Peter Temple, the first crime writer to win Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Award, died March 8, the Age reported. He was 71. The author of nine novels, Temple was perhaps best known for his four Jack Irish books, which "had a magnificent stable of recurring characters many of whom drank in a fictional pub, the Prince of Prussia."
He was also the first Australian writer to win the British Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award (for The Broken Shore in 2007). The follow-up to that novel, It Was Truth, won the Miles Franklin in 2010. Temple also garnered five Ned Kelly Awards, beginning in 1997 for his first book, Bad Debts.
Crime writer Michael Robotham said Temple "was the first pure crime writer to win his country's top literary award, which was an incredible achievement. He was such a beautiful writer."
Author Shane Maloney observed that Temple "was to terse blokes with hard jobs and wounded souls what Proust was to memory. He made every sentence count and shot the stragglers.''
Although originally from South Africa, he "created authentically Australian novels, peopled with the most Australian characters," the Age noted. His publisher, Michael Heyward, said: ''As an expat he heard us in a way we could hardly hear each other. We were so lucky to be able to publish a writer who was a poet who understood narrative and put it to the service of Australian literature.''