Book Review - The Empty Beach by Peter Corris

 The Empty Beach by Peter Corris

Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983                          ISBN 0868612294

Crime fiction can be like junk food - probably not something you'll remember as you do a fine dining experience, but a quick delicious hit that leaves you wanting more. So it is with Cliff Hardy, the shambling Sydney PI created by Peter Corris. The Cliff Hardy novels have everything required for the quick fix of the crime genre - a noir hero who just manages to keep things legal, a helpful cop, always a woman who the hero may (or in this case may not) bed, and the usual assortment of criminals and down-and-outers who help the plot along.

In The Empty Beach the plot revolves around the death of John Singer. The police thought suicide, but his wife thinks differently - she thinks he may still be alive. That's when Cliff comes in. In his search for the truth he allies himself with some social campaigners and drunks, and faces up to the sleaze of gambling and drugs. As is usual in a Cliff Hardy book, a couple of people get killed. Cliff is beaten up, kidnapped and pistol-whipped, and it all turns out well in the end, as Cliff returns to his shabby house in Glebe.

This, the fourth book in the series, introduces some new characters - Hilde, Cliff's boarder, and Frank Parker, Hardy's new contact with the police. There is another twist in the plot that involves Hardy's client and why she wanted him to investigate her husband's death.

Corris has set The Empty Beach in Bondi and the suburbs surrounding, and as seems usual in the Hardy books, the Sydney suburbs are their own character in these books.

And now, like junk food, I need more.... I can see a summer of Hardy coming up.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell