Helen 0:00

The Kill City podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands we're on. Here in Melbourne, that's the Wurrundjeri Woi Worong people of the Kulin Nation. We honour their deep connection to storytelling, a tradition carried across more than 2,000 generations. Pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and we extend that acknowledgement to First Nations people listening today. My name is Helen, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host Leigh. Today we're diving into the career of the late Peter Corris, who was often called the godfather of contemporary Australian crime. And look, I know that title gets thrown around a bit, but in this case it actually fits. If Australian crime fiction were a family business, Corris would be the one sitting in a dimly lit room saying, I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. Only in this case the offer was usually a new Cliff Hardy novel.

Leigh 1:23

That is terrible, Helen.

Helen 1:25

Sorry, wrong godfather, but I can't help myself. Well, Leigh, how are you going? This rainy kind of um it's atmospherically correct Melbourne evening. What are you looking forward to in our discussion on the career of Peter Corris tonight?

Leigh 1:41

Thanks, Helen. I'm well and really looking forward to our conversation, say, on Peter Corris because he played such a big role in the Australian crime writing landscape.

Helen 1:50

Yeah, absolutely. And for anyone who's not familiar with Peter Corris, he wasn't actually just a crime writer. He started out as an academic and a historian. He moved through journalism and then from about 1982 onwards he became a full-time novelist. And he didn't actually just focus on fiction writing, he wrote historical novels as well as crime. He also did essays. He was really prolific. And as I've mentioned, he really earned the godfather of contemporary Australian crime writing tag because he genuinely did reshape the landscape. Now with the Cliff Hardy novels, he basically defined sort of what we call today Australian noir because his books weren't flashy. They actually didn't really pretend to be sort of British or American crime novels. They actually were just so grounded in that sort of gritty kind of Australian place and landscape and storytelling. And they were all set in the Sydney that he really knew inside out. And in 1999, the Ned Kelly Awards gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award, which actually I think felt a little bit modest when you look at the scale of what he produced. He actually wrote 42 Cliff Hardy novels, and he actually had almost 70 books all up that he wrote. It's such a big body of work that shaped the genre for decades. And of course, Cliff Hardy made it to the big screen as well. Brian Brown played him in the empty beach back in 1985. And honestly, I thought that was really perfect casting. Because if you need someone who can walk into a room and immediately look like he's asking the wrong questions, I reckon Brian Brown's your man.

Leigh 3:30

Yeah, actually, the Empty Beach, the film was probably my first introduction to Peter Corus with Brian Brown, who interestingly has also moved into the crime fiction scene with two novels of his own under his belt. And obviously he was playing Cliff Hardy. And a bit of random trivia. Robert G. Barrett, author of the Les Norton books, who we talked about uh in part one of our Twelve Essential Adaptations episode, actually had a brief cameo in the film.

Helen 3:55

Oh, there you go.

Leigh 3:57

Um he was prolific, Peter Corus, and he's undoubtedly left behind a lasting legacy.

Helen 4:04

Alrighty, well, why don't we get into it? So if you're new to Peter Corus or you're just wondering where to start, we've pulled together our top five. Now, it's not the only five, obviously, but if you want a sense of his range and how his career evolved, this is kind of the short list. Now, number one is The Dying Trade, which was published in 1980. And this is really the starting point, I think, because it's the first Cliff Hardy novel, and that was the book that really re-established Australian crime fiction with a voice that actually felt Australian. So Corris took the bones of American Noir, but he grounded it in sort of the Sydney streets and the kind of social tensions of the time, and I think that that mixes why it's seen as his most significant early work. And if you're just going to read one Peter Corris novel, I think you should make it this one.

Leigh 4:55

So the American Noir influence, so Chandler Hammett, it's all there, but the book is still sort of unmistakably Sydney. When I was digging around for this episode, I stumbled across this sort of documentary-ish thing on YouTube about Peter Corris. Um, and he pops up in it quite a lot, um, and he actually talks about Chandler's influence, and he puts it really simply. Um, he said, and this surprised me quite a bit, um, he said, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald were not only inspirations, but I outright stole from them. I pinched bits of plots. The very character of Cliff Hardy is a modification of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's character. I lifted plots and scenes and even turns of phrase. I call it pastiche rather than plagiarism. And it took me about three or four books to get past that and get my own voice. I think the influence of Raymond Chandler is probably very evident in Countless Crime Rise of the last 70 years. You know, such was the impact and the influence that he had.

Helen 5:50

Yeah, look, and I reckon it's just fascinating hearing him say it aloud. Thank you so much for sending me that YouTube thing because I was watching it on my screen while I was doing research. He's such an interesting guy, the way he talks. He he could have actually starred in his own film adaptations, I reckon. But look, I think you can see Chandler's fingerprints all over those early books. But what I love is that Chorus is he's just completely upfront about it. And honestly, I don't think he's alone. I think Chandler's influence is everywhere in crime writing for at least, I don't know, the last 70 years really. Um, his mix of cynicism and wit, I think it yeah, changed the whole genre. And then, but also, you know, to what Chorus said in that quote that you called out, Leigh, it's actually really interesting how quickly he found his own footing. Uh, so where do you reckon we go next?

Leigh 6:39

Uh second on the list is 1983's The Empty Beach. Um, and you could argue was where the series really started to find its feet. The fourth Hardy book, Chorus was quoted as saying that he felt this novel was where the Cliff Hardy novels went from imitative to unique, um, which you know off the back of the quote that we just talked about makes perfect sense. Um, when Hardy books on average sold 10,000 copies, the Empty Beach sold 30,000, and obviously, as we've said, was adapted for the screen, which says something about how visible Hardy had become at this point. Um, you start to see more depth, more moral ambiguity, more complexity in Hardy himself.

Helen 7:17

Yeah, and look, we were just talking about it, but I'm just wondering, um, hopefully our listeners also remember that a couple of weeks we did talk about our 12 essential crime novel adaptations. So, how close did the empty beach come to making the cart?

Leigh 7:32

That's a great question, and it did make the initial long list. I actually quite liked it, and I'd like to re-watch it one day because it's been a very long time since I've seen it. But researching it and reading more about the whole history of the film, it was broadly considered a bit of a disaster. Um, Chorus himself was actually replaced as screenwriter after turning in two drafts, one of which they said was too soft, one of which they said was too hard. But it didn't actually bother him that he was replaced, and he sort of knew that he was too inexperienced. But after the film's release, he said, I believe the script missed the point of the book. I thought it was silly. I hated the water death, the car chase, and the Bond I've pavilion shootout scenes. He also disliked the emphasis on the missing tapes, which were part of the plot, the stories about deceit, Marion Singer's deceiving of Hardy, her deception of the crimes, their deception of each other, and maybe John Singer's deceiving of Marion. Deception is more interesting than tapes. In 2013, he reflected a bit more candidly on it. Rat shit movie, terrible film, but the money enabled me to put a deposit on a house. My stand-up comedy line is that I much preferred the house to the film. So to be honest, it probably was the correct call, after all, for it to have missed the cut.

Helen 8:49

Oh, I love it. He definitely wasn't afraid to call a spade a spade or a rodent droppings, you know, when he talked about that film. Um, and I think before we go any further, um, I know Leigh and I we both want to give a shout out to one of our very first listeners, Jim. Now he's an amazing film oracle, and he reminded us about the Empty Beach adaptation during our um Essential Crime um adaptations two-parter. Now, I don't think it's a film that many people remember now, but you can actually still track it down on Foxtell or Apple TV if you're curious. And if you are interested in the wider film world, if you want to hear about film festivals, um the jury prize politics, retrospective, and all that stuff that kind of happens outside our crime fiction lane but does involve film, Jim and his good mate Sean host a really brilliant podcast called In Competition. Now we're gonna put the details in the show notes, um, but yeah, give it a try if you want to know more about film.

Leigh 9:47

Absolutely. And um, thanks again to Jim. Um, I was gonna refer to it, Friend of the Show, Jim. Um and not just for the empty beach for Minor, but for all the advice he gave us back in the beginning when uh Helen and I were first tossing around the idea of doing this podcast, we lent uh we learnt quite heavily on Jim. So um thank you very much.

Helen 10:07

Absolutely, Jim was so generous with all his time and tips. We we owe him a lot. Uh all right, well, we better keep moving because we've got a few more to go. So, third on the list is the undertow, which was published in 2006. Now, this is later chorus, and you can kind of actually really feel the shift in the writing. Um, the main protagonist Cliff Hardy's older, he's more reflective, and the tone of the novel's kind of much more character-driven. Now, that one was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award that year, and it's actually another one of his most critically recognised works. And here's something that often gets overlooked. Corus wasn't a stranger to the Ned Kelly Awards. So after they kicked off in 1996, he ended up being nominated or shortlisted every year from 2004 to 2009, with I think the exception of 2005. But that's a pretty solid run by anyone's standard.

Leigh 11:02

And absolutely, and when I was actually researching this episode, it did cross my mind that I mean the Ned Kellys didn't start till 1996. So there were 16 years of Cliff Hardy novels that that weren't even eligible because the Ned Kelly's didn't exist. So I imagine I wonder what how many nominations he would have had had the Neds been around from 1980.

Helen 11:24

Um cleaned the I reckon he would have done a clean sweep for longer, for sure.

Leigh 11:30

For sure, yeah, most definitely. So next up, we have gone with the 2009 novel Deep Water. Um, it's another of his sort of most critically recognised books, and the one that finally won him the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction, which was actually his only win in that category. Um people talk about this one as chorus at full strength late in his career. The plotting was super sharp, and it's often mentioned as one of the standout Hardy novels overall. The setup's big as well. So Hardy's lost his PI licence, he's grieving Lily Truscott's murder, and he heads to the US to help her brother with a world title boxing shot. While he's there, he has a heart attack and ends up with a quadruple bypass. In hospital, he meets Margaret McKinley, and she's an Australian nurse whose father, a well-known geologist, has gone missing back in Sydney. And that's the thread that pulls him back into the investigation.

Helen 12:26

Mmm, interesting. And I think when I was doing my research too, he had a real interest in boxing and wrote a few books about boxing. So if you're a pugilist or have an interest, that's another reason to go down the rabbit hole with his novels.

Leigh 12:39

Yeah, and there's some in that documentary, there's um there is actually a scene where he's in that boxing gym in Sydney and he talks about um uh for better or for worse, whether you know he loves boxing but he also hates it. So it's quite interesting. The the DOCO, and we'll leave a link to it obviously in the show notes. Um the DOCO is quite interesting. Um, it's a a real honest and sort of candid look behind the curtain.

Helen 13:02

I would say brutally honest in some ways. So yeah, it was fascinating.

Leigh 13:06

Yeah, I'm not sure you would see something like that in this day and age. Yeah, it was quite different in its style. In some parts it was reenactment and other parts do, and then there was um there's a scene where they're on the train, his wife and his two daughters or his daughters, um talking very, very openly about their marriage and a bunch of things. So yeah, it was very open and honest.

Helen 13:35

I know, I think it's yeah, it's just worth watching for that, isn't it? Yeah. Anyway, moving on. Um, let's get to our final pick. So it's Win, Lose, or Draw, which was published in 2017, and it's actually the last Cliff Hardy novel, so it's kind of the real end of the road. Uh, and you can actually really feel that in the writing. Uh, it's reflective, it's measured, uh, but there's a sense of Hardy and Chorus actually closing things off because sadly, Chorus was dealing with really serious health issues by then, and he said he ended the series because of what he called creeping blindness from diabetes. It's actually the 42nd Hardy novel, and it was the last one that he'd published before his death in 2018, age 76.

Leigh 14:23

And when you look at his life, um, it makes sense how much depth he brought to the series. Um, he was born in Stahl in regional Victoria, went to Melbourne High, then studied history at the University of Melbourne, and then went on to do a master's at Monash and eventually a PhD in history at um ANU. He lectured for a while but later moved into journalism, including a stint as uh literary editor at the National Times. Um he actually lived with type 1 diabetes for most of his life, which influenced some of his novels and led him to write an autobiography, Sweet and Sour, A Diabetic Life in 2000. And he was married to another crime writer, Jean Bedford, um, who did just about everything. She was a journalist, an editor, novelist, and she taught creative writing at a bunch of universities around the country.

Helen 15:13

Yeah, and her first novel, Sister Kate, is actually a really striking one because she actually flipped the Ned Kelly story and she told it from Kate Kelly's point of view. Now, this was Ned Kelly's sister, but actually no one really looked at her. But Kate wasn't a bystander. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with this because she has a fascinating history. She had such an interesting life. Her first love was Jo Byrne, who was shot at the famous Glenn Rowan shootout, which I think we mentioned in a previous episode.

Leigh 15:44

We did.

Helen 15:45

We did, yeah. So she's right in the sort of emotional centre of that saga. She also, after Ned Kelly's death, she went around, um, she went on the talking circuit, talking to people. She died in mysterious circumstances, drowning in the lagoon in her 30s. But, you know, Bedford really took it to a point where she said she was pushed into writing this novel after reading American the American novel Desperados. And what was interesting about that was it handled those national myths in a way that Australians weren't doing because Sister Kate was one of those really first big attempts to sort of crack open the Kelly legend from a female perspective, and it was actually really well received. It actually still gets taught in school curriculums today, and it's actually held up as one of the early feminist takes on the Kelly story. But sadly, Bedford died late last year after a long illness, but she did leave behind a huge legacy. She wrote eight novels, including three Anna Southwood detective novels and two short story collections. She also co-founded the New Town Review of Books, and she was really such a force in Australian uh writing in her own right.

Leigh 16:59

Alright, so we've talked about the books and we've talked a bit about the man, but once you've read a few of them, you start to spot the stuff that Corus keeps circling back to.

Helen 17:08

Yeah, look, and it's not really themes that you'd say kind of in a fancy literary sense. I think it's just the world he's writing about. And one of those big things, if we're going to call them themes, is Sydney and how it actually works. Because you know, you've got the shiny end of town, you've got the dodgy end of town, and the way they overlap kind of a bit more than anyone admits.

Leigh 17:29

Oh, totally. And in Corris's novels, the bad guy isn't always the bloke with the knife. Half the time it's the system. Um, this could be the businesses, the politics, or even the people pulling strings. Um, it's clear that the way his novels are written, that crime isn't a one-off incident, it's really like baked into a place.

Helen 17:50

Oh, yeah. And look, I reckon that's why Cliff Hardy, sort of as the main character, he lives in the grey. He's not out there delivering perfect justice, he's just trying to make the best call he can in a messy situation. Sometimes, I think actually more often than not, the endings are pretty rough or unresolved because actually that's how real life works.

Leigh 18:11

Yeah, and Hardy himself is the classic outsider. He moves through all these different parts of Sydney, but he doesn't really belong anywhere. He's just trying to keep on the straight and narrow while everything around him is a bit bent.

Helen 18:23

Yep, and plus there's always money in the mix. Who has it, who doesn't, how far will people go to hang on to it? Look, I think in his writing, Chorus is pretty blunt about the class divide in his books, but not surprisingly, the wealthy end of town gets away with a lot more than the people that Hardy usually deals with.

Leigh 18:43

Yeah, that's the world he drops you into. You get that tone straight away. Um shall I give people a taste of how Chorus does this?

Helen 18:51

Why not? Because I think you've pulled the dying trade off your bookshelf in preparation for this episode, haven't you?

Leigh 18:57

I have.

Helen 18:59

Alright, so which bit are you gonna read to us?

Leigh 19:01

Um I'm gonna start right at the beginning. I was feeling fresh as a rose that Monday at 9.30 AM. My booze supply had run out on Saturday night. I had no way of replenishing it on the Sabbath because we still had Sunday prohibition in Sydney then. I didn't have a club, that had gone a while before, along with my job as an insurance investigator. I also didn't have a wife, not anymore, or friends with well filled refrigerators. Unless I could be bothered driving twenty five miles to become a bona fide traveller, Sunday could be as dry as a Mormon meeting hall. I didn't travel. I spent the day on Bondi Beach and the evening with tonic water on the Care, so I was clear headed and clean shaven, doodling on the desk blotter when the phone rang. Hardy investigations? Yes, Cliff Hardy speaking. Good. Mr Hardy, I need your help. You've been recommended. I could think of perhaps ten people who'd mildly recommend me. None of them would know the owner of this voice. eight hundred dollars a term, plenty of ordering people about and international travel. Yeah? By who? He named a name and I heard a faint bell ring. An insurance area boss or something a hundred years ago. Still, it was a better start than the faded wives whose husbands had taken a walk or the small businessmen with payroll panic. Who am I talking to? My name is Gutteridge, Bryn Gutteridge. That didn't mean anything to me. There are three million people in Sydney. Maybe a hundred are named Gutteridge, and I didn't know any of them. What can I do for you, Mr. Gutteridge? Mr Gutteridge didn't want to say too much on the phone. The matter was delicate, urgent, and not for the police. He said he wanted advice and possibly action, and asked if I could come out to see him that morning. Maybe he wanted to see if I was the advising or the active type. I felt active. Anyway, that's Hardy, straight to the point. Bit of attitude, no fluff. And it's funny because when you go back to the old hard-boiled stuff, you can hear where that tone comes from.

Helen 21:05

Oh yeah, totally. You just read a few pages and you go, yep, yep, that's that Marlo DNA. But it wasn't really in a copycat way, just that same dry, slightly fed up voice. You know, the bloke who's kind of seen too much, but he still gets out of bed and does the job. And you know, Leigh, I think your your voiceovers are improving. Maybe you should reconsider your PSA.

Leigh 21:28

All right, and just to give you the vibe. Um this is the opening of the Big Sleep Chandler's first Philip Marlowe book from 1939, and one of my favourites ever. It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the cleanness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder blue suit with a dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved. And sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Helen 22:10

That's just so good. I love it. Yeah, you can you can just hear why Chandler's still everywhere in crime riding. You know, we talked about it with Peter Temple, it's the same with Chorus. Oh, that sort of kind of dry, slightly over at voice, you know. Oh, just so good. And look, I think even at the end of his career, he hadn't lost it. Um, Chorus' opening of win, lose, or draw it still has that same clean down-the-line feel. There wasn't any warm-up, there wasn't any throat clearing, you know, just bang, you're in.

Leigh 22:40

No, you're right. Here's the first line of that. I'd read about it in the papers, heard the radio reports, and seen the TV coverage, and then forgotten about it the way you do with news stories. For a couple of weeks or so, the image of 14-year-old Juliana Fontaine was never out of the heads of anyone who paid attention to the media.

Helen 22:58

And bang, straight away you just know exactly what that case is. You know it's a missing girl, there's a wealthy family, set in Sydney's East. It was just classic hardy territory. Look, because Chorus just always had that knack for just he could take a big media story, he showed you what it looks like when you were the one kind of actually waking up in the house.

Leigh 23:19

Oh, totally. Um, hearing that again makes me want to go back and read and reread a whole lot of Chorus. His legacy's bigger than I think people give him credit for.

Helen 23:29

Absolutely. And there's this great line from the Australian Crime Writers Association. It was originally on Chorus' own website when he got the Lifetime Achievement Award, and it's where he actually describes Cliff Hardy himself because he calls him an ex-army, law student dropout, insurance company investigator, turned private eye, someone who embraces the best bit of Australian life, the tolerance, the classenessness, the mix of city and country, while despising the greed and conservatism that try to keep chipping away at what he sees as real Australia.

Leigh 24:01

Yeah, and that fits perfectly with how people talk about Hardy more broadly. He's the Australian private eye. Um, critics always come back to that. He's the character who basically defined modern Aussie PI, the shift from bush ranges and outback myths to gritty urban contemporary crime. One reviewer even called him the private detective and anatomist of modern Australia, which is just a fancy way of saying he shows you how the country actually works. Um but it's such a good snapshot of who Hardy is and why he's endured.

Helen 24:33

Oh, exactly. And look, for a little bonus, just keep an eye out for Leigh reading the first chapter of The Empty Beach, the fourth Chris Hardy novel, and the one that was adapted for screen back in 1985 that we've been talking about. But speaking of next week, we're really thrilled to have Jenry Gilcrest joining us on the show. Now, her new novel, The Final Chapter, has been getting lots of well-deserved praise, and we think for good reason it's a really sharp, clever layered book. It's one that you pick up, you actually want to keep reading till you get to the end of it. And we've got lots of questions for her, including the one big one, which is do people actually get murdered on writers' retreats? Because between her book and half the crime novels that are actually on my bookshelf, you'd actually think that every second cabin in the woods is hiding a body. And look, I'm just keen to hear how much of that comes from research and how much of it is just writers working through their professional anxieties.

Leigh 25:28

Yeah, and I'm fully expecting her to say, oh no, it's perfectly safe in that very calm author voice while quietly making notes for her next book.

Helen 25:36

Mm-hmm. Exactly. The plot thickens. Alright, well, we've got a big long list of things we're going to ask, and we can't wait to share that conversation with you. So happy reading, and we'll talk to you soon.