Australian crime fiction grew from the country's modern origins as a very distant English prison. Early stories described escaped convicts becoming heroic bushrangers, or how the system maltreated mis-convicted people.

As Australia developed, thrillers emerged about threats to the wealth of free settlers and crime among gold-seekers from England and America, and then urban crime fiction including in 1887 London's first best-seller, Fergus Hume's Melbourne-located The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

The genre thrived, with bush detectives like Billy Pagan and Arthur Upfield's half-Indigenous 'Bony', and from the 1950s women like June Wright, Pat Flower and Patricia Carlon linked with the internationally burgeoning psychothriller. Modernity has massified the Australian form: the 1980s saw a flow of private-eye thrillers, both Aussie Marlowes and tough young women, and the crime novel thrived, long a favorite in the police-skeptical country. In the twenty-first century some authors have focused on policemen, and more on policewomen- and finally there is potent Indigenous crime fiction.

In this book Stephen Knight, long-established as an authority on the genre and now back in Melbourne, tells in detail and with analytic coherence this story of a rich but previously little-known national crime fiction.