Life on the West Island - Whodunnit?

Despite many forecasts of its imminent demise, West Island publishing is booming, with dozens of new authors seeing their books in print and selling rapidly. At the same time, West Island public libraries are proliferating, offering the usual large range of printed works along with lots of new services, such as 3-D printing, video conferencing, book launches, competitions, workshops and Zoom sessions from national and international events and festivals.

One of the key growth areas in Australian published writing is crime fiction. Perhaps the best current West Island crime fiction author is Victorian woman Jane Harper. She has a keen eye for detail in both her characters and in the rural locations where her spellbinding stories take place. In a variation of Agatha Christie’s “locked room” mysteries, they are set in small settlements where the range of suspects is limited. As well, the main characters know each other well through family or community ties, so identifying the murderer from among the not-so-innocent can be a puzzling task for the reader.

Harper’s first crime novel, The Dry (2016) was made into a highly successful movie starring Eric Bana. It evokes a Western Victorian town gripped by drought and riddled with unresolved suspicions of who was responsible for a drowning many years before, when the town’s only river actually had water in it. Now there has been an horrific murder of a family, with little evidence of who was responsible. The story moves at a fast pace and comes to an exciting and unexpected climax.

Buoyed by the success of her first book, in Harper’s follow-up novel Force of Nature (2017), she moved the setting to the remote bushland (possibly based on The Grampians), where a woman goes missing on a corporate retreat. This limits the suspects to a handful of women who are set a task of finding a way through dense scrub. Six go in, but only five come out. Was the missing woman murdered, or did she simply become lost? The landscape is beautifully evoked, along with the sense of dread which comes to city professionals when they become disoriented in unfamiliar and threatening surroundings.

The landscape of Harper’s third book The Lost Man (2018) is even more hostile, more alien and yet beautiful, in the remote dry country of Western Queensland. It opens with an image so disturbing it lingers for days. At the grave of a long-dead stockman, hours from anywhere in the middle of the scorching Australian outback, lies a fresh corpse. A dust circle surrounds the grave’s headstone, made by the desperate man as he tried to stay within its small shadow, but who lasted less than 24 hours in the fierce heat of an outback “blasted smooth by a 100-year assault from sand, wind and sun”.

The dead man, Cameron, is one of three brothers who farm on vast cattle properties in the red desert; driveways run to more than 20 kilometres here; neighbours are hours away. His car is found abandoned and locals begin to ask if Cameron walked to his death - he wouldn’t be the first. But as his eldest brother, Nathan – a man reviled by the far-flung community, and who lives a life of horrifying loneliness – digs into the mystery, the discrepancies pile up, and he can’t stop asking questions. Harper deftly manipulates her small but fully realised cast to a conclusion that chills, despite the outback heat.

Harper’s fourth book, The Survivors (2020); is set in a small rural town (in this case coastal Evelyn Bay in Tasmania). There is a cast of numerous locals, most of whom have dark secrets from each other. And much of the intrigue around a current murder dates back to a tragic death more than a decade before. As usual, Jane Harper sets the scene in intimate detail and in best whodunit style presents a range of suspects, all with motive and opportunity. There is also a touch of romance.

Exiles (2022) is another cracker from Jane Harper which appealed to me especially as, unlike the locations of her first four books, her latest crime thriller is set in a fictional South Australian wine district, very like the town in the Barossa Valley where I was born and raised, right down to its annual vintage festival. It has the usual mysteries of two murders, but is also a book of romance set within a close-knit group of family and friends, some of whom turn out to be exiles from their rural upbringing. This book is both a continuation of Jane Harper’s intriguing mysteries but also a departure from some of her earlier quite gothic tales set in remote, closed locations.

There are many other successful West Island crime novelists, many of whom are women, such as Kerry Greenwood with her hugely successful Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman novels.

Not all the “new” novelists are female. Iconic Australian actor Bryan Brown became an international success in the early eighties with critical acclaim from performances in Breaker Morant and the TV series A Town Like Alice. He has been telling stories with his distinctive Australian voice on TV and in film for a long time, but this time he's writing crime in his first book. Fellow actor Sam Neill wrote: My friend Bryan Brown, quite apart from his other manifold talents, turns out to be an excellent writer. An authentic voice; highly imaginative yet completely believable, with a flair for fully realised characters and a gripping narrative … a great story teller. This is utterly baffling. I'm furious!

If you have become tired of the dreary string of quasi-historical books about Norfolk Island, portraying it as a backward closed community with a vicious history and dark secrets hidden from outsiders, Life on the West Island recommends that you try some of the more appealing and much better written West Island crime novels. They will give you an enjoyable and different perspective on life and crime in small rural communities.