Chapter 1: What is the significance of Peter Corris in Australian crime literature?
Hi, I'm Kate Evans, and this is an extra podcast episode of The Bookshelf, made for the saddest of reasons, but also made as a celebration. Crime writer Peter Corris has died. Well, I say crime writer, but he was also a historian and novelist and he co-authored a number of biographies. He wrote more than 90 books, 40 of them about private detective Cliff Hardy.
Hardy first appeared in 1980 in The Dying Trade. Corris's last novel, Win, Lose or Draw, was also a Hardy novel. Cliff Hardy had an office in Glebe, but he drove and walked all over Sydney. There was always a precision to the descriptions in these books that made them a pleasure to read. This wasn't a generic city or even a generic Sydney.
Hardy ran down particular roads in Elizabeth Bay, walked rainy streets in the Cross, listened to the radio while driving through Newtown.
Chapter 2: How did Cliff Hardy become a central character in Corris's work?
Hardy listened to Radio National, I should say, and so did Peter Corris. Hardy left the city too, of course. He headed towards Wollongong, overlooking the sea, as Corris himself did for many years, turning an old hall into a house with his wife, the writer Jean Bedford, and their daughters.
Yes, it's impossible for a reader to separate the writer and man, Peter Corris, from his most famous fictional character. Peter Corris himself returned to Sydney many years ago and kept writing. He and Jean Bedford founded and produced the really terrific online review journal, the Newtown Review of Books, where he wrote a regular column called The Godfather.
Corris had diabetes for years and his eyesight was failing. This made both reading and writing difficult. I interviewed him in 2015, after he'd written Gun Control. He didn't know at that stage whether he'd be able to keep on writing, but he did.
Chapter 3: What personal experiences influenced Peter Corris's writing?
I'm going to leave in my original introduction to that story from a few years ago, partly because it starts with music, and Chorus loved music. So here's Don Walker and the late Peter Chorus.
Now for ten or fifteen years We'd see Harry come and go Like an ugly piece of weather These days no one seems to know Why half a lifetime later, he hasn't been to town for quite a while. And the rules, they come and go around.
Poet and songwriter Don Walker, with a vision of crime on the streets of our towns, and Sydney in particular, with a really Australian edge. Harry was a bad bugger. A character like Harry, who the song says spends some time in inner-city glebe, might well have rubbed shoulders with Cliff Hardy. Hardy is a private investigator who's been around for decades. He knows where the bodies are buried.
Chapter 4: How did Peter Corris's health challenges impact his writing process?
He's watched his Sydney change. He's also a fictional character created by Peter Corris. The latest book in the Cliff Hardy series is Gun Control.
MUSIC
Peter Corris, congratulations on your 40th Cliff Hardy book, Gun Control.
Thank you, Kate.
Now I have to ask, do you get sick of him?
No, I don't. I enjoy Cliff as much as I hope the readers do. And I've written two more.
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Chapter 5: What themes are explored in the latest Cliff Hardy novel, Gun Control?
Well, they're somewhere between the drawing board and the pipeline. And no, I don't get tired of him. I find it great fun to write and stimulating rather than boring. So if a writer's stimulated by what he's doing, he's got the game licked.
What is it do you think that keeps you interested in him as a character?
It's hard to say. The writing itself actually gives me the chance to express myself, to get things off my chest, to have sly digs at people and to praise certain things and to disparage other things. And so that way, the writing is kind of therapy in that way. As to the character, he's just so familiar with
and so like me in some ways and not like me in other ways that I find it enjoyable to play between those two kind of qualities.
Chapter 6: How does Sydney's changing landscape influence the Cliff Hardy series?
What do you think has changed more, though, Hardy or Hardy Sydney?
Oh, that's a big question, isn't it? Um... Sydney's changed more. Australia has changed more. Hardy still is the basic character that he always was, just with certain adjustments. But I think the country and the city have changed enormously.
And you can sense that in Hardy because he is so much a character of his place.
That's right. And again, as I said before, things he likes and things he dislikes, new things he approves of and old things he regrets the passing.
Chapter 7: What challenges does Peter Corris face in writing about crime and police corruption?
So that makes for texture. It gives you something to play with as you're writing.
But Peter, have your ideas about what crimes to use as your focus, about how to actually hook in us as readers to crime fiction, has that changed as you've written this series?
No. The story has always just developed from the client's inquiry and the client's problem. And where that comes from is just out of the ether, out of the imagination as far as I'm concerned. For this book, Gun Control, it was written a better part of 18 months ago, I suppose. and before some of the current stuff about guns and bikies and the rest of it was in the news.
And it just came to me as something to play with. I mean, I don't take it all tremendously seriously.
Chapter 8: How has Peter Corris's relationship with reading evolved over time?
I take it seriously professionally to try and do the best job I can, but I don't think it's world-shattering writing or literature. And so things come to me and I go with them.
So explain the central concern of this one or the central body, I guess.
Well, it starts off with a very simple inquiry that a person wants to find out how his son managed to commit suicide. Again, suicide's very much in the news now, but wasn't particularly back then, although I had been working with Philip Nitsky, so I suppose I had suicide in my ledger somewhere.
And as with all these things, it just spreads out when Hardy attempts to inquire into what weapon was used. That raises questions about people and places and the way things interlock with each other. And so the story gets up and running. So there's no particular theme. There are corrupt cops and honest cops.
I think honest cops is something I haven't done very much with apart from the standard character, Frank Parker, who occurs in many of the books. But I have some very honest cops in this book and that was interesting to play with as against the very dishonest ones.
Is it harder to write a good person? Because you can have a lot of fun with a corrupt cop or a bad character.
It is a bit harder to write a good person. The best way to do it is to give them a sense of humour so that people will find them appealing. And I try to do that. And again, you have to be very careful not to make them sanctimonious or self-righteous and things like that. But I don't find that too hard to do.
Well, and there's a very light touch with the social issues. So you mentioned that you'd done work with Philip Nitschke and so on, and Cliff does have a conversation about end-of-life planning.
Does he? I've forgotten. Yes, the other things in my life going on do find their way into the books, of course.
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