Peter Corris, the godfather of Australian crime fiction, has died
Australian readers owe a great debt to Peter Corris, the man dubbed the godfather of Australian crime fiction, who has died at his home in Sydney at the age of 76.
At a time when the genre lacked a genuinely local character, he employed the hard-boiled characteristics seen in the work of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, but with Australian vernacular characters and settings that proved irresistible.
He published his first novel, The Dying Trade, in 1980, introducing his best-known character, Cliff Hardy. To many readers' surprise Hardy, a big drinker, fighter and womaniser, managed to survive intact through 42 books and featured in Corris' final book, Win, Lose or Draw, which was published early last year. Both the first and last books were dedicated to his novelist wife, Jean Bedford.
As Sue Turnbull wrote in her Fairfax Media review of that last book, "From the moment we first encountered Hardy sweating out a rare alcohol-free day on Bondi Beach (a side-effect of the now unthinkable Sunday prohibition), to the more sober grandad Hardy of today, Corris has offered an incidental but extraordinary commentary on the changing social and cultural landscape of Sydney with some interesting side-trips along the way."
Corris also had several characters who featured in their own series, including Ray "Creepy" Crawley, Richard Browning and Luke Dunlop, but it was Hardy with whom he was most associated. He also wrote historical fiction. He published more than 60 books in his lifetime, after struggling for four years to get The Dying Trade published.
Corris had been a Type 1 diabetic since he was 16 and that had taken his toll. Last year he told Fairfax Media that his deteriorating eyesight made it harder to work. But Corris didn't stop writing, filing a weekly column called The Godfather for the online Newtown Review of Books, which was established by Bedford, and his former publisher and long-time friend, Linda Funnell. In his most recent column, Corris reminisced about reading Josephine Tey's innovative crime novel about Richard III, The Daughter of Time, while he was a tutor in the history department of Monash University in 1964.
"He delivered his copy every week on time," Funnell said today. "It was always prompt and always excellent. He filed his last column last week but we do have one in hand."
She said she was working at Pan Macmillan when it published Corris' second and third Hardy novels and the pair had been good friends ever since. "I remember the excitement that we now had our very own hard-boiled hero." She and Bedford were about to raise a glass to Corris' memory, she said.
Gold dagger-winning crime writer Michael Robotham said Corris had been incredibly generous to him. "He would listen to my books on audio and always sent me an or message to say how much he enjoyed them. He said he wished he was starting his career now because it had been so tough for him and people say now is a golden age of Australian crime writing. He played in a huge part in that; he convinced Australian readers and writers to take a punt on Australian crime."
Stuart Coupe, who worked on a biography with Corris that was never published and edited the crime fiction magazine Mean Streets for many years in the late '80s and early '90s, said Corris began the renaissance of crime fiction in Australia.
"Crime fiction was considered a dead-in-the-water genre. No one was interested in it and it was lapsing globally. It was pre-James Ellroy and people like that. But with Cliff Hardy we not only had a great hard-boiled detective in the Dashiell Hammett/Ross MacDonald tradition but he was firmly rooted in Australia. He lived in Glebe, his office was in St Peter's Lane and he drove an Australian car. The tone was larrikin and the voice Australian."
Coupe said Corris was a magnificent chronicler of Australian cities. "He always said a private eye can cover and traverse all stratas of society." When Coupe interviewed the American musician Warren Zevon before his first trip to Australia he said he knew everything he needed to know in advance "because he had read Peter Corris".
Stephen Knight, author of the recently published Australian Crime Fiction: A 200-Year History, said it was very important that Corris had been published here. "He was the first of the modern period. He brought an American form into Australia. It wasn't British, there was no kowtowing." He also pointed out that Corris' quality as a serious academic historian was present in all his fiction, but in a distilled form.
Without Corris, you wonder whether we would be having that golden age now.