Literary Birthday – 22 November – Jon Cleary

Jon Cleary was born 22 November 1917, and died 19 July 2010.

Five Quotes

1. They are company. I still love the serendipity of the character who walks on that you haven’t envisaged, and you know that he or she is going to be with you for the rest of the book.
2. I’ve known writers who have written two or three books too many and when I found myself making notes on a serial killer, I thought, no, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, because that’s the cliché in crime fiction.
3. Age doesn’t make you sage, but it does help you relax in taking risks. And in recognising that you are never too old to adjust.
4. I get annoyed when people dismiss me as a thriller writer – I think to myself well the buggers haven’t read half of me because if they look at my books they would find half are not thrillers. Besides, I dislike the term – to me a thriller is something that’s all story, usually written with cardboard characters and often to a formula.
5. Half the pleasure of writing for me has been the research … I might use only 10 per cent of what I get but the other 90 per cent gives me a certain reassurance.

Jon Cleary was an Australian writer and novelist. He wrote many books, including a long series of popular detective fiction featuring Sydney Police Inspector Scobie Malone. Its sympathetic protagonist was introduced in The High Commissioner. Degrees of Connection, published in 2003, was Scobie’s 20th appearance.

Some of Cleary’s works have been adapted for film and television.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JonClearyLMF2008.jpg

Masahiro Sumori, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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