Cliff Hardy is the protagonist of Peter Corris’s crime fiction series, the longest-running private detective series in Australian literature. Hardy is a Maroubra-born, ex-army, law-school-dropout-turned-private-eye who operates out of Sydney’s Glebe neighborhood. He first appeared in The Dying Trade (1980) and his last case was Win, Lose or Draw (2017).
Hardy is not a polished character. He drinks too much, his personal life is a mess, and he takes more hits than he gives. But he’s persistent, and Corris used him to map the changing face of Sydney across four decades. The early books have the grit of 1980s Kings Cross; the later ones deal with an aging detective who refuses to quit. The series has earned comparisons to Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, transplanted to Australian soil.
Reading Order
See the complete Cliff Hardy reading order for all books in the series.