nasty at all. Good job, nicely done.

But where the review really shines in in depicting the book’s ‘sensibility’ (for want of a better word)

The action in The Apricot Colonel takes place in 2003, in the aftermath of the bushfires. The drama of the fires is not part of Cassandra’s story, but its effects are there like a malevolent presence…The 2003 Canberra bushfires were a domestic event made national—even global—by their scale. For a short time at least, the rest of Australia heard the word Canberra as meaning something other than the seat of government.

Again this says so much in so few words. You can easily imagine the presence of the fires in the story and Dani also makes it clear how locals felt…not only about going through such a horrendous natural disaster but also about their perpetual place in the nation’s psyche as nothing but the home of our national government. A point brought home by the last line of Dani’s review “Government is part of Cassandra’s Canberra, but it’s not all of it.”

The other review I want to highlight here is Kate’s review of Caroline Overington’s I CAME TO SAY GOODBYE which opens with a baby being kidnapped from a hospital. Not only is it a good review offering us a flavour of both the book and the reviewer, but it’s a fine example of a review which found some things not to like about a book but managed to convey those thoughts without being mean or sarcastic or any of the other things often levelled at ‘amateur’ reviewers. Kate tells us

The reverse storytelling didn’t work for me. In some books it’s fantastic (Canada by Richard Ford comes to mind) but in this case the story that unfolds doesn’t appear to be leading up to the opening chapter until the very end. Of course, you can guess how the story will unfold but I like more clues to bring me back to the opening hook.

It’s only taken a couple of sentences for Kate to tell us about the element of the book that didn’t work for her and why it didn’t but without being so mean anyone would feel foolish to actually pick up the book themselves (I’ve seen plenty of negative reviews which seem to have this aim and it’s really not terribly helpful).

Kate went on to say that she wasn’t overly fond of the dialogue sections of the book “on account of all the ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids‘”. Kate pondered whether this was made worse because she listened to some sections of the book via the text-to-speech function of her kindle but the comment struck a chord with me because I listen to a lot of audio books and even though the narrators are a billion times better than the computer generated voice of a kindle this kind of thing can make you (OK me) scream. But aside from the fact I can relate, I thought this was another good example of Kate giving valid reason for one of her dislikes about the book without being condescending or unnecessarily derogatory.

Thanks to Dani and Kate for their terrific reviews and to Annabel from Scribe for inspiring me to seek them out. I would urge you all to read the three winning reviews from last year’s challenge, they’re all terrific.

If you’re after some ideas of more crime/mystery/thriller or true crime books to read then head over to the genre’s reviews page for this year’s challenge to see what else is being discussed.

Previous roundups for this category

• AWW2013 Crime Roundup #1

Officially this category is listed in the challenge as Crime fiction – mystery, detective, thriller, suspense or true crime but that gets a little unwieldy for a post title, however all those sub genres are covered in the roundups

The AWW challenge started well as far as the crime category of reviews is concerned, so far garnering 32 reviews of books by 22 different authors. By my calculations the genre has accounted for just over 8% of the nearly 400 reviews that have been posted for this year’s challenge so far. Here are just some of the highlights.

The honour of posting the first review in the crime category of this year’s Challenge goes to Marisa Wikramanayake with her thoughts on Kerry Greenwood’s 19^th Phryne Fisher historical series novel, Unnatural Habits. Phryne tackles a particularly nasty case in this one as a series of young, pregnant girls have gone missing in Melbourune, 1929. Kerry Greenwood was one of two most reviewed authors in the crime category for last year’s challenge (she and Sulari Gentill received 12 reviews a piece) so it is fitting that her latest novel kicks off the second year of the challenge.

In the closest thing to a review of a true crime book that the Challenge has generated so far this year Melanie Meyers took a look at Anna Haebeich’s Murdering Stepmothers: The Execution of Martha Rendell who was the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia after being convicted of killing three of her stepchildren in the early 1900′s. The book tells Rendell’s story via a succession of characters either lifted directly, or composited from, the historical record which, Meyers says provides

…a nuanced means of conveying the prevailing attitudes (particularly towards women), bigotry and religious dogma of the time, whilst entertaining variously informed opinions on Rendell’s guilt or otherwise. Rich in detail, it is a narrative devise calculated to show what a woman in Rendell’s position was up against and how she was unlikely to have ever received a fair trial.

Katherine Howell’s sixth novel, WEB OF DECEIT is the most reviewed one in  the genre so far this year, garnering three reviews.  It’s the sixth in Howell’s successful series featuring Detective Ella Marconi and one of the first major new releases for the genre in 2013 so it’s not surprising that it was a popular one readers wanted to get their eyes on. It sees a pair of overworked Sydney paramedics drawn into an investigation when they treat him after a minor car accident and later attend the scene of his death under a commuter train. All three reviews, from Shelleyrae, Karen and your humble correspondent agree it’s a cracking read. Two of Katherine’s older novels have also each generated a review and it’s nice to see readers checking out an author’s back catalogue

Kathryn Ledson‘s ROUGH DIAMOND is the first book in a series featuring a Melbourne-based Stephanie Plum-style character called Erica whose husband has dumped her for a bimbo and left her in debt. She gets caught up in some mayhem after discovering a man bleeding to death in her garden. The novel looks to be an early contender for “novel most likely to cross genre boundaries” under discussion in this year’s challenge as it has so far generated 5 reviews in 3 different genre categories! Those who think it belongs in the crime camp echoed similar thoughts with Monique Mulligan saying “Rough Diamond is one of those books with mass-market appeal that will please people who want a light read that is quite simply fun”

Gabrielle Lord is one of Australia’s most successful and prolific authors, having recently completed the almost herculean task of publishing 12 books, a complete young adult adventure series, in a single year, Two of her older crime novels for adults have cropped up so far in this year’s challenge – Baby Did A Bad Thing is one of her Gemma Lincoln novels while Death Delights introduces ex-cop, forensic scientist Jack McCain and both reviews highlight Lord’s talent in juggling many storylines and bringing them all to a satisfactory ending.

Over at Adventures of a Subversive Reader Squirm’s mother (a.k.a. Mel) highlighted a children’s crime book (suitable for people around 8 years of age) called The Tunnels of Tarcoola by Jennifer Walsh. I was hooked when I read that it was a Famous Five-esque adventure but if you need more incentive to track this one down for the junior crime reader in your life (or in your heart) then it’s got caves and a ghost house too!

Still haven’t found a crime novel to tempt you? Then head over to the genre’s reviews page for this year’s challenge to see what else is being discussed.

Australian women have been writing crime fiction for a long time. The country’s first acknowledged mystery story by a person of any gender was 1865’s Force and Fraud and it was written by proto-feminist Ellen Davitt. There is excellent, though somewhat disheartening, research which suggests that the world’s determination to ignore Australian women writers, or relegate them to some kind of literary backwater, was already well entrenched when Force and Fraud was serialised in the Journal and then virtually forgotten until the mid 1990’s when it was re-issued and later the local chapter of Sisters in Crime established an award for crime writing by Australian women and named it in honour of Davitt. Ostensibly a whodunit about the murder of wealthy station owner Angus McAlpin, Force and Fraud gives an early indication that Australian women writers would use the crime genre to explore important social issues including the role of women in society. In the form of McAlpin’s daughter Flora the story also contains a feisty heroine who refuses to conform to all of society’s strictures for her gender, a tradition of Australian women’s crime writing that continues to this day. [note: a 1993 re-issue of this book by Mulini Press, with an introduction by ‘literary archaeologist’ Lucy Sussex, is reasonably easy to get hold of]

Nearly 200 of the 1400+ reviews posted as part of the inaugural Australian Women Writers challenge were of books that their reviewers considered to be part of the crime or mystery genre though there is a fair amount of cross over with other genres as the books discussed ranged from traditional whodunnits and police procedurals to romantic suspense, historical crime fiction, comic capers and even a gothic ghost story, a yarn that is also part sci-fi and a horror novel. You can easily browse the reviews, relating to 107 books by 62 authors (and one collective of authors featured in anthology of short stories) for yourselves but here I’ll highlight some trends and themes that caught my eye when perusing the reviews.

We love our history

An obvious trend is that historical crime fiction was a very popular kind of crime book to be reviewed by this year’s challenge participants. The two most reviewed authors, Sulari Gentill and Kerry Greenwood, are both best known for their historical series (though in Greenwood’s case some of her modern novels were also reviewed) and their books along, with many of the other historical crime novels reviewed, are set squarely in Australia. In her review of Sulari Gentill’s A Few Right Thinking Men, set in 1930’s New South Wales, Isobelle Clare of Brouhaha neatly articulates the appeal of good historical fiction

You can read a list of facts, even a historical document, but to get that sense of what it was to be there – that idea of how people thought, acted, the politics of the day, the class divisions at work – you need a book like A Few Right Thinking Men. This is where fiction has a huge advantage over non-fiction, yet the best books still manage to educate as well as entertain. The phrase “bringing history to life” is overused to the point of cliché, but this is truly what Gentill manages. It’s a fantastic achievement.

Whether it be the austere period following the first world war in Carolyn Morwood’s Death and the Spanish Lady, the hedonistic environment of Kerry Greenwood’s 1920’s-set Cocaine Blues, the wartime worries of 1940′s Perth in Deborah Burrows‘ A Stranger in my Street or the politically turbulent 1990’s Sydney of P.M. Newton’s The Old School  it seems Australian women crime writers are embracing the opportunity to examine our history and readers can’t get enough. What I’m thrilled to see is that we’ve finally grasped that Australian history covers more than just the early colonial period which is all it ever seemed to be about in my school days.

We also love love, especially when it’s accompanied by a dose of scary

Psychological thriller/suspense novels with a romantic twist vie with historical fiction as the most popular sub genre of books to be reviewed for this category. Jaye Ford, who took out two of this year’s Davitt Awards with her debut novel Beyond Fear, was a popular choice with Brenda’s review showing a typical reaction to the breathtaking pace and twists in the tale of Ford’s novels. Helene Young’s three romantic suspense novels set in far north Queensland were also popular, with Burning Lies, a novel which depicts the investigation into a series of deliberately lit bushfires, tipping out Young’s other two novels as her most reviewed this year. It seems Young’s choice to use a non-urban location as her backdrop is important to some readers and there can’t be too many Australians who would be unmoved by the subject of the ever-present threat of bushfires. In her review Bree from All the Books I Can Read sums up many readers’ thoughts:

Burning Lies delves into an important issue facing this country: arsonists. We are a country of long droughts at times and high temperatures. Bushfires are a given and they can be absolutely devastating. But time after time, things are made far worse by people deliberately lighting fires for the sheer thrill of watching things burn. Often these result in homes and even lives being lost. It’s hard enough to fight the destruction of nature without adding in. Burning Lies is meticulously researched but with information and scenarios that don’t slow down the pace building at all. The story keeps moving, never pausing, making its way to the dramatic climax that delivers everything promised throughout.

Having our thoughts provoked is good too

As a lifelong fan of the crime genre I’m used to the disdain with which some people view the books I love most and these days I am (usually) mature enough to ignore their jibes, secure in the knowledge that the sneerers don’t know what they’re missing. That doesn’t mean I’m not thrilled when someone who has a stereotypical view of what constitutes the crime genre suddenly realises there’s a heck of a lot more going on than a search for clues in most modern crime novels. I saw this happen a few times in this year’s reviews but no one captures the sentiment better than Yvonne Perkins who started reading P.M. Newton‘s The Old School at breakneck speed but soon realised she had to slow down to enjoy Newton’s ‘delightful prose’, the book’s exploration of identity and its honest depiction of its particular time and place.  Yipee I thought, another convert!

Other readers too picked up on the social and political ideas being explored amidst the tropes of crime and suspense novels including

• Virginia Duigan‘s The Precipice is my personal favourite novel discovered during the challenge not least because it contains that most unlikely being – a woman over 60 who isn’t a cuddly grandmother type hiding in the background of someone else’s story.
• Wendy James‘ The Mistake which goes deep into many territories including the moral dilemma of an unwanted baby and modern society’s rush to judgement of guilt or innocence based on nonsense provided by the media
• Sylvia Johnson‘s Watch Out for Me uses the backdrop of a 1960′s kidnapping to deftly depict the changes in Australian society over the past few decades, with a particular emphasis on those wrought by our post-September 11 2001 focus on security at any cost
• Deb Kandelaars‘ Memoirs of a Suburban Girl, a second-person, present tense story about a woman living in an environment of sustained domestic violence which Janine Rizzetti found claustrophobic and unsettling in its realistic depiction of this frighteningly common phenomenon
• Finola Moorhead‘s Still Murder is a prize-winning novel that very deliberately uses the genre’s tropes to address issues important to its author, in particular the use of violence and rape against women though Marilyn from Me, You, and Books is quick to point out that while in this novel “Moorhead has certainly not retreated from her radical feminism… she expresses it in a story more accessible to general readers”.
• Caroline Overington‘s Matilda is Missing garnered quite a few reviews even though most readers weren’t sure what genre to include it in. Still, in telling the story of a bitter marriage breakup and the legal wrangling surrounding custody of the couple’s young daughter it made for compelling reading and reviewer Rachael Johns wasn’t alone in not knowing what decision should have been made in Matilda’s interests. You can’t help but feel for the people who must make those kinds of decisions in the real world.
• Nicole Watson‘s The Boundary which Linda from Newton Review of Books says uses the backdrop of an investigation into the death of a judge who has ruled on an Aboriginal land rights claim to provide “…a vivid picture of Brisbane past and present, wrapped up in a page-turning thriller.  Polemical, passionate and deeply felt, it is a novel of irresistible energy and an urgent cry for justice“. It is also an example of the kind of book that might never again be published as one of the newly elected Queensland Premier’s first activities upon attaining office was to cut all funding to the awards program that nurtured this publication to life. But I digress.

I found it fascinating that the crime book which attracted the widest array of opinions was Y.A. Erskine‘s 2011 novel The Brotherhood, which definitely falls into the thought–provoking category.  It tells the story of the shooting of a Tasmanian policeman and there aren’t many hot button topics it doesn’t touch on including police resourcing, race relations, the modern media’s role in reportage and a bunch more besides. I suppose it just makes a truth of the old adage that no two people read the same book as it garnered this disappointed review as well as this satisfied one and a range of thoughts in between these extremes. I guess you can’t ask for more than that from one book.

We still like to travel

One of the things which surprised me about this challenge was that a vast majority of the reviewed books were set in Australia. I guess I had expected more of them to take place overseas because several of our best known crime writers (male or female) do set their novels overseas, especially the UK and America (e.g. Michael Robotham, Barry Maitland, P.D. Martin). Even though this is obviously a changing trend there is still a place for the Australian perspective on foreign settings which seems quite natural given our penchant for travel. A couple that stand out from the year’s crop of reviews are:

• Malla Nunn‘s series of novels set in 1950′s South Africa, just as the apartheid system is being created and enforced, had a strong showing with Marilyn from Me, You, and Books saying of A Beautiful Place to Die

Even those who usually shun mysteries will enjoy this exploration of how people react when rigid color lines are supposed to divide them. Nunn’s characters are surprising, but believable,  individuals who reveal both love and cruelty within themselves. They don’t always make the choices we would prefer, but ones which make sense within the limitations of their lives

• Angela Savage‘s The Half Child is set in Thailand and features an expat Aussie heroine. AWW challenge creator Elizabeth Lhuede recommends the book to “readers who enjoy tom-boy Aussie female ‘anti-hero’ protagonists, quirky humour and exotic settings, and who don’t mind their detective stories giving them something more to think about than your average mystery“
• Felicity Young’s A Dissection of Murder explores sibling relationships and the hardships of being a female doctor in early 1900′s England and Tseen Khoo thought “Young’s deft touch with historical detail and social mores was enticing. She forewent slabs of exposition for tightly drawn scenes with telling conversations (loved those), non-intrusive urban context, and political conflict as demonstrated through personal relations and prejudices“. I Couldn’t agree more.

We also like to chuckle

A final trend that I feel duty bound to comment on, given the serious nature of most of the books under discussion here, is that Australian women can write light-hearted and funny crime and mystery fiction too. It’s hard to ignore a title like Mad Men, Bad Girls and The Guerilla Knitters Institute from Maggie Groff and Shelleyrae from Book’d Out convinces me that this tale of a freelance journalist investigating an American religious cult setting up business on the Gold Coast is a great romp. Unorthodox private investigators feature strongly in this category with Marianne Delacourt‘s Tara Sharp and Leigh Redhead‘s Simone Kirsch both featuring in reviews of their comic caper tales.

Crimes happen in the real world too

True crime is a whole different ball game from crime fiction and something I shy away from in my personal reading (and watching, I think I’m the only person in the country who hasn’t watched an episode of Underbelly) but it would be remiss of me not to include some analysis of the true crime books that were reviewed as part of this year’s challenge. Really though the most noticeable trend here is that I am clearly not alone in eschewing real crime for its fictional counterpart as there weren’t a lot of true crime books reviewed. However, a couple did stand out:

• Hilary Bonner’s The Double Life of Herman Rockefeller which details the rather sordid death of a Melbourne millionaire at the hands of a pair of swingers. I found it interesting that reviewer Simone at Great Aussie Reads thought the book good but lacking any insight into why such a man would allow himself to get caught up in the sordid games that cost him his life. In the best crime fiction we’d get the answers to the why question, but in true crime (as in life) the reasons for such things often remain a complete mystery.
• Helen Cummings‘ Blood Vows - a memoir of a woman who was the first wife of a man who ultimately killed his second wife and their daughter. Brenda’s review makes it sound like a gut-wrenching tale of living with a man prone to fits of rage.
• Vikki Petraitis‘ The Frankston Serial Killer was reviewed by fellow writer Amra Pajalic who praised Petrait’s for getting “…into the heads of the police, grieving parents, and chart[ing] the way the community changed with the realisation of a monster in its midst, fuelled by sensationalist headlines and a media hungry for a new spin.“

This last review sums up beautifully the difference between crime fiction and true crime

In a fiction novel the murderer is captured, the family of the victim gets closure and even though still suffering, are able to stoically move forward. Vikki shows that in real life the story does not end when a murderer is captured and imprisoned. Instead the victims are forever frozen in time, while family and friends are forever changed by their loss

Indeed. I read crime fiction because it allows me to pretend none of the nasty, horrible things it depicts have ever actually happened. If I started reading true crime I’d have to start being honest with myself and surely that way madness lies.

What does it all mean?

One of the reviews I bookmarked early in this challenge was Jason Nahrung’s review of Katherine Howell‘s novel Frantic which tells the tale of Sophie, a Sydney paramedic, whose husband is shot and son kidnapped in the first pages of the novel. It struck me that Jason had hit upon something important when he wrote

It’s a methodical tale, competently told, with attention to detail — leaves in drains, the smell of food — and no grandstanding. Marconi [the novel's detective]  is neither Sherlock Holmes nor Dirty Harry. Sophie is not an action hero. Chris is not Chuck Norris. No one gets out unscathed or unaffected, not even Marconi. That down-to-earth approach is perhaps the novel’s most endearing feature.

I think this sensibility runs through a lot of writing by Australian women crime writers who are, for the most part, writing Australian stories. Our stories. The realism, the undercurrent of humour, the down-to-earth nature, the almost anti-hero like qualities of the protagonists that Jason recognises in the one novel are, I think, mirrored in many of the other books read and reviewed for this challenge. A recurring theme in dozens of the reviews is that local readers loved reading about people like them, living in locations they recognised, with characters occasionally strolling a street the reader knew intimately. Those foreign readers taking part in the challenge reported enjoying gaining a sense of this Australian-ness).

I think one other conclusion I can safely draw is that crime and mystery writing by Australian women is in fine form with any of these authors (and the many others I didn’t have room to mention individually) being able to be favourably compared to their male and/or international brethren. In fact the only common lament (that I’m sure crosses all the genres) was from overseas readers who struggled to get hold of many of the books being discussed and reviewed as part of the challenge. I don’t think I posted a single review that didn’t elicit at least one comment or email from someone overseas who was tempted to read the book but was unable to get hold of a copy in their country. Perhaps that’s our next challenge as a community of avid readers and promoters: to drag our publishing industry into the 21st century and stop all this faffing about with territorial copyright?

In the interim stay tuned for monthly wrap-ups of crime / mystery / thriller / suspense news and reviews from the 2013 Australian Women Writers challenge (which it is not too late to join). And remember…crime writing may not be what you think it is.

About Me

I’m Bernadette Bean. I’ve been reading avidly for as long as I can remember, blogging about reading since late 2008 at Reactions to Reading and co-hosting Fair Dinkum Crime, a site devoted to promoting and discussing Australian crime fiction, for the past couple of years. I read and reviewed 18 books as part of my own participation in the 2012 challenge. Some of them weren’t even crime novels!