![]() At first I chalked this up to over-imitation of Hollywood films, only to read in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature that the Sunburnt Country has a true-life tradition of especially tight-knit “mateship.” Not for nothing did Australian prisoners in Japanese POW camps survive at a higher rate than American ones. Among male friends an intensity of joshing camaraderie is in evidence that even our frat boys would find stifling. But the characters in these novels behave much more differently from Americans than do the Swedes in those Stieg Larsson books, and this never stops feeling odd. True, the suburban backdrops appear very familiar, and on the printed page the Australian variant of English is almost identical to our own. This is the good thing about Australian crime fiction: as an American, you are never completely at home in it. Perhaps we want to feel the way we did as children, when the genre was so much more thrilling for being slightly over our heads. I t is a rare crime novel that doesn’t seem better in the first part, when we are still trying to find our bearings. ![]()
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