Highlight: The Dunbar Case (Cliff Hardy #38) by Peter Corris

This wasn't Hardy's usual brief--uncover the mysteries of a nineteenth-century shipwreck--but he could do with an easy case and the retainer was generous.

But is it ever that simple? Not with a notorious crime family tearing itself apart, and an undercover cop playing both sides against the middle. These and an alluring but fiercely ambitious female journalist give Hardy all the trouble he can handle.

'Ever feel manipulated?' Hardy asks. The body count mounts up as he pushes closer to the truth about the mystery and the loot.

Peter Corris’s first novel was published in 1980 and he has been a full time writer since 1982. Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the Australian crime story was in the hands of writers producing mass market pulp novelettes, chief among them being Alan Yates (Carter Brown). Although written in Australia, these stories usually had pseudo American or British settings. Peter Corris is credited with reviving the fully-fledged Australian crime novel with local settings and reference points and with a series character firmly rooted in Australian culture - Cliff Hardy.

Peter Corris hopes that his latest non-crime book, The Journal of Fletcher Christian, will find a wide audience and underline his credentials as an historical novelist. Inevitably, this thoroughly researched book will be seen as a circling back to his earlier career as a Pacific historian and a journalist with an interest in Pacific affairs, but as Corris has said, "there is no better training for a novelist than history and journalism."


Peter Corris was born in Stawell, Victoria in 1942. When he was five his family left the country for Melbourne and he was educated at Melbourne High School and the University of Melbourne. After taking a Master's degree at Monash University and a PhD at the Australian National University (both in History), he was an academic, teaching and researching in various universities and a College of Advanced Education until 1975 when he gave up academia for journalism. He was literary editor of The National Times, 1980-81. He has travelled and lived for short periods in the Pacific, Britain, Europe and the USA. His interests are reading and writing, weight training, golf (which he plays off a very high handicap), swimming and films. He is married to writer Jean Bedford and they have three daughters. He lives in Sydney.