And that was what you thought was the appropriate behaviour. Should you feel guilty about that? But at the time that was the culture. “And that question as well about the sort of things you did as a teenager, I think we can look back at our teenage years and think, with relationships at school, and the way you treated friends, and the way you spoke to our parents.
We spoke (via Zoom) before Christmas, and after congratulating her on Australia’s enviable Covid-free status, I asked first about her early life, and about her particular outsider’s perspective (not unheard of in crime fiction: the great Californian crime novelists all came from elsewhere, while Harper’s illustrious predecessor Peter Temple was South African). She emigrated to Melbourne when she was 28, where she now lives with her family. It’s perhaps not surprising that this should be so Harper was born in Manchester, moved to Australia when she was eight, then returned to England aged 14. Harper writes with a nuanced, compassionate eye of how those turbulent teenage dramas seem laid to rest, only to resurface in later life, harbingers of crisis, sources of shame she repeatedly dramatises William Faulkner’s much-quoted line: “The past is not dead. A suspenseful plot, a vivid sense of place and a satisfyingly ambiguous ending have become identifiable elements of Harper’s repertoire, and they are on display here to compelling effect.īut it is her preoccupation with the slings and arrows, the errors and omissions of adolescence that gives the books their extraordinary emotional force: the boyfriends betrayed, the friends abandoned, the parents rejected.
Since the success of her CWA Gold Dagger winning debut The Dry in 2017, each of Jane Harper’s novels has been both critically acclaimed and an international bestseller the latest, The Survivors, shows no falling off in quality.
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