Female Australian P.I.s
Damien at Crime Down Under offers a splendid chance for readers to expand their crime-fiction horizons. His post on female Australian private investigators is full of information about and links to nine authors, their protagonists and their books. From the descriptions, the books range in tone from humorous to hard-boiled, in setting from Sydney to Melbourne to Bangkok to Los Angeles, and in title from the straightforward but intriguing (The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender) to the absolutely delicious (The Quokka Question).(Quokkas, in case you are wondering, are small marsupials found mainly on Rottnest Island off Perth in Western Australia, with smaller populations in the mainland. And they’re cute, even if this shy example appears to be missing half its head.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2007
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 10:53 PM
4 Comments:
I haven't looked at the post to which you link, but I happen to be reading such a book at the moment -- Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland.
I hope you're enjoying it; you may know that I'm a big fan of that unusual novel. I discuss it at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2007/01/diamond-dove.html in the closest thing I've written to a traditional review.
Hyland's Emily Tempest is more like an amateur sleuth than a full-fledged P.I., but Damien is such a booster of Australian crime fiction that I'm sure he'd be able to come up with a category into which he could fit Diamond Dove.
Damien's list does carry a disclaimer but it's hard to understand his omission of Kerry Greenwood. Yes, she can verge on the cosy and she doesn't deal in graphic violence, but she can write the pants off almost all the authors he cites.
I'll thank you for that suggestion the same way I, and, I hope, many other readers outside Australia, will thank Damien for his list. Australian crime fiction is not always easy to obtain overseas, and these lists and suggestions give us more to look for.
Here's a link to page about Kerry Greenwood's Phryne FIsher series: http://www.phrynefisher.com/
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