Ned Kelly Award shortlist shuns big names?

?

Thanks to Bernadette and Kerrie at Fair Dinkum Crime, I discovered today that the 2011 Ned Kelly Awards shortlists have now been released. I was pretty curious about this, given the proximity of our trans-Tasman neighbours, and the fact that I have read and enjoyed several Australian crime fiction authors in the past couple of years, including the likes of Peter Corris, Leah Giarratano, Michael Robotham, and several more. I've also heard very good things about some authors I haven't read yet, such as Katherine Howell, Malla Nunn, and Adrian Hyland.

Given there were 23 novels nominated for the 2011 Ned Kelly for Best Fiction, there were always going to be plenty of good books and great authors that missed out on the short-list. But I imagine few would have predicted that not a single one of the 'big names' like Peter Corris, Kathryn Fox, Leah Giarratano, Kerry Greenwood, Katherine Howell, Adrian Hyland, Colleen McCulloch and Malla Nunn would make it. I'm surprised - especially given the great things I've heard about GUNSHOT ROAD by Hyland, in particular.

Perhaps this just shows a lack of knowledge on my part of contemporary Australian crime fiction, but I was scratching my head a little when the finalists were revealed as:

• THE HALF-CHILD by Angela Savage (Text)
• THE DIGGER REST HOTEL by Geoffrey McGeachin (Penguin)
• BEREFT by Chris Womersley (Scribe Publishing)

I really expected to see GUNSHOT ROAD on the list, given all the great things I'd heard about it. But then again, I'm sure there were several people who were surprised that books such as THE FALLEN by Ben Sanders didn't make the 2011 Ngaio Marsh Award finalists list, announced in the past few days. That's the nature of these things. Not every good book can make it, and judging can be quite subjective. And now that I have a look online, THE HALF-CHILD seems pretty interesting, and has got some good reviews.

For those out there that have read Australian crime fiction, what do you think of this year's shortlistees? Are they great books that perhaps just haven't yet got the publicity of some of the bigger-name authors? Do you think there are books that have been hard-done-by? I'd love to get your thoughts.

Meet Michael Robotham in Auckland on Thursday

As I revealed back in March, award-winning Australian crime writer Michael Robotham is visiting New Zealand this week. Last year Robotham was due to attend the Christchurch Writers Festival, and be part of a panel at the originally scheduled event for the inaugural presentation of the Ngaio Marsh Award, but those plans of course changed due to the September earthquake. Now Robotham will be appearing at Takapuna Library this Thursday evening.

I will be heading along, and giving the intro for Robotham. It should be another fun night at the Takapuna Library, who've made a habit over the past couple of years of scooping some great crime fiction author visits (eg Linwood Barclay, Gregg Hurwitz, Tom Rob Smith, Simon Kernick, Peter James etc).

I had the pleasure of interviewing Robotham for a feature in the Weekend Herald last year, and I'm looking forward to meeting him in person. You can read my Herald feature, "Ghostwriter haunted by his own characters", online here.

You can also read Robotham's 9mm interview with Crime Watch, here.

Robotham's latest thriller, THE WRECKAGE, was released recently. The new book sees the welcome return of ex-cop Vincent Ruiz, who "rescues a young woman from a violent boyfriend but wakes next morning to find that she's robbed him. It was a set up – an elaborate scam. Setting out to find Holly Knight, Ruiz discovers her boyfriend's tortured body and realises that powerful men are looking for the same girl. What did she steal that was so important?

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, Pulitzer prize-winning Journalist Luca Terracini is living 'outside the wire' in Baghdad and investigating a disappearance of billions in reconstruction funds. The trail will lead him to London where he teams up with Ruiz and together they investigate the disappearance of an international banker and a mysterious 'black hole' in the bank's accounts.

THE WRECKAGE is an international conspiracy thriller involving clandestine agents and powerful nations who seek to bury secrets and manipulate the truth. It's about the money, politics and power. Who has it, who wants it and who's ultimately going to pay."

You can read the first chapter of THE WRECKAGE on Robotham's website here.

Have you read any of Michael Robotham's thrillers? If so, what do you think? Will you read THE WRECKAGE? Or come along to Thursday's event? Comments welcome.

I is for INSIDE DOPE by Paul Thomas (Crime Fiction Alphabet)

For my second go around at the Crime Fiction Alphabet (read my 2010 posts here), I've set myself the challenging task of focusing not only just on New Zealand-themed posts, but just on Kiwi crime fiction books (ie I won't do any author profiles etc this time around) - although sometimes it may be the author's name that is relevant to the letter of the week.

So this week I'm featuring INSIDE DOPE by Paul Thomas, a book which won the inaugural Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel back in 1996 (co-winner with Barry Maitland's THE MALCONTENTA). Although Paul Thomas is a Kiwi, I believe he was living in Sydney at the time, so that may be why he was eligible for the Australian crime writing awards.

After studying at the University of Auckland, Thomas worked as a public relations executive, consultant, journalist and editor before turning to writing full-time. When he did so, Thomas quickly established a reputation as quite a prolific writer - churning out newspaper articles, novels, short stories, and non-fiction work, particularly cricket and rugby-related sports biographies, at a steady pace over the years.

After writing three sports biographies (in conjunction with top rugby and cricket players and coaches), his first crime novel was released in 1994, OLD SCHOOL TIE (later released in Australia as DIRTY LAUNDRY). It introduced DS Tito Ihaka, a Maori detective based in Auckland, as well as Thomas's blackly comic and witty writing style - one critic described it as "Elmore Leonard on acid", and the novel was widely acclaimed.

INSIDE DOPE was Thomas's second of three novels to feature Ihaka, and centred on a hunt for missing drugs from the notorious real-life Mr Asia gang which spanned Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia in the 1970s (and which was featured recently in the Australian TV series Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities). Disgraced former cop Duane Ricketts is on hand to hear the dying words of Frank Varty, the only man who knows the location of 10kg of high-grade cocaine misplaced after an aborted drug run a decade before. As Ricketts hunts for the drugs, he opens a Pandora's box of trouble, and Thomas has the reader racing along on a plot filled with bodies in spa pools, rogue CIA agents, indiscreet diplomats, crooked lawyers, hoods, and a CIA assassin. As well are recurring hero Ihaka and his police colleagues, of course.

As I said above, INSIDE DOPE was co-winner of the first-ever Australian crime writing award, the Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel in 1996.

INSIDE DOPE, along with his other Ihaka novels and some standalone thrillers (eg THE EMPTY BED in 2002), cemented Thomas's reputation as a high quality crime writer - at a time when New Zealand authors and publishers weren't really taking up the crime writing baton in any major way - understandably, Thomas's work has been called 'groundbreaking', in terms of modern Kiwi crime fiction.

As noted on the NZ Book Council website, in Writing Gothic Matilda: The Amazing Visions of Australian Crime Fiction, Michael Pollack and Margaret MacNabb write about Thomas’ early novels, "These comic novels leave the reader laughing, that’s for sure. The sparkling dialogue, absurd situations and all the crackling one-liners are pure entertainment. But there is always the shadow of doubt falling over the page…After reading Paul Thomas… one never reads a newspaper or watches a television newscast with the quite the same degree of innocence again."

A review of INSIDE DOPE on Amazon from back in 1999 (the very early days of the online bookstore) states, "Inside Dope is brilliantly plotted to tell a complex and highly amusing story. The characters are larger than life; the narrative deliciously demonic; and the dialogue outrageously overblown yet real. The whole adds up to a hilarious novel in a unique and original style. Get it!"

Thomas's crime novels fell out of print, but remained available from libraries and secondhand bookstores. However, in some great news for antipodean crime fiction fans, last year his publisher re-released all three Ihaka novels (OLD SCHOOL TIE, INSIDE DOPE, GUERILLA SEASON) in one volume - THE IHAKA TRILOGY. Even more than a decade later, the stories still hold up, and Thomas's writing can still entrance and amuse readers - the re-released trilogy spent several weeks on the New Zealand Fiction bestseller list (rising as high as #3 for some weeks - at the time that Ben Sanders's THE FALLEN was #1).

Reviewer Karen Chisholm of AustCrimeFiction said, "I just love these books. I love the settings, I love the humour, the quality of the plots and all of the characters. I love the way that Tito Ihaka is a central character, but not necessarily THE central character. These are very much ensemble cast books with Tito and others never taking the entire focus. I also love the way that these books are not necessarily straight-forward police procedurals, although they do involve police investigations (and ex-police investigations) and journalistic investigations and a whole bunch of things happening all at once. Making Ihaka not the entire focus of these books is quite an achievement as he's a larger than life sort of bloke. Maori, toe treading, unconventional, he's balanced beautifully against his very proper, very buttoned up, very Irish, dour boss Ulsterman Finbar McGrail."

You can read Karen's full review here.

I know I'm not alone in hoping that the re-release of the three Ihaka books might herald that Thomas is now working on a new crime novel. Watch this space.

Comments welcome.

Disher wins Ned Kelly after bringing back anti-hero Wyatt

Last night at an event at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, prolific Australian author Garry Disher came out on top at the 15th annual Ned Kelly Awards, with his crime thriller WYATT picking up the 2010 award for Best Novel (hat tip to Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise for the heads-up). It was the second Ned Kelly for Disher, who won in 2007 for CHAIN OF EVIDENCE.

As noted today in an article in the Melbourne Age reporting on Disher's Ned Kelly win last night, in WYATT Disher brings back his titular anti-hero, a "cool and very calculating crim" who starred in six books in the early to mid 1990s. As the Age said, "If Disher, who has published 41 books in a variety of genres, had any doubts about revivifying Wyatt's life of crime, they were put to rest last night when WYATT won the Ned Kelly award for the past year's best Australian crime novel."

You can read that full article, including some comment from Disher, here.

Disher, who was born on a farm in South Australia, has certainly written a lot of different kinds of books; literary and general adult fiction, short stories, adult crime and thriller fiction, young adult fiction, children's fiction, and Australian history textbooks for schools, amongst other things.

I had heard of Disher, but didn't know much about him, and hadn't yet read any of his books - so I thought I'd take this opportunity to do a little bit of quick research and share it with you all (since many Crime Watch readers may be in a similar situation).

According to his website, many of Disher's "children's and Young Adult titles continue to be studied in schools", and his "crime novels are rapidly earning an international reputation, with editions published in the USA, England, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Italy, Spain and Hungary."

He's also won crime fiction awards in Germany. In something that may be interesting for some of you, Disher also shares some of his thoughts on writing crime fiction (covering topics like finding and developing ideas, theme, and planning etc) on his website, which you can read here.

The publisher's blurb for WYATT says, "The job’s a jewel heist. The kind Wyatt likes. Nothing extravagant, nothing greedy. Stake out the international courier, one Alain Le Page, hold up the goods in transit and get away fast.

Wyatt prefers to work alone, but this is Eddie Oberin’s job. Eddie’s very smart ex-wife Lydia has the inside information. Add Wyatt’s planning genius and meticulous preparation, and what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty. And when you wrong Wyatt, you don’t get to just walk away."

Immediate reaction on the blogosphere to Disher's win has been mixed, with several reviewers seeming to have struggled with the book. I haven't read it yet, so can't comment.

You can read an extract from WYATT here. And here are a variety of reviews of WYATT:

• Book Show reviewer Chris Flynn, who's also editor of Torpedo magazine, reviews the book for ABC radio. Listen here.
• Karen Chisholm, creator of AustCrimeFiction.org, reviews the book on CrimeSpace.
• Max Oliver of Bookseller+Publisher magazine shares his review on FancyGoods.com.au.
• Stephen Davenport of The Independent Weekly newspaper.
• Sally Murphy reviews the book on AussieReviews.com.

On the three-book shortlist, WYATT was up against BLEED FOR ME from twice Ned Kelly winner Michael Robotham, and THE BLACK RUSSIAN by Lenny Bartulin. For those wondering where Peter Temple's TRUTH was, and how a crime thriller that won the Miles Franklin Award, and has been said by many should have been on the Booker Prize list, failed to make the shortlist, I understand TRUTH was withdrawn from Ned Kelly consideration (perhaps at the request of the author or publisher, I'm not sure) after being noted on the original longlist.

Personally, I would have liked to see Robotham win, as I enjoyed BLEED FOR ME, and he is coming to New Zealand next week for The Press Christchurch Writers Festival (assuming that all goes ahead after the massive 7.1 earthquake there this morning), and will be there on the night of our own inaugural Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. But Robotham did tell me during our recent interview that he thought WYATT might win the Ned Kelly.

The other Ned Kelly Award winners last night were:

• True Crime: Kathy Marks – PITCAIRN: PARADISE LOST (HarperCollins)
• Best First Fiction: Mark Dapin – KING OF THE CROSS (Macmillan)
• Lifetime Achievement Award: Peter Doyle

So, have you read WYATT? Or any of Garry Disher's other crime novels? What do you think of the Ned Kelly Awards, or crime fiction awards in general? Have you tried some Australian crime fiction lately? Who are your favourite Australian crime writers? Thoughts and comments welcome.