Simpson Desert, Australia. Stephen Mabbs/Unsplash

Jane Harper sits in a rare category of contemporary Australian writers whose novels have achieved phenomenal international success. She has sold 1.5 million books in Australia and 3.5 million overseas.

While all popular fiction adheres to certain formulas – that is, after all, why we read these books – Harper has skilfully combined a set of conventional tropes to develop her own narrative brand. Her crime novels build on a familiar ideas about the Australian landscape we have been taught how to interpret and accept – images that have become a type of shorthand.

Harper’s version of what has come to be called “outback noir” invariably features a small-town setting where the natural world is perceived as threatening, and an outsider or outcast who must solve a crime with a link to the past.

Importantly, her depictions of the Australian landscape also draw on the traditions of the Australian Gothic.

When early settlers encountered Australia’s unfamiliar landscapes, they found the place strange and unsettling. Swans were black, not white; the seasons were reversed. As novelist Marcus Clarke famously observed, the trees shed their bark, not their leaves.

Australia’s earliest writers, including Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton, used the strange animals and plants, the harsh weather and the seemingly endless deserts as ominous backdrops for their fictional works.

As one character in Harper’s first novel The Dry (2017) reflects on the emptiness that surrounds the fictional town of Kiewarra: “This place is like a nightmare.”

Despite their rural settings, however, Harper’s novels have not to date included any significant First Nations characters or perspectives. Nor do they appear to acknowledge the deeper meaning and consequence of their Gothic conventions.

Harper’s landscapes

A Gothic sensibility is evident in all of Harper’s novels. It is there in the outback settings of The Dry, The Lost Man (2019), and her newest novel, Last One Out (2025). It is there in the forest hinterland of Force of Nature (2018), the rocky coastline of The Survivors (2021), and the rural farmlands of Exiles (2023).

Each novel is set in a new location, but in all cases the central crime takes place in a small town, playing into the Gothic’s concern with isolation. Characters’ limited access to resources, their strained relationships with others, and their remoteness combine to render them vulnerable and create a sense of claustrophobia.

Jane Harper. Mrs Smart Photography/Macmillan

In The Dry, the residents of Kiewarra are suffering from an extended drought. The paddocks of local farms have dried up; so has the town’s river. In Force of Nature, the constant rain and unfamiliar tracks in a mountain forest cause a group of city folk on a corporate “retreat” to get lost during a hike.

The depictions of Tasmania in The Survivors and Australia’s wine regions in Exiles are less extreme. In these works, the natural world is not described with the same eerie, threatening tone of Harper’s earlier novels. But the most violent and climactic events take place not within homes, city streets, or even each town’s single pub. They occur in the dangerously liminal spaces of an isolated cliff and a coastal cave.

The reader is led to understand that these locations are significant in their uncertainty, which creates a sense of unease, a quiet foreboding. Although the natural sites themselves do not harm the characters, they are used for malevolent purposes by criminals, marking them out as haunting and haunted spaces.

Harper’s detectives

Crime fiction is the world’s most popular literary genre. It speaks to our desire for justice and resolution.

Its origins can be traced to the 19th century, but it was during and after the first world war that crime or detective fiction was most in demand. This period – dominated by the work of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – has become known as the “golden age of detective fiction”.

Precisely because of the horrors of wartime, and the shock of the terrible injuries and deaths experienced there, crime fiction of this period was decidedly “unbloody”. As literary scholar Alison Light observed, “fleshiness, either figuratively or literally, was […] in gross bad taste after the butchery many had witnessed”.

In these early iterations, the crime genre was conservative. The crime has disrupted the social order in some way; the resolution of the story depends on the straightforward discovery of the criminal, with the implication that justice will be served.

In contemporary detective fiction, both the crimes and the detectives have become more complicated, more morally corrupt, less transparent in their view of justice.

This is the genre known as “noir”. Even in the recent BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work by Sarah Phelps, the relatively simple character of the famous detective Hercule Poirot has been made more complex and his responses to crimes more nuanced, through the addition of a traumatic backstory.

Noir detectives are marked by their personal struggles: addiction, traumatic pasts, and – often as a result of the two former traits – difficulty in forming relationships, whether platonic or romantic. These traits compound the detective’s isolation and “otherness”.

This is also true of Harper’s recurring detective, Aaron Falk, who was forced out of Kiewarra as a teenager under suspicion of harming a local girl.

These experiences have caused him to become guarded and emotionally closed off to others, especially his romantic partners. In The Dry, we witness the disintegration of his formerly close relations, and the gradual and careful ways in which he slowly builds a fragile new friendship.

It is critical that Harper’s detectives are outsiders to the communities in which they work, albeit as non-professional detectives. In this way, they stand in for the reader, who is also – Harper’s urban and international readership suggests – an outsider, largely unfamiliar with such places and communities. This too increases the sense of mystery and threat.

A legacy version of Australia

Harper’s adherence to these generic conventions is doubtless one reason for her popularity. But her novels are not simply crime fiction.

Outback noir transfers the gritty urban settings of traditional noir to small regional towns, where the claustrophobia and secrets of a small community, as well as the threat of an encroaching natural environment, add tension and stakes to the crime at the centre of the narrative. This is where outback noir overlaps with the Gothic – specifically, Gothic narratives that take place in extreme environments, such as the Southern Gothic of the United States, and of course Australian Gothic.

This use of landscape is a common strategy in noir set in specific locales, such as Nordic noir or tropical noir. But there are negative consequences to this construction of the detective as outsider when the outback setting is presented as something unfamiliar, something to be feared. These arise from the origins of Australian Gothic, which scholars have long recognised as an expression of settler-colonial anxiety about the violent dispossession of the country’s Indigenous people.

Noir is not the only popular fiction genre that makes use of rural settings. Rural romance (or “ru-ro”) also has a wide readership and, like outback noir, uses small-town settings and the natural environment to add stakes to the plot. The small town offers a host of quirky but lovable characters, while the harsh landscape allows for displays of physical prowess and the romance of being saved from physical threat.

Both outback noir and ru-ro present a landscape that is recognisably, and cinematically, Australian. They draw upon longstanding ideas and images of our landscapes and lifestyle: a scalding sun, empty rain tanks, wide and dry plains, and a small town with a single pub where a drunken brawl is not uncommon.

This clichéd understanding of Australia has been presented and reinforced through media and marketing, often aimed at audiences beyond our shores – in Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee films, for example, or in Ted Kotcheff’s film adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright (1961).

Harper’s contribution to contemporary Australian literature hearkens back to the “golden age” of detective fiction. She uses a formula that embeds familiar features of the crime genre in an alternative setting. And just as the novels of detective fiction’s golden age erased the mutilated bodies of the war dead, her novels gloss over the difficult, traumatic and violent elements of Australia’s past and present.

They are engaging with a legacy version of Australia that is more literary than realistic. In their reinforcement of settler-colonialist depictions of Australia, they are both comfortable and uncomfortable reading.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jessica Gildersleeve, University of Southern Queensland and Tara East, University of Southern Queensland

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.