Peter Temple: tributes paid to acclaimed crime writer after his death, aged 71

The Miles Franklin award-winner transformed the face of Australian crime fiction, critic Peter Pierce says

Writers and fans have paid tribute to the Miles Franklin award-winning author Peter Temple, who has died aged 71.

Temple died on Thursday at his Ballarat home after a six-month battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife, Anita and son, Nicholas.

The critic and writer Peter Pierce said Temple transformed the face of Australian crime fiction.

“He used crime fiction to produce some of the finest anatomies of Australian society in the last 30 years,” he said.

Temple was the first crime writer to win the ​Miles Franklin award for his novel​ Truth in 2010. About a dedicated Melbourne detective investigating a murder while the Black Saturday bushfires brought havoc to the city, Truth was the sequel to The Broken Shore, for which Temple won the British Crime Writers’ Association major award, the Gold Dagger, in 2007. Temple was also a five-time winner of the Ned Kelly award for crime writing, the first for his debut novel, Bad Debts.

Temple is perhaps best-known for his character Jack Irish, the former lawyer and alcoholic turned investigator protagonist of four of his novels. The books were made into three television series and starred Guy Pearce in the title role.

In his acceptance speech for the Miles Franklin award, Temple expressed his shock at being awarded the prestigious prize.

“I’ll thank the judges anyway,” he said. “They’ll have to take the flack for giving the Miles Franklin to a crime writer and all I can say, my advice to them is cop it sweet. You’ve done the crime, you do the time.”

Temple was widely regarded to have captured the human experience in a way that other authors within the crime genre have not, drawing comparisons to great literary writers such as JM Coetzee and Tom Wolfe.

As Edmund Gordon wrote in the Observer of his novel Truth he was “a far more literary writer than most of his peers, he eschews the staccato prose rhythms that typify the genre.”

Text publisher Michael Heyward said Temple “was a defining writer for us” and described him as “the funniest person”.

Temple was reportedly working on a new novel, the third in a series following The Broken Shore in 2005 and Truth in 2009. The novel was possibly going to be named The Light on the Hill, but Temple had not yet submitted a copy to his Melbourne-based publisher.

Temple was born and raised in South Africa, in a town near the border with Botswana. He and his wife, Anita, left for Germany in 1977. Temple opposed the apartheid regime in South Africa and said in a later interview that “you can have no real love of country” if you disagree with the decision making of the country.

After spending two years in Germany, Temple moved to Australia to work as education editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, before taking up lecturing journalism at what is now Charles Sturt University in Bathurst. Temple moved to Melbourne in 1982 to edit the magazine Australian Society and later returned to teaching at RMIT. He committed to writing full time in the 1990s.

Temple described crime as a “wonderful vehicle” for engaging audiences.

“What is more at the heart of social life than the crime against the person? I see it as an excuse for beginning the narrative. It has its own logic and relentless drive. It is a reason for things to happen and for the way characters behave.”

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