Heard of twenty-three-foot long man-eating crocodiles used as a murder weapon? How about priests who massacre their own congregation? Or murder investigators convicted of murder? How about dust, drought, drugs, dreariness and environmental devastation south of the equator? You’re in the zone of outback noir, Australia’s latest contribution to the world treasury of noir literature and film.
It’s similar to the rural noir practiced by US crime writers like _______ (here’s where you insert your favorite writers for this category) James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series, SA Cosby or Daniel Woodrell with three books adapted for film, most famously Winter’s Bone. From these writers chosen at random you can see that rural noir gets mixed up with southern noir.
And when eggheads are asked about rural noir they may trace it back to James Dickey’s Deliverance (picture four overweight dudes on a canoe trip running into a couple stereotypical inbred perverse rifle-toting hillbillies) and William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (a stream-of-consciousness crime novel about a black man accused of murdering a white farmer). But this pigeon-egg-head is not going there. Rural noir includes all kinds of forgotten landscapes, usually exploited by our relentless drive toward technological production and urbanization, not just southern landscapes dotted with stills and shacks full of barefoot children.
Classic film examples of rural noir include Touch of Evil and Bad Day at Black Rock, along with some 1940-50s B-grade noirs about imperiled hitchhikers or forgotten little towns with a diner and one nasty local cop. In Touch of Evil Orson Welles plays a one-legged bigoted alcoholic police captain investigating a bombing in a southwestern border town.
In Bad Day at Black Rock, Spencer Tracy is a one-armed WWII vet trying to return a medal to the father of a fallen Japanese-American buddy in a remote desert hamlet where dark and dirty secrets claim lives. (Incredible films, BTW, that should be on every crime fanatic’s bucket list.)
After that long meander through the noirish countryside, back to today’s question: what is outback noir and why is it sizzling like a summer day in western Australian (highs reported this summer of 126 degrees fahrenheit)? The niche gained attention with Jane Harper’s 2016 The Dry about federal agent Aaron Falk who returns to his hometown in Victoria, twenty years after he was accused of murder there, to attend the funeral of the friend who gave him an alibi that saved him from conviction. The complication? The friend apparently killed his family before taking his own life. The 2021 film version of The Dry broke Australian box office records. Harper followed up with two more novels featuring Falk.
Candace Fox’ 2017 Crimson Lake follows a detective, falsely accused of a violent sexual assault of a minor, retreating to a small town in Queensland to lick his wounds. There a female tattoo artist wannabe PI hires him to help investigate a disappearance. Her criminal record includes a prison sentence for stabbing a high school classmate to death. That makes three crime stories that interweave on the way to solution. The book was adapted into the series Troppo in 2022 with another season airing this year. If you’re a lily-livered city-dweller, get ready to shut down the remote control for the scenes of twenty-foot crocodiles acting as murder weapons.
Then in 2018 Chris Hammer told the story of journalist Martin Scarsden, still suffering from traumatic war reporting, who goes to a drought-whipped Australian town to write a human interest fluff piece one year after the town priest massacred five people in front of the church. It’s clear who did the shooting, but figuring out what really went down in that town gets complicated. The TV adaptation appeared in 2023 with a second series on the way.
All three of these are international sensations so outback noir is a subgenre with legs. These stories may use stock characters; the tattoo artist in Troppo is a Lisbeth Salander knockoff and all the investigators are educated blokes who suffered a traumatic problem and fled to the country. The locals are quirky individuals with secrets. The murder is motivated by drugs or sex or money as murder nearly always is in mysteries.
But the most imposing element in outback noir is the land itself. This isn’t the gritty dirty but mute urban setting of traditional noir or hardboiled. Here the abused land is pregnant with buried meanings and scarred with the traces of past crimes. Whether characters are hiding in sugar cane fields that tower overhead for miles or driving around on unmarked dirt roads looking for skeletons or sniffing the digestive gases expelled by giant submerged crocodiles, the land conceals the truths they’re seeking. We can only hope they figure it out in time. Let me know what you think of outback noir!
Some Australian tropical noir
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