Veronica Lando’s first novel The Whispering won the 2021 Banjo Prize for best unpublished manuscript. That book, set in the rainforests of Far North Queensland involved a man returning to a small rural town, and being caught up in a mystery involving two deaths seventeen years apart. Her follow up, The Drowning Girls, feels cut…
Amy Suiter Clarke seemed to be riding the zeitgeist with her debut novel Girl, 11 and a main character who was a true crime podcaster. Her second novel, Lay Your Body Down centres around another current hot-button topic in crime fiction – cults and the corrupting power of religion. A few of good recent examples…
While the idea of interpretation and interpreters as a way of exploring culture has had a successful run in science fiction (cf: China Meiville’s Embassytown and Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life) and fantasy (RF Kuang’s Babel) it is not one that has yet been overused in the crime genre. And with authors always…
While it is always true to say genre is fluid, occasionally something magical can happen when crime fiction meets science fiction. This may be because the best crime fiction uses its tropes to interrogate a particular milieu and its inhabitants, while the best science fiction creates new environments, often to explore what it means to…
Rae Cairns was shortlisted for the best debut crime novel in the Ned Kelly Awards in 2021 for her then self-published book The Good Mother. The book was picked up by Harper Collins and has now been followed up with a another standalone crime thriller Dying to Know. While it is a very different proposition,…
For a film featuring several brutal murders, Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is oddly bloodless. That’s not to say it’s bad – it has many fine things going for it – but it lacks the grit those familiar with Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective may be expecting. That could have something to do with the fact the source…
– The Mousetrap – Only at QPAC, Brisbane We have 2 double passes for the performance of The Mousetrap at the Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane at 6:00 pm on Sunday, 28 May 2023. *Please make sure before you enter that you will be 1) in Brisbane, and 2) available to attend on that date* Note: If…
I don’t know about you but I’ve felt a bit jaded going to the movies lately. I mean, there’s only so many explosions, car/boat/spacecraft chases or unlikely romances a person can take. Which is to say, if you want an antidote to all that, you really should consider the terrific French thriller November. Co-writer and…
American writer Dennis Lehane burst onto the crime scene with his hard-hitting debut A Drink Before the War (1994), the first of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels. That series probably hit its apex with one of Lehane’s best-known books (thanks to the movie version), Gone Baby Gone. These books, along with the standalone Mystic River,…
Winner of the Best Screenplay at the Cesar Awards (the French Oscars), The Innocent is a comedic crime caper mixed with romance. Sylvie Lefranc (Anouk Grinberg) is a 60-year-old prison drama teacher that can’t help herself. She has a habit of falling head over heels in love with and then marrying the inmates, which inevitably…
