Jon Cleary and Sundowner Productions Pty Ltd: The Making of a Textual Craftsman

Osborne, Roger

Abstract

[Extract] Sixty years separates the publication of Jon Cleary’s first novel, You Can’t See Round Corners (1947), and his last, Four-Cornered Circle (2007). During those sixty years, Cleary published more than fifty novels, a novel a year at the peak of production, receiving early critical recognition in Australia with the ALS Gold Medal for Just Let Me Be (1950), and, later, in the USA, with the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award for Peter’s Pence (1974). A winner of multiple Ned Kelly Awards for crime writing, he was honoured in 2004 for his lifetime contribution to that genre. The number of copies of Cleary’s novels doubles when English and American editions are considered, and increases further with counts of adaptations, translations, serialisations, and abridgements. Cleary himself moved as far as his books, travelling widely, while maintaining Australia as his homebase for increasingly extended periods of time as he grew older. His cultural and professional networks connected him with significant figures in trans-national publishing, particularly through his long connection with literary agents Paul R. Reynolds in New York and John Farquharson in London, and with publishers William Collins, Sons, in Britain, and William Morrow and Company in the USA.

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1834-9013

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Bibliographical Society of Australia & New Zealand

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