The Lowdown on Down Under

Just as the Amazon.com Web page design seemed to become a formatting standard (complete with top-of-the-page tabs) a couple of years ago, now the Wikipedia “look” is showing up everywhere. The latest example is AustCrime, a wiki site devoted to crime/mystery fiction from Australia and New Zealand. While the editors acknowledge that “this is going to take a little while to get off the ground,” even at this early stage AustCrime seems quite inspirational, in that it opens the eyes of Americans and Europeans to the wealth of “Down Under” novelists contributing to this genre.

Already, the list of Australian authors runs to 251 names, while the New Zealand roster contributes 30 more. And though write-ups about some of the best-recognized modern fictionists (such as Stella Duffy, Shane Maloney, and Jon Cleary) are strangely thin, the editors’ intention is for outside contributors--including fans--to beef up AustCrime’s offerings, just as they already do Wikipedia’s. Between AustCrime and the Australian Crime Fiction Database, there’s absolutely no reason why readers living beyond the bounds of the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean should be ignorant of Aussie and Kiwi crime writers any longer.