Kia ora Koutou.
Southern Cross Crime: The Pocket Essential Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film and TV of Australia and New Zealand, by Craig Sisterson (founder of the Ngaio Marsh awards and champion of crime writing in Aotearoa), published by Oldcastle Books. Available as an ebook on Kindle.
I was reared by a mother who read crime novels. Rose wanted a bit of peace from my continual questions so she taught me to read just before I turned five. I ripped through the stories for five, six and seven year olds. Boring. Too many rabbits and fairy godmothers. Where were the drunk men on bikes, the harmomonica players, the scones?
Then one day Rose left her library book open on the scungy old couch and I picked it up. I don’t remember the title but it was an Agatha Christie. I began to read and was hooked. A lifetime of reading crime novels began. The problem was I had to read the book when Rose wasn’t there so I only got halfway through before she whisked it back to the library.
So I never knew who murdered the red–faced, bullying Colonel or whether the young woman ever found true love. I had a body, I had suspects, I had seething tempers and not always well–kept secrets, some of the house guests were a bit suspect, ‘a colonial, dear’. Someone was lurking in the shrubbery, there was something very odd about the butler and then the book was gone and I had to guess who the murderer was and whether the ‘high class git’ (detective from Scotland Yard) had solved the crime. I learned that people didn’t speak – they cried, they shouted, they exclaimed, they ejaculated. Yes, well…
I decided I better read fast so I’d get to whodunnit before Rose took the book back to the library. I read like a steam train at full speed. I read like I was starving and had to gobble down as much food as I could before someone took the plate away. I never thought about the writing or the characters, I read to see what happened next. I liked but was puzzled by the stories, plots and settings – all these country houses (manors?) and lashings of food. Cocktails were served by butlers, there were head–gardeners, lady’s maids and ‘tweenies’ (wtf?).
Crime novels were my fairy tales. Real life was Rose weeding carrots for Mr Hetherington for sixpence an hour.
I read Christie, Marsh, Ellingham, Sayers and whoever else Rose brought home. At age ten I was delegated to change the library books. I grabbed them from the shelves labelled Detective Stories and crossed fingers Rose hadn’t read them.
It was Dorothy Sayers who made me think about what other things a story could say. She was English, well educated, devoutly Christian – go figure. I was twelve or so when I re–read Gaudy Night and realised it was the discussions between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey about equality, about women still working after marriage, that interested me. I only had to look around. Men went out to work, women stayed home and cleaned house, looked after kids, cooked. I ignored Sayer’s assumptions that going to Oxford was the pinnacle of any woman’s ambition. And wtf were proctors anyway?
A few years later I came across her introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery & Horror (1928 Gollanz) which she also edited, and in which she made the sweeping statement that only literary novels reflected our lives, that mystery, horror and crime stories were escapism only. I liked a lot of her comments on crime and horror stories, but I disagreed with this statement then and I disagree with it now but Sayer’s attitude lasted, especially in Aotearoa. We didn’t lose our slavish reverence for all things English for many decades and in some minds, never have.
So I approached Southern Cross Crime by Craig Sisterson with just a little trepidation. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it, more that I didn’t want to read another firm but kindly or apologetic putdown of crime novels as opposed to literary novels. I mean – hello? The Broken Shore by Peter Temple? And his Truth which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award?
I needn’t have worried. Southern Cross Crime got me from the very first page. I’ve only read it once but I’ll go back. And back. There are some standout parts, a hell of a lot of information which must have been so hard to organise and write and yet Craig Sisterson makes every entry fresh, lively and enticing.
The history of crime writing in the Antipodes starts with Fergus Hume, the kiwi who wrote best selling, The Hansom Cab (pub 1886), while working as a barrister’s clerk in Melbourne. There’s lots of writers I knew about, lots I didn’t. Of course I was glad to see my favourites there – at last someone gives Adrian Hyland’s Emily Tempest her due. I loved Diamond Dove and Gunshot Road.
We get to know about the formation of the Australian chapter of Sisters in Crime and the writers names read like a who’s who of crime novelists I’ve read over the years. Stella Duffy (Money in the Morgue, with Ngaio Marsh), Kerry Greenwood and her Phryne Fisher novels set in the Australia of 1928. Murder in Montparnasse is a favourite.
There’s lots of crimes set in country towns so because the author couldn’t cover them all, he included a list of other titles and Penelope Haines’ Death on D’Urville and my The Wild Card are on that list which, in my case, because I came so late to the party, is very polite of him.
Its not just coming across the ones I know though, its all the ones I don’t, both New Zealand and Australian. Southern Cross Crime is divided into sections and those sections are divided into categories, YA and Juvenile, TV and Film.
There are longer pieces on Peter Temple, Peter Corris, Emma Viskic, Jane Harper along with Vanda Symon, Nikki Crutchley, LIam Mcilvanney, JB Pomare, Nathan Blackwell and all the other suspects. This is a big whare and there’s a lot of us in it.
All books are not created equal but whether I like one better than another all depends, not on a red wheelbarrow, Carlos, but on attitude, education, experience, the ideas formed by those things mixed with how I’m feeling on the day.
Southern Cross Crime is informative, knowledgeable, wide ranging. If you have any ideas about writing a crime novel you need to read it, if you enjoy reading crime novels, you need to read it, if you simply love reading, you need to read it. This is not a dry as dust tome – the writer’s encyclopaedic knowledge is carried lightly.
Good crime fiction…tells us about the world we live in, and a lot of literary fiction doesn’t do that. Literary fiction may be beautifully written and tackle interesting ideas and all the rest of it, but you don’t learn a lot about the world we live in. The corruption in high places, the effect of homophobia or sexism on society, social justice issues, all those sorts of things we find in crime novels. Garry Disher – from an interview with Craig Sisterson.
So sucks to you Dorothy Sayers…no not really. We don’t choose our friends because they’re perfect – and we don’t choose books because we like everything about their writers. I appreciate Sayers and what she and her cohorts did for the crime novel and for me.
Southern Cross Crime by Craig Sisterson is a box of the finest literary chocolates, some with soft centres, some with hard. Settle back, take your pick, the ones from Aotearoa first perhaps? After all, (thank you Fergus Hume), along with Anzac biscuits and Pavlova (they can have Phar Lap), we started it.
Renée
