Peter Temple Books in Order

If you want to meet Jack Irish first: Bad Debts → Black Tide → Dead Point → White Dog
If you prefer atmospheric rural mysteries: The Broken Shore → Truth
If you like stand alone thrillers: An Iron Rose → Shooting Star → In the Evil Day / Identity Theory
If you enjoy shorter work and essays: Ithaca in My Mind → The Red Hand

Peter Temple was born in South Africa in 1946 and grew up in a small town near the Botswana border, in a family that spoke English while most of his neighbours spoke Afrikaans. As a boy he learned to move between languages and worlds, an experience that later fed his sharp ear for how people really talk. After school he served compulsory national service in the army in Cape Town, then walked straight into journalism, starting as a cadet on the Cape Argus and spending long days in courtrooms watching the daily damage of apartheid up close.

In his twenties Temple went to Rhodes University in Grahamstown to study history and politics, intending to become an academic, but the pull of newspapers remained strong. He taught journalism there for a time, then began to feel that simply carrying on with ordinary life inside white South Africa was a kind of complicity. After the death of activist Steve Biko in 1977 he decided he could not stay. Temple and his wife, Anita, left for Germany, where he found work on an English language news digest in Hamburg and learned what it meant to start again in a new country.

Australia became his next and final home. In 1980 the family moved to Sydney, where Temple worked as education editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and later taught at what is now Charles Sturt University in Bathurst. Two years later he shifted to Melbourne to launch Australian Society, a magazine of social issues, giving him a front row seat on debates about politics, class and inequality in his adopted country.

After leaving the magazine he went back to teaching and helped build the Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT in Melbourne, a program that trained many editors and writers. He took editing seriously as a craft and often compared a well made sentence to a piece of careful joinery. Around this time he also took up cabinetmaking himself, a quiet, physical counterbalance to long hours at a desk.

In the mid 1990s Temple left teaching to write full time. His first novel, Bad Debts, introduced Jack Irish, a former criminal lawyer in Melbourne whose life has been blown apart by the murder of his wife. Across four books, Bad Debts, Black Tide, Dead Point and White Dog, Jack scrapes a living as a debt collector and sometime investigator, spending his spare hours in a Fitzroy pub, at the races and in a woodshop where he learns to make furniture. The books are rich with Melbourne detail and with the clipped, funny exchanges of people who do not waste words.

Temple also wrote stand alone crime novels. An Iron Rose follows Mac Faraday, a former detective trying to live quietly as a country blacksmith. Shooting Star centres on Frank Calder, an ex soldier and ex police negotiator drawn into a fraught kidnapping, while In the Evil Day (published in some places as Identity Theory) ranges across Europe and Africa as burnt out reporter John Anselm and mercenary Con Niemand collide over a terrible secret. These books showed Temple’s interest in damaged men, old loyalties and the long shadows cast by violence and politics.

His best known later work came with The Broken Shore and its companion novel Truth. Set in coastal towns and in Melbourne during the time of the Black Saturday bushfires, they use crime investigations to explore racism, corruption, family history and the way power works in modern Australia. The Broken Shore won a major British crime award, and in 2010 Truth became the first crime novel to win the Miles Franklin Award, one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes.

Readers often talk about Temple’s dialogue, his feel for the rhythms of Australian speech and for men who hide feeling behind dry jokes. His characters gamble on horses, argue about Australian Rules football, drink too much and try, not always successfully, to do the decent thing in systems that reward something else.

In his later years he published shorter work, including the story Ithaca in My Mind, and after his death a collection titled The Red Hand gathered stories, essays, reviews and a substantial fragment of an unfinished Jack Irish novel. Temple lived for many years in Ballarat in regional Victoria with Anita and their son, Nicholas. He died there in March 2018 after a short illness, leaving a compact body of fiction that continues to draw new readers into his version of Australia.