Why Jane Harper’s ‘outback noir’ novels make for comfortable – and uncomfortable – reading
- Written by The Conversation
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.
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”.
