The quiet rise of Outback Noir

No Australian woman has ever won the Booker Prize — and yet in the stylish genre called Outback Noir, women reign supreme. Of these, the queen is Jane Harper. Her 2016 debut, The Dry (successfully filmed with Eric Bana), marked the start of a new kind of detective fiction that has gained an international following.

Some of this may be due to the way we love this version of Down Under. Forget about Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Portraits of small societies where embattled individuals get swallowed up by the big bad bush, parched or flooded, give an apocalyptic, Mad Max edge to a distinctly Australian setting. Arthur W. Upfield’s much-loved Napoleon Bonaparte series of the 1930s, featuring a mixed-race Aboriginal detective, may have paved the way, but at its best Outback Noir is more than pure entertainment. Its settings hark back to tales from the Wild West, but their contemporary take suggests warnings of catastrophes coming to Europe and America as well as Australia. (Both Harper and her rival Chris Hammer are former journalists, and their interest in political and environmental issues has been honed on the job.)

In Exiles, federal agent Aaron Falk is back to investigate the disappearance of a local woman, Kim, from a small-town food and wine festival. A devoted mother, she apparently abandoned her six-week-old baby. Post-natal depression is ascribed as the cause of her possible suicide, but despite searches Kim’s body has never been found. A year on, her husband, friends and relations meet at the festival again to make a public plea for new information. Inevitably, it takes Falk’s eye for detail and sympathetic personality for the mystery to be solved.

Harper’s pared-down style establishes a laconic, atmospheric way of conveying character, nationality and atmosphere. Sometimes it’s too laconic: the plot’s time shifts create some initial confusion about what is happening when and to whom. This is not helped by similarities between characters’ names which require patience to keep straight, and it takes time to untangle the story of the missing mother, married too young as a beautiful and charismatic teenager, then divorced and remarried.

Economically and socially, we are in a very different environment to that of Harper’s previous Falk novels The Dry and The Lost Man. Instead of the tinder-like outback, or the Tasmanian coast, we are in Australia’s verdant, burgeoning wine country, in spring. The characters are professional people, not struggling farmers. There is a teenage drinking spot overlooking a local reservoir; the presence of water (so precious and thematic in this landscape and climate) seems to be an omen of Kim’s disappearance. The reservoir was also the scene of the hit-and-run death of the festival director’s accountant husband a decade ago, and as this earlier death starts to mesh with the current one, a gripping double plot emerges. (If you already suspect that Chardonnay is an abomination, you may not be surprised that wine plays a large role.)

Harper’s forte is showing how living in a small community can lead both to belonging and not-belonging, and about how even in a place where everyone supposedly knows everything about each other, toxic secrets fester till they poison. Falk, scarred mentally and physically by the climactic bushfire at the end of The Dry, is unable to bear even seeing a naked flame. His experiences and character make him an increasingly interesting and sympathetic protagonist, though it’s not very subtle to have him tell his lover that what he enjoys about his job is “working things out… that moment when you’ve been untangling something for ages… and it’s like — The world makes sense.”

All the best detective stories from Oedipus on need the past to give them depth and heft; Exiles is balanced between uncovering its characters’ errors and exploring whether Falk has any future in a small provincial town with his new romantic interest. You can guess the answer.

Maybe this creeping domesticity is why Harper’s fifth novel, though highly enjoyable, feels less striking than previous ones. P.D. James said that what detective fiction is about “is not murder but the restoration of order,” and part of the consolation it offers is that, while its heroes succeed in healing a community, they gain little personal happiness from “the good everyday stuff.” From Sherlock Holmes to Lew Archer to V.I. Warshawski, the hero must remain a perennial misfit. However much we like them, we need detectives to carry not just the sorrows and corruptions of their imagined societies, but our own.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2023 World edition.