(1949- )
Garry Disher’s claim to hard-boiled pulp fame is as the author of the Wyatt novels, a brutally tough, formally restrained series about a professional hold-up man. The Wyatt novels, begun in the early 1990s, are an Australian emulation of Richard Stark’s Parker novels of the ’60s. From the nature and style of the protagonist, to the middle-level heists that generally comprise the plotlines, the smooth, intricate unraveling of said plots, the terse, compellingly understated prose, the inevitable falling out from the inevitable lack of honor among thieves, the organized crime group known to both series as the Outfit, and more, the Wyatt topics read like Stark reborn with an Aussie accent. Deathdeal (1993), for example, reprises a legendary Starkian gambit, the opening paragraph in violent motion:
There were two of them and they came in hard and fast. They knew where the bed was and flanked it as Wyatt rolled onto his shoulder and grabbed at the backpack on the dusty carpet. He had his hand on the .38 in the side pocket and was swinging it up, finger tightening, when the cosh smacked across the back of his wrist. It was lead bound in cowhide and his arm went slack and useless. Then he felt it across his skull and he forgot about his hand and who the men were and how they’d known where to find him and everything else about it.
Luckily, for Stark/Parker fans, the Disher/Wyatt topics are a good emulation, even a great one. Unlike the sometimes primitive British Commonwealth writers of earlier times who persisted in parroting Yank tough-guy fiction on the Americans’ own ground, Disher sticks to a setting he knows and (to American readers) entirely authentic-seeming local color, character types, and dialogue. Disher is in fact one of Australia’s best-regarded literary figures, an acclaimed novelist, short story writer and children’s topic author, who gives to the Wyatts a rigorously sharp style and an ice-cold surface under which slip intriguing ideas about human nature, Australian life, and corporate culture.
Like the first volumes in the Parker series, the early Wyatts form a loosely connected saga. The complications of each botched or barely survived heist leave Wyatt having to dodge the pursuers from one volume’s caper—cops, squealers, Outfit hit men—right into the next. Enemies and unfinished business are liable to show up at any moment, complicating Wyatt’s already tension-filled work and ratcheting up the suspense as each topic moves toward a fast, blood-soaked climax and last-minute escape.
Disher began life in the back-country of Burra, Australia, then attended high school in the big city of Adelaide, where he eventually attended the university. He had nursed private dreams of writing since childhood but only began to find his way around a pen and pad during a two-year “walkabout” in Europe. In Italy, he told the journalist Murray Waldren, “inspired by newspaper stories of a particularly lurid murder case, I wrote the beginnings of some very bad crime stories.” He returned to academic study in Australia and earned a master’s degree, writing his thesis on the history of Outback fiction in the 1930s. As one of the creative stars of his university, Disher won a scholarship for a year’s stay at Stanford University in California, where he took part in an advanced writing lab taught by novelist Robert Stone.
Returning once more to Australia, Disher tried to succeed as a full-time writer. His work found publication and growing acclaim, but the remuneration remained modest. Even the Wyatt series, with its growing worldwide cult of readers, did not do much to lift Disher—nearing age 50— above struggling writer status. Like Stark before him, Disher suddenly abandoned his series about the tough, cool career criminal. “Despite the supportive reviews here and overseas, sales in Australia were pretty modest,” he told a journalist. “Plus I needed a break from him—there was a danger the series might become formulaic, and I felt I had pushed him far enough.”
Not long after, Richard Stark himself returned after a hiatus of more than 20 years, perhaps influencing Disher’s decision not to resume his own similar series. In 1999 Disher released Dragon Man, a crime novel with a new protagonist, Challis, who is a regional homicide inspector and moody loner who lives in the Mornington Peninsula farmland that is also home to his creator. A near complete turnaround from the cold-blooded, violence-streaked Wyatt novels, the Challis mystery follows the pattern of the more moody and ratioci-native mysteries of the English mystery novelist Colin Dexter and his ilk, but Disher’s tough, distinctive voice still comes through loud and clear.
Works
- Crosskill (1994);
- Deathdeal (1993);
- Dragon Man (1999);
- Kickback (1991);
- Payback (1992);
- Port Vila Blues (1995)
