But to be a clever liar is not enough; to write book after book you have to write out of something, out of some need, some tension. It could be despair or it could be greed, but it better not be greed because there's not much money in it. There has to be some inner tension in you and in my case I really think there are two tensions at work. One is that I'm not as brave as I'd like to be, nor as resourceful… Most detective story writers, perhaps all, are great fantasists. They make their heroes taller and braver than themselves, they make the detectives' mothers more possessive than their mothers were, the fathers more drunken and insensitive, and so on. It's natural that these heightened projections of their own inadequacies should be set on a more interesting stage than the old neighbourhood. That's true in my case.
Mean Streets [Interview, October 1990]
Use the link below to read an article about Australian academic, historian, journalist and bestselling crime novelist PETER CORRIS (1942–2018):
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