Past Programs
Books - Crime Fiction - 2007
Literary drag -- Melbourne Writers' Festival
21/11/2007
Good writers are often praised for their ability to get inside the heads of their characters - to slip seamlessly and convincingly into the skin of another person.
Paradoxically they're also noted for their distinctive authorial voices -- the sense of their unique selves and perspective on the world infused in their words.
But can we really read the writer behind the text? At this year's Melbourne Writers Festival - Michael Robotham and Alexander McCall Smith - author of the much loved Number 1. Ladies' Detective Agency series - talk about writing in the voice of the opposite sex.
Ian Rankin's Exit Music Read Transcript
15/11/2007
The last days before a detective retires pop up as a plot device in many a crime novel. In Ian Rankin's Exit Music it has double significance, because this is the end of his Rebus series. Ramona Koval finds out if it was painful for Ian Rankin to put down the pen when he finished this book.
Mystery solved: Edgar Allan Poe's death
08/11/2007
Matthew Pearl, author of The Poe Shadow, thinks he has solved the puzzle of what caused Edgar Allan Poe's death.
Poe died in 1849 in Baltimore, but the cause of death is unknown. Suicide, alcohol, tuberculosis, heart disease, and even rabies are some of the possibilities that have been put forward.
Now the mystery has apparently been solved; and it's been done by the clever mind of a writer, rather than a scientist.
It is apt that while Matthew Pearl was knee deep in research for his own book about Poe's death, he uncovered this mystery.
Matthew Pearl joins the Book Show from a studio in Boston; and that is quite fitting, because Poe was born there.
Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence (review) Read Transcript
02/11/2007
Sara Paretsky is well known for her best-selling VI Warshawski crime novels, and her tough-talking, Smith and Wesson wielding heroine, Vic, who was one of the first female crime fighters to grace the pages of genre fiction.
But Radio National's Lynne Mitchell has discovered that this time she's written a very different sort of book called Writing in an Age of Silence.
Australian crime-writer Peter Corris
24/06/2007
Peter Corris has often been called the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing and the master of the meanest Sydney streets. Cliff Hardy is just one of his creations -- there's Ray Creepy Crawley and there's Luke Dunlop and there's Richard Browning -- and at 65 Peter Corris has now published his 31st Cliff Hardy novel. Mr Hardy has been stripped of his investigator's licence and he's had an appeal denied. But then something happens to make him investigate, regardless of having his ticket removed.
Peter Corris joins Ramona Koval from Sydney and reads a passage from his latest Cliff Hardy novel, Appeal Denied.
Australian crime-writer Peter Corris
18/06/2007
Peter Corris has often been called the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing and the master of the meanest Sydney streets. Cliff Hardy is just one of his creations -- there's Ray Creepy Crawley and there's Luke Dunlop and there's Richard Browning -- and at 65 Peter Corris has now published his 31st Cliff Hardy novel. Mr Hardy has been stripped of his investigator's licence and he's had an appeal denied. But then something happens to make him investigate, regardless of having his ticket removed.
Peter Corris joins Ramona Koval from Sydney and reads a passage from his latest Cliff Hardy novel, Appeal Denied.
Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games
31/05/2007
Broadcasting live from the Sydney Writers' Festival, our guest is Indian novelist Vikram Chandra, who has written a 900-page crime novel called Sacred Games. It's set in Mumbai and overturns the conventions of the crime novel. Chandra weaves stories of Bollywood, race and religious wars, international terrorism and the gumshoe detective.
Sucked In, by Shane Maloney
13/05/2007
For fans of Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan series, the wait is over. Number six in the series is here. Sucked In. No – that's the title.
It's 1997 in Victoria and the premier of the state is lording it over everyone and everything – standing tall at the opening of a big new casino.
And Murray Whelan himself? The ALP member for Melbourne Upper is enduring the long lonely slog of opposition – and within a page or two of his new adventure, he is indeed sucked in – this time into a mystery about some human remains that have turned up in a dried-up lake.
If you're already addicted to these very funny books, then your new fix has arrived. And if you're new to the Murray Whelan books, why not start here?
Murray Whelan's creator (and winner of the wonderfully named Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel) Shane Maloney joins Michael Gurr for a natter.
Sucked In, by Shane Maloney
07/05/2007
For fans of Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan series, the wait is over. Number six in the series is here. Sucked In. No – that's the title.
It's 1997 in Victoria and the premier of the state is lording it over everyone and everything – standing tall at the opening of a big new casino.
And Murray Whelan himself? The ALP member for Melbourne Upper is enduring the long lonely slog of opposition – and within a page or two of his new adventure, he is indeed sucked in – this time into a mystery about some human remains that have turned up in a dried-up lake.
If you're already addicted to these very funny books, then your new fix has arrived. And if you're new to the Murray Whelan books, why not start here?
Murray Whelan's creator (and winner of the wonderfully named Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel) Shane Maloney joins Michael Gurr for a natter.
Dorothy Porter: El Dorado
06/05/2007
When you hear the words 'widely read' and 'poet' in the same sentence, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone's got something wrong.
But Dorothy Porter's verse novels have won thousands of new readers to a form that many people are a little bit scared of. The Monkey's Mask has been a film, a play – and has been recently adapted for radio by the BBC.
Two of Dorothy Porter's other verse novels – What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise – have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and she's worked with the composers Jonathon Mills and Paul Grabowsky.
She's got a brand new verse novel out – it's called El Dorado – and it's about some really nasty crimes and some very troubled people.
Dorothy Porter: El Dorado
30/04/2007
When you hear the words 'widely read' and 'poet' in the same sentence, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone's got something wrong.
But Dorothy Porter's verse novels have won thousands of new readers to a form that many people are a little bit scared of. The Monkey's Mask has been a film, a play – and has been recently adapted for radio by the BBC.
Two of Dorothy Porter's other verse novels – What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise – have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and she's worked with the composers Jonathon Mills and Paul Grabowsky.
She's got a brand new verse novel out – it's called El Dorado – and it's about some really nasty crimes and some very troubled people.
The Uncomfortable Dead: a Zapatista crime thriller
26/04/2007
The novel The Uncomfortable Dead is a collaboration between the leader of the Zapatista guerrilla movement, Subcomandante Marcos, and one of Mexico's best-known writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo. Besides more than a dozen thrillers featuring his world-weary hero Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, Paco Taibo has written best-selling biographies of Che Guevara and one of the great heroes of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa.
Subcomandante Marcos was unavailable for an interview, as he was hiding in the hills, but for the Book Show Nick Caistor tracked down Paco Taibo to his Mexico City lair and starts by asking him whose idea it was to write The Uncomfortable Dead as a collaboration.
Writing of murder in Holland
26/03/2007
Featuring the authors of two books on murder in Holland: a Dutch thriller, now published in English translation as The Dinner Club, in which there is a strong resonance with the kind of fear that the people of The Netherlands are still trying to deal with after the two assassinations that have occurred there in recent years; as well as the true-crime investigation of those assassinations, called Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma.
Australian gothic fiction
23/03/2007
The underbelly of the Australian psyche will be exposed today in our panel discussion on Australian gothic literature. From the early colonial writers like Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson, to Elizabeth Jolley and Peter Carey, the Australian landscape has been transformed into a menacing character in gothic tales of colonisation and displacement.
