Peter Temple

In Australia you had the remarkable, the wonderful Peter Temple, whose novels lit up the 1990s and the early 2000s – the Jack Irish novels and his other award-winning novels. He was an astonishing writer, but he never broke out into wider bestseller-dom, although he won the Gold Dagger for The Broken Shore. That made some of us aware that there was good crime fiction coming out of Australia. Temple was really a class act, and opened the door for a big blockbuster like Jane Harper’s to come powering through. And the great thing about that is then publishers and readers start to become curious about what else is going on in this particular corner of the world. It’s exciting for me as a reader, I think it’s brilliant.

The Best Crime Fiction of 2019 recommended by Val McDermid