As with rock’n’roll music’s finest cultural theoriser, Greil Marcus, Knight has an astonishing ability to make connections, to see in what are superficially the most disparate books a commonality, a way of defining Australia, its crime fiction and its search and struggle for a singular and distinctive identity. Me, I can read about five books a week but Knight appears to have devoured virtually every Australian crime fiction title ever published.

There were frequent moments when I thought, ‘Well, I bet he doesn’t refer to this’, checked the index and found a mention. Being an occasional trainspotter I was delighted that he doesn’t refer to A Death At The Football, a very ordinary AFL-based murder mystery published in Melbourne a few years back, and Colin Talbot’s The Zen Detective (every bit as inventive as Knight’s much lauded Jan McKemmish’s A Gap In The Records), along with the Autopsy Press series which attempted to re-create ‘50s pulp fiction with an Australian base, plus my and Julie Ogden’s Case Reopened and Crosstown Traffic (with Robert Hood), plus the increasingly fine work of James Tatham (very much rooted in the Australian landscape and the post-Vietnam experience) but for the half dozen I picked Knight has provided at least fifty titles I’ve never heard of – let alone set aside time to read.

There have been, to date, very few attempts at a critical understanding of the development and themes of Australian crime fiction. David Latta’s Sand On The Gumshoe anthology came with an incisive forty or so page introduction that briefly got pretty much of the story right whilst Knight’s Dead Witness contained a far shorter and less developed overview of the genre.

Since then there’s been John Loder’s exhaustive but still incomplete bibliography of Australian crime fiction and Graeme Flanagan’s homage to the Australian pulp paperback publishing house of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Neither of the latter two have offered much analysis so to a large extent Knight’s book is a ground-breaking study of the area ... and a scary thought for anyone contemplating attempting to match or better it.

Continent of Mystery is essentially divided into four sections plus an overview of what Knight describes as ‘post­Colonial Patterns’. After a thorough introduction he looks at the early development of the genre in Origins and Sins (Crime, Criminals and Their Variation), before moving on to Detecting Women (The Role of Gender), The Vanishing Policeman (Patterns of Detective Authority) and Place and Displacement (The Role of Setting).

These chapters are, one assumes, meant to be a cohesive discourse (and for the most part that’s the case) but if there’s a problem with Continent of Mystery, aside from a tendency to dwell too much on the plots of books, there are occasional overlaps in text and references that create the sense that the book was constructed as separate essays and then put together as an overall perspective.

Knight begins Continent with the statement that until ten years ago Australian crime fiction was almost completely unrecognised and misunderstood:

Cultural stereotypes can be very powerful. Even when Australians recognised in recent times how limited and limiting the bush myth had become, even when many aspects of the multicultural and multifaceted national culture had been brought to light, from aboriginality (sic) to science fiction, there was still in the mid-eighties no general awareness of a common and continuously produced genre in Australian writing – crime fiction.

Knight acknowledges that Peter Corris, with his Cliff Hardy series, which began in 1980 with The Dying Trade, was responsible for the boom but he argues that when he was joined by Jennifer Rowe and Jan McKemmish ‘and then what seemed like an unending flow of new and capable crime writers’ things began to change. What Knight does, however, is take us back to the tradition that ultimately, whether they realised it or not, shaped the work of these writers.

It’s long been an argument of crime fiction aficionados that crime fiction is just as relevant, if not more so, than so-called ‘real writing’ and Knight argues that, ‘if you are discussing the role of crime fiction in the construction of national culture and self­consciousness, then it should in some way or other deal with this country and its issues.’

Over the course of Continent of Mystery Knight takes the reader through the development of Australia, the changing notions of criminality, how they were portrayed in the novels and short fiction, arguing· always that crime fiction has reflected the changing nature of Australian social, political and economic life.

Knight obviously has his favourites – he derides Arthur Upfield and his Bony series, over praises Marele Day whose outstanding achievement was really only her first novel (The Life And Crimes Of Harry Lavender), dismisses for the most part (or simply doesn’t mention aside from Alan Yates aka Carter Brown) the pulp fiction writers who churned out production line novels that whilst, for the most part, were not located in Australia make up part of the tapestry of this country’s crime fiction writing.

At certain points Knight gets a little too carried away about Jan McKemmish, particularly her A Gap In The Records but at the same time makes strong arguments for the important role of female crime writers such as Mary Fortune and Pat Flower although, at the risk of sounding bloke-ish (of which I’m often accused) I think he presents too strong a case for both. He also becomes carried away by Peter Corris who, like Fortune and Flower, is a fine craftsperson, a superb storyteller and chronicler of the nature of Australian society in the ‘80s and early ‘90s but, like most of our crime writers, can only be viewed as a ‘great’ in terms of Australian crime writing – not on the world stage.

That’s however Knight’s premise – to look at Australian crime fiction writing in terms of a national consciousness and that’s a very valid approach to take – but it’s also where Knight, the academic, and me, the fan, would probably be at odds. I’m fascinated by how Australian crime writing has reflected (naturally never driven) our sense of national consciousness, but I really want to see the big picture and the big answer: Australia has a rich tradition of crime writing but at the end of the day are the books worth reading except for an historical perspective? I’m kinda fascinated by how Silverchair fit into a definition of Australian music over the last forty years – but I also want to know if they’re worth listening to. If Corris, Day, Flower et al. are great practitioners of Australian crime writing are they still worth reading for reasons other than their locations and sense of place?

Stephen Knight has produced in Continent of Mystery a book that daunts me completely. It’s an incredibly impressive, well argued, astonishingly researched book about Australian criminality over the last century or so and I delighted in every page of it. If crime fiction’s your passion (and I mean passion) then this is as good an academic study as you will probably get.