Hard evidence that crime pays

After 30 years of having his work in print, Australian author and University of Adelaide graduate Garry Disher is starting to find that crime really can pay.

A 10-year-old girl is snatched from the side of the road. The acting head of the Crime Investigation Unit, Detective Ellen Destry, is faced with little evidence and some tough decisions to make as time is running out to find the girl alive. Her boss, Inspector Hal Challis, is 1000 kilometres away visiting his dying father, and he's about to start pulling at the threads of a family mystery...

So begins Chain of Evidence, the latest crime novel in the award-winning Challis & Destry series by Australian writer Garry Disher. The author of more than 40 titles, including fiction for adults, teenagers and children, history textbooks and books about writing, Disher has been a published writer for 30 years.

But it is only now that he is beginning to earn the kind of recognition and the readership that he deserves. His most recent series of crime novels has something to do with that.

While a number of Disher's other works have won some major awards in the past, and others have been shortlisted for prizes such as the National Festival Awards for Literature and the Steele Rudd Award, the Challis & Destry series has been universally well received. The first Challis & Destry novel, The Dragon Man, won the German Crime Fiction Prize (Disher's second work to do so), while Chain of Evidence, the fourth novel in the series, last year won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction as well as critical acclaim throughout Australia, Germany and the United States.

Disher's passion for writing began when he was just a boy on his parents' wool and wheat farm near Hallett, 200km from Adelaide in the mid-north of South Australia. A gifted student, he moved to Adelaide for his final year of high school, completing his matriculation at Adelaide Boys' High.

"That was a real shock to me, because I went from a school of about 120 kids in total at Burra to an all-male school of about 1100, so I felt quite lost," Disher says.

More shocks were in store when he started his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Adelaide in 1968, as he soon discovered that university-level English was nothing like his beloved subject from school.

"I hated it. Back then I was already keen on becoming a writer, and it seemed to me that English was going to ruin my love of reading and books. I found the analysis of the novels we were reading too academic, too difficult, and in some respects wrong-headed. But I was just a kid, what did I know? I wasn't ready for that way of looking at literature."

Luckily, Disher discovered a love of history and philosophy, in which he majored. He kept his writing interests alive by submitting creative pieces to the annual magazine published by Lincoln College, where he stayed throughout his undergraduate years, and becoming co-editor of the University's student magazine, On Dit, in his final year in 1971.

"The idea that I would write fiction had been there since I was a child, but by the time I finished university I wanted to make a conscious effort to write something and get it published," Disher says.

"When I left Adelaide University I travelled overseas for a couple of years and I tried to write a novel part-time while I was travelling, which was very difficult. And it wasn't very good; it came to nothing.

"I was thwarted by not knowing what I was doing, as well as the travelling. When I came back to Australia I moved to Victoria and did a Masters degree (in History) at Monash, and while I was there I tried again to get something written. I started with some short stories."

Disher's writing began to take shape, so much so that while studying for his Masters he won a scholarship to study Creative Writing at Stanford University, California, in 1978. This marked a turning point in his skills as a writer and helped to set him on a path towards a career as a published author.

An eclectic career followed - as well as writing collections of short stories, novels, history texts, and a number of books about creative writing, he also taught writing for 10 years at adult education and TAFE level.

With such a varied writing career spanning a wide range of personal interests, it was inevitable that Disher would turn his hand to crime writing.

"I've always loved reading it. Even as a kid I loved reading adventures and thriller novels, and later as an adult I read crime fiction to see what made it tick. I thought: it's time I wrote one because I like reading them so much!"

The result so far is two series of crime novels, including the Wyatt series - written from the criminals' point of view - a collection of crime short stories, and now the Challis & Destry novels, which are set on Disher's adopted home on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Another Challis & Destry novel is due next year, followed by a `literary' crime novel that is not part of the same series.

Despite having left the State more than 30 years ago, "in my imagination I keep coming back to the small towns and mixed farms of the mid-North," Disher says.

"I've set several books there: three children's novels, a Wyatt thriller and the novel I'm proudest of, The Sunken Road, which was a critical success but not a commercial success.

"In Chain of Evidence, one of the main storylines is set in South Australia's dry north.

"The setting is an important element of all fiction, but it is a particularly strong element of crime fiction. Whenever I go home to my parents' farm, I busily take mental and even written notes about the place as reminders, and I notice changes," he says.

Chain of Evidence is published by Text Publishing.

STORY DAVID ELLIS