Peter Temple Wins Miles Franklin

Great news for we hacks toiling away in the tenebrous mines of genre fiction: Peter Temple has won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most important literary prize, for his outstanding novel Truth. Well done that man!
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Unless you're in the literary fiction racket, no one writes a novel with awards in mind; science fiction novelists write science fiction because they love the genre and crime writers write crime and mystery novels because they love those. But Temple's win of the Miles Franklin is important and perhaps a sign that the literary establishment is beginning to take crime novels seriously. Clive James's dismissal of crime fiction as "mere travelogues" says more about James's lazy reading habits and less about a genre that is multifarious and diverse and pretty much the only thing keeping bookshops above water these days. Borges, Jacques Barzun, John T Irwin et. al. are among the critics who have always treated crime fiction with respect and maybe others will now see that crime fiction is a lens through which to view the world without all the middle class wanking about. For a couple of years I've held the belief that the two Peters - Temple and Carey are Australia's two most important novelists, but Temple has had the harder job convincing the elites to take what he does seriously.
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Do I sound a little prickly? Perhaps. A few months ago I was at The Perth Writers Festival waiting for a bus and a fellow writer asked me what I did. "I write mystery novels," I told him. "Oh dear," he said "that must be frightfully boring." "Why do you say that?" I asked. "Well, those books are so dull." My literary bus stop friend was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award this year, but he didn't win. Crime writer Peter Temple did instead. A brokh tsu dayn lebn, asshole... as my dear old gran never used to say.

Temple Tells Truth, Terminates Talk

Crime novelist Peter Temple told the truth on a phone-in interview on a Brisbane radio show this week and apparently it has caused quite a kerfuffle. (Or so I read in today's Melbourne Age.) Appearing on Greg Cary's 4BC show, Temple admitted that he wrote books "for the money" and as for his ideas, well "he just made things up." Reasonable enough, eh? Dr Johnson famously said that "only a fool ever wrote for anything but money." Cary, however, was aghast and seemed to think that Temple was being deliberately provocative. Cary, who was apparently born yesterday, obviously feels that writers should be driven by their personal Furies to some isolated tower where they scream into the raging tempest and then over a tear-strewn manuscript attempt to exorcise their demons by turning their gut wrenching pain into prose. Only Cormac McCarthy operates this way. Everyone else sits in a room at a desk with a laptop, staring at the wall, trying desperately to think of something before the lunch-time news.

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Not liking Temple's answers Cary grew increasingly rude to his guest, accusing him of being a "pain in the neck" and asking why he was so annoyed. "I'm not annoyed at all," Temple replied placidly, which apparently drove the poor man into apoplexy. According to the report in the Age Cary said "I'd just like you to answer the questions, not for me, mate, I couldn't give a rat's arse-" whereupon Temple sensibly hung up.

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Here's a wee tip for Greg and other polished souls naive about the writing business: everytime you read an interview with a professional writer and they tell you that they're doing it for any other reason other than the money - well, they're bloody lying, mate.