The Red Hand

‘One of the world’s finest crime writers.’ The Times

‘He was to terse blokes with hard jobs and wounded souls what Proust was to memory. He made every sentence count and shot the stragglers.’ Shane Maloney

Peter Temple didn’t start publishing novels until he was fifty, but then he got cracking, writing nine of them in thirteen years. When he died, in March 2018, there was an unfinished Jack Irish novel in his drawer. This substantial fragment, entitled High Art, reveals a writer at the peak of his powers.

The Red Hand also includes the screenplay of the ABC telemovie Valentine’s Day, an improbably delightful tale about an ailing country football club, as well as stories, essays, autobiographical reflections, and a selection of Temple’s brilliant book reviews. What connects them all is his trademark wit, his ruthless intelligence, and his abiding love of his adopted homeland of Australia.

Peter Temple held crime writing up to the light and, with his poet’s ear and eye, made it his own incomparable thing. His work transcends all notions of genre: he remains a towering presence in contemporary Australian literature. This wonderful book pays tribute to all the achievements of the master.

Peter Temple was born in South Africa in 1946, and emigrated to Australia in 1980. He published nine novels, including four books in the Jack Irish series. He won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction five times, and his widely acclaimed novels were published in over twenty countries. The Broken Shore won the UK’s prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger for the best crime novel of 2007 and Truth won the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the first time a crime writer had won an award of this calibre anywhere in the world. The Jack Irish series was adapted for TV with Guy Pearce in the lead role. Peter Temple died on 8 March 2018.

‘Peter Temple is an addiction. Read one book and you will want to read them all.’ Val McDermid