Before parched and dusty towns across Australia became full of fictional sinister people; before the explosion of outback noir and all the mega book deals, starry adaptations and international bestseller lists that came with it; before all these things reached critical mass, there was Garry Disher.
For decades, he has been quietly working away, writing his polished, masterful crime novels in the shadows. Always anxious about money, relying on public lending rights and side hustles like writing workshops and teaching jobs.
It has been the slowest of slow burns: three decades of intricate plotting and accomplished, fully realised work before he could claim his rightful place as a bestselling novelist with the publication of his 2019 novel, Peace. Now 74, having written 60 books in 43 years, Disher says: “It’s only in the last 10 years that I’ve made what I could call a decent sort of living.”
There has always been respect for Disher, but not always recognition outside the crime cognoscenti. “He’s the crime writer’s crime writer,” says author Michael Robotham, who has sold 8.5m books. “He’s the crime writer that other crime writers read. He’s incredibly influential.”
“It has always puzzled me as to why he wasn’t recognised more widely,” says Sue Turnbull, crime fiction expert and senior professor of communication and media at the University of Wollongong. “He’s always been a brilliant writer. He’s certainly in the same league as Peter Temple and Peter Corris.”
Before the world discovered that the Australian landscape could be as captivatingly harsh, moody and threatening as the people who populate it – such an atmospheric antidote to malevolently quaint English villages or American prairie badlands – Disher says there was “a kind of cultural cringe that if it is Australian, it can’t be good enough and if it is crime, it is therefore junk fiction. Certainly those prejudices existed and I only sold in small quantities for most of my working life. Most people bought Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin or Ed McBain.”
And yet, he adds: “I have never wanted to do anything else.”
The scope and breadth of his work is remarkable, though given his prolific output, as he says, “I’d go very stale if I wrote the same sort of book over and over again”. There has been literary fiction: his 1996 novel The Sunken Road was nominated for the Booker prize but “sank without a trace in Australia”, he says. There have been seven Challis and Destry mysteries, following Detective Inspector Hal Challis and Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry; these are set on the Mornington Peninsula, where Disher lives on a quiet dirt road, a place, he says, of “extremes of rich and poor people”.
Then there are four crime novels in the Hirsch series, where Constable Paul Hirschhausen runs a one-cop station near the arid Flinders Ranges; this is where Disher grew up and “it still tugs on my imagination”. There are all the stand-alone novels, and eight novels in the Wyatt series, following the titular professional thief whom Robotham calls “one of the most captivating characters in crime fiction”.
Disher’s latest novel, Sanctuary, follows another thief, Grace, who specialises in snatching small, high-value objects and, using her own outlaw morality, steals from people she thinks deserve to be robbed. Grace appeared as a minor character in one of the Peninsula novels, but “she kept tapping me on the shoulder in intervening years, wanting a story of her own”, Disher says.
With so many books under his belt, what does he do to counter accidental repetition? “I don’t check, but I am aware that it is possible it could happen,” he says. “My girlfriend has found my use of the term ‘the smell of toxins in the air’ in three books now. So it’s a tiny thing.”
He is an inveterate collector of newspaper clippings, sometimes sitting on them for years before they are ready to be in a book. For Days End, about Covid deniers, anti-vaxxers, the rise of far-right movement, he had been making notes about the latter for years. For other books “the whole concept will come to me when I have just been walking on the beach”.
He writes his first draft by hand with a blue ballpoint pen on the back of old manuscript pages: “There’s a certain superstition. I make asterisks and notes for myself. In the afternoon I will type what I wrote in the morning and by then I’m already editing it.”
His novels are busy, a complete world in themselves. Yes, there are capers and car chases, but they are multilayered, full of humanity, nuanced, evocative of place and covering the panoply of alarming social issues.
“What I think I am doing,” Disher says, “is not just writing another crime novel which has got a certain formula. I am not so much interested in the tropes of crime fiction, as I am in the characters and the sorts of strain they are under.”
So why did it take Disher decades to break through? It is not enough any more to simply write one good book, or even 60. Many authors will spend weeks on the road, going from town to town across the country when a new book is published to spruik it. Authors are expected to be personalities now, Robotham explains. “You’ve got to be very engaging and entertaining. You have got to be able to give a great soundbite on a radio show and tell an interesting anecdote to entertain the festival crowds. Garry is charming and has got a great sense of humour, but he is a shy man. He doesn’t enjoy that part of it.”
“I’m not a natural,” Disher admits. “I’m not a warm and cuddly figure. I get really nervous every time – speaking to you, live on radio, in writers festivals. I do find it hard.” He’d much prefer to let his books do the talking.
“I’d love it if my adoring fans would just flock to the bookshops,” he adds. “But it doesn’t happen that way. There has to be some publicity. But I’d rather not.”
Even so, Disher isn’t giving up the day job. “I think I’m getting better as a writer,” he says. “I’ll keep writing for as long as my mind keeps working. I might have to rely on friends to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘you know, you’re losing it’.”
Sanctuary by Garry Disher, his 60th book, is out now (Text Publishing, $34.99)
