Standing in the Shadow

by Peter Corris

My hands tremble as I close the faded, dog-eared manuscript inside the battered manila folder. Every instinct tells me that here at last is the big one.' But all is not as it seems in the half-tonal worlds of the literary agent in The Illusionist, the Vietnam draft dodger in Conscription, or the wrestler in Tag-team...

Standing in the Shadow explores the sexual underside of life in Sydney. 'These long stories have an effortless readability ... they show a bracing command of the range of human feeling, an alert sympathy to the kinship, under the skin, of every form of erotic itch and a fictional virtuosity in the range of sympathies evoked. The prose is expert, the dialogue is 'overheard' and there is, almost incidentally, a superb command of the nuances and differences of history in this record of human desire ... (Peter Craven)

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Peter Corris was an Australian academic, historian, journalist and a novelist of historical and crime fiction. His first novel was published in 1980. Corris is credited with reviving the fully-fledged Australian crime novel with local settings and reference points and with a series character firmly rooted in Australian culture, Sydney PI Cliff Hardy. As crime fiction writer, he was described as "the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing".

He won the Lifetime Achievement award at the Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing in 1999 and was shortlisted for best novel in 2006 for Saving Billy and in 2007 for The Undertow.

Reviews

[Harsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful.