AustLit

'Charles Dickens died at his desk in 1870, aged 58, with his crime novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. Robert B. Parker also went out in harness – in 2010, aged 77 – so that there would be no more adventures (by his hand anyway) for the private detective Spenser and his peerless companion, Hawk, although at least readers were spared any more of the insufferable Susan Silverman. Michael Dibdin only reached sixty. The tally of his Aurelio Zen crime novels halted at eleven. Philip Kerr was two years older, his death coinciding with the publication of the thirteenth outing of Bernie Gunther, Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018) (a fourteenth novel is happily in the publisher’s hands). The career of Australia’s foremost crime writer (to call him the Godfather confuses the subject with the craft), Peter Corris, ended in 2017, the year he turned 75, because increasing problems with his sight (caused by diabetes) meant that he could no longer write.'  (Introduction)