The Godfather: Peter Corris on contemptible people
I was watching a History Channel documentary on notable crimes. This one dealt with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, in the early 1940s when the Duke of Windsor was Governor of the colony, an appointment made to keep the former king,...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his best books of 2015
To date this year I’ve read 16 books and listened to 28 audio books. Because I keep a record with a note on each book and assign each a mark out of 10 to assist me in this exercise, I’m easily able to list the five I ranked most highly. They appear here in the order I...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on execution songs
Earlier this year my column dealt with what I called ‘unspoken backstory’ songs. I was prompted to think of other styles of songs, those with a distinctive mode or theme. Execution songs, where the subject is about to be executed, rendered in either the first or third...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on an island #2
The name Coochiemudlo refers to the red rock that outcrops on the island and provided ochre for the mainland Indigenous people who visited for fishing and ceremonies. The island has no permanent water and water is now piped from a vast Stradbroke Island aquifer. The...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on an island #1
I don’t know when I first developed my yen to live on an island. It may have related back to Robert Louis Stevenson, but more likely to a book that was a set text in my last year of high school. This was A Pattern of Islands (1952) by Arthur Grimble who had been the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Scotland
Jean and I both have Scots ancestry. Jean’s paternal grandmother was a Fraser. The Frasers were a clan notorious for changing sides in the conflicts that raged in the borderlands for centuries. A family story is that a distant aunt or some such relative was a...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the hat
An agent never puts on his hat and goes home. – Raymond Chandler If you look at a photograph of a street scene in any Australian city taken in, say, the 1940s and 1950s, you will notice that the great majority of the adults, men and women, are wearing hats. A similar...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on hard-boiled Hemingway
At one time I had a lot of Hemingway’s books on my shelves – novels, short story collections, journalism, even Death in the Afternoon (1932), although I never sympathised with his passion for bullfighting. I’ve always thought that the story ‘Fifty Grand’, about a...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on film quotes
Call me superficial, but several quotes from films stay with me permanently and surface in my consciousness from time to time. One in particular I repeat at what I deem to be an appropriate moment. Whenever I consider that I’ve done something generous towards a family...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his workplaces
I’ve done my writing in some pretty unusual places. The early chapters of the first Cliff Hardy book were written in a Melbourne house that was packed up ready for our move to Sydney. I had a borrowed electric typewriter moored on some boards stretched across a number...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the Victorians
I first read Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) at school when it was a set text. I was very impressed by it, answered a question on it in the exams and got a good mark, although I’ve long forgotten what I wrote. At university, Hardy’s poems were set for...
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