There’s a genre of Australian crime fiction known as ‘outback noir’.

And, since I discovered that my local library was stuffed with outback noir books, I’ve read rather a lot of it as my bedtime reading to help me turn off and relax before going to sleep.

Set in small isolated rural communities of country Australia, the stories can be quite formulaic:

– the lead protagonist is someone with some connection with the law, an ex-cop, a lawyer, or a journalist.

– for some reason they come back to some outback community they had some past connection with such as a funeral, to care for a parent with dementia, to sort out a deceased estate

– somehow they become involved in a murder, investigation, such as finding a dead body while jogging

– the local police are either disinterested, corrupt, or obstructive, and do not seem the least bit interested in the protagonist’s statement

– something happens that seems to connect the current investigation to a previous murder

– complications arise due to sexual shenanigans within the community – it can even include a hint of incest

– someone in the police eventually takes the protagonist seriously, and the case is resolved, and everyone lives unhappily after.

While formulaic, in the hands of a skilled writer it can become something else. Part of the charm can come from the writer’s ability to evoke the feeling of these small places left behind by climate change, by rural depopulation, which increasingly seem to have less and less in common with the big east coast cities, and more importantly can tell us something about life outside of the cities, about the suicides and farm foreclosures, the devastation caused by the droughts, the agricultural engineering businesses just hanging on and surviving by supplying under the counter tractor parts, and about the young kids who can’t wait to get away to Sydney or Melbourne.

Not all outback noir sticks to the formula. Most do, but some are different, a lesbian roadtrip to escape the law, a failed search for a prospector’s lost stash, but all tell us something about Australia, and how its changing.

About the impact of mining in the Kimberley and how suddenly in the middle of nowhere there’s a bunch of guys with money to spend, and being young men mostly want to spend it on booze and sex, and its impact on remote indigenous communities.

At its best, outback noir gives stories that help explain about what is happening out there outside of the east cost capital bubbles