Taking Care of Business: Cliff Hardy 28

‘The godfather of Australian crime fiction.’

I was starting to get interested. As someone who thinks stockmarkets, futures trading and currency speculation ought to be illegal, I was aware that I was radically out of step with the times. I dimly grasped what Marriott was saying, enough to understand that it sounded like being allowed into the mint with a U-haul van.‘

Cliff Hardy is no financial genius. But in Taking Care of Business he pursues white collar crime with the same doggedness he applies to his more downmarket villains.

Hardy’s tasks are many and his clients are from all walks of life. He is minder for Thomas Whitney, the highly strung whistle blower, whose company is siphoning money off through Vanuatu. He is hired by computer genius Charles Marriott, whose shady dot com partner wants control of the business and is letting nothing and no one get in his way. And ever keen for some spare cash, he even takes a case from Spiro, his local florist, whose son seems to be involved in some very dodgy business involving tobacco and big bucks.

This collection of stories featuring Australia’s favourite PI is fast-paced and entertaining. It reads in the best Corris style.

Hardy is a wonderful creation still, under Corris’s magisterial narrative control, capable of those odd echoes and resonances, the elegiac interludes that characterise the best crime writing.’ Graeme Blundell, The Weekend Australian

There has been no more efficient, entertaining and amusing writer of detective thrillers in Australia than Peter Corris.‘ The Age