About book Heroin Annie And Other Cliff Hardy Stories (1987)
Cliff Hardy is your typical down on his luck private eye; a broke womaniser who gets bopped on the head more often than is good for him and down those dangerous streets he must walk alone. Only in his case those dangerous streets are Sydney, in the early 1980s. Australia's very own Sam Spade created by Peter Corris is currently the star of a 37 book series.These stories are from early in his career and work as a good introduction to the man and his method. I'd always figured they wouldn't be much to write home about, just another third rate hard boiled detective series that's only popular because he's a hometown hero for fellow Australians. I'm not a very optimistic guy when it comes to this type of thing. It turns out that Peter Corris is largely credited as being single-handedly responsible for putting the hard boiled and the pulp back on Australian shores after many years of Australians pulling a James Hadley Chase and pretending they were in America, step forward Carter Brown as a prime example. This collection was me dipping my toes in to the water and I think I'm about ready to go for a longer frolic in future.Cliff is everything you want in a gumshoe; resourceful, has a strong moral code and willing to put his body on the line. Corris has a way with words, establishing locale and setting the scene with a few well chosen descriptive passages and a few phrases peculiar to this country, his metaphors and similes are not spectacular but they work and they don't irritate like somebody who is forcing the issue without the talent. The only real problem is that these short stories are all very formulaic, I started off reminded of Ross MacDonald's early work and slowly came to realise that Cliff Hardy will get knocked out for no apparent reason about a third of the way through the story then arbitrarily follow the plot from A to B to Z making smart-aleck remarks and observations, kind of like those early Ross MacDonald books. These are copycat stories told with a Sydney flavour and I can respect that from a young author breaking new ground but I want more in future.
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