Australian Made, Born, Bred, and Written

My friend Bernadette over at her newly created blog Reactions to Reading has reminded me of what hurdles we sometimes have to jump to locate a specific book in Australian crime fiction.

At yet we demonstrably have world-class writers, and a number of writers who are stretching the boundaries of crime fiction.
Bernadette recommends Aust crime fiction as a starting point because it lists several hundred Australian writers and almost all of them have written at least one mystery. As it happens, Aust crime fiction is one of the sites that I contribute reviews to as do Helen of It's Criminal, Sunnie on her Book Blog, and Sally who "lives" at Books and Musings from DownUnder.

If you want some starting points in my blog, click on the "Australian made" logo for links to all mentions of "Australian author" in my blog.
Earlier this year Karen Chisholm (of the Aust Crime Fiction weblog), Damien Gay (of Crime DownUnder) and Perry Middlemiss (of Matilda) produced Australian Crime Fiction Snapshots in which they interviewed 36 Australian crime fiction authors. They certainly made me aware of authors I had never even heard of, and it was refreshing to read interviews with those who were already favourites. Start with my final blog posting about the project, and it will lead you to the others.

At the beginning of July I hosted Carnival of Criminal Minds #18 and produced quite a comprehensive list for you to explore. Since then we've had the Davitt Awards, and the Ned Kelly Awards.

And then, if you'd really like to be part of a group that discusses Australian crime fiction, then you could join oz_mystery_readers, a Yahoo group that focusses on crime fiction available in Australia, and highlights Australian authors and books.