At our April meeting, the Australian Authors Group read novels by Jon Cleary.
Jon Cleary was born in 1917 in Sydney, Australia, the eldest child of an Irish, working class, Catholic and poor family. Cleary left school in 1932, aged 14, to help his family financially. He enlisted in the Australian army on 27 May 1940 and served in the Middle East before being transferred to the Military History Unit. He served for a time in New Guinea, and was discharged on 10 October 1945 with the rank of lieutenant. He married and had two daughters. He wrote during WW2 and then afterwards in England, New York, and Italy, before returning to Australia.
A list of his 50 plus books with a synopsis can be found on:
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/search-results/?contributor=jon-cleary
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/419867.Jon_Cleary
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/jon-cleary/
He died in 2010, aged 92. His obituary can be found at: https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/cleary-jon-stephen-16706
Other information, including his awards and the many films of the novels, can be found on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Cleary
The books which we collectively read were:
Scobie Malone detective novels
- The High Commissioner(1966)
- Helga’s Web(1970)
- Murder Song(1990)
- Bleak Spring(1993)
- Autumn Maze(1994)
- Endpeace(1996)
- A Different Turf(1997)
- Five Ring Circus(1998)
- Dilemma(1999)
- Bear Pit(2000)
- Yesterday’s Shadow(2001)
- The Easy Sin(2002)
- Degrees of Connection(2003)
Other novels
- Just Let Me Be(1950)
- The Sundowners(1952)
- Back of Sunset(1959)
- Vortex(1978)
- The Beaufort Sisters(1979)
- Morning’s Gone(2006)
- Four-Cornered Circle(2007)
We very much enjoyed reading Jon Cleary’s books and noted the long list of books we had collectively read for this month. Cleary was a craftsman of the detective genre, with an excellent understanding of the psychology of serial killers and corruption in politics and property developments in particular. The murderer is not always brought to justice and the loose ends of people’s lives are not always tidied up by the end of the book. The detective and murder novels are pacy and one’s that could not be put down – page-turners in fact.
His use of language is superb as is his development of characters. Cleary’s sympathy with the poor is evident, for example in his early novel ‘The Sundowners’ based on his own early family life.
We discussed the changing of the author’s ideas and language in response to the social change over the length of his writing career of 60 years from 1947 – 2007. Today, some of the novels’ ideas on racism, sexism and homophobia would not be published in novels but Clarey did indicate in his books how he had changed his views over the years through the dialogue he included in the books, for example detective Scobie Malone’s conversations with young woman detectives, an indigenous Australian policeman, gay men and women, and his wife and three children.
We obtained copies of Cleary’s book through kindle, apple books and Judith Hickman’s wonderful collection 🙂