Cliff Hardy books in order

Reading order

The Cliff Hardy series is the longest-running private detective series in Australian fiction. Starting with The Dying Trade in 1980, Peter Corris wrote Hardy’s cases for nearly four decades, finishing with Win, Lose or Draw in 2017. Hardy operates out of Sydney’s Glebe neighborhood, taking on cases that range from missing persons to murder, with the city itself as a constant backdrop.

Hardy is not a polished character. He drinks too much, his personal life is a wreck, and he tends to get hit more than he hits. But he’s persistent and smart when it counts, and Corris used him to explore the changing face of Sydney across the decades. The early books have the grit of 1980s Kings Cross; the later ones deal with gentrification, technology, and an aging detective who refuses to quit. The series has earned comparisons to Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, transplanted to Australian soil.