Cirrus@Austlit

The author examines the canine in detective fiction in the nineteenth century. Concentrating on the inception of this figure in the mid-century, she argues that the creator of the canine detective was the Australian writer Mary Helena Fortune.

Australian crime fiction has long-standing local success, but limited international impact. Peter Temple has gone further both through his innate skills and because he has meshed Australian anti-authoritarianism and landscape-linked writing with interrogative approaches like that of James Ellroy. This occurs in the Jack Irish series, but more powerfully in some of his nonseries novels that lead up to the worldwide successes of The Broken Shore and Truth (Editor's abstract).

The author discusses Australian writer Frank Moorhouse’s exploration of the crafting of literature and the writer’s function through the use of the detective genre in Lateshows. He contrasts the whodunit as an authorcentric and -dominated form with the discontinuous narrative, in which forms such as the short story and autobiography are interrelated (Editor's abstract).