Scobie Malone

Scobie Malone is a fictional Sydney homicide detective created by Australian novelist Jon Cleary. History Named after the jockey Scobie Breasley, Malone made his first appearance in Cleary's 1966 novel The High Commissioner. Cleary says he got the idea from meeting an Australian policeman he knew walking out of Australia House in London one day. He was on six months leave but Cleary wondered what if he had come to arrest the Australian High Commissioner for murder. Although the original novel was a best seller and turned into a film, Cleary did not originally intend to create a series around Malone. However, he brought the character back later for Helga's Web (1970) as a means to explore the construction of the Sydney Opera House, then for Ransom (1973). There was a long gap before he started using the detective again, but once he did he wrote Malone novels regularly from 1987 onwards until the end of his writing career. Cleary and his wife used to travel two months every year to research his books. However, after Cleary's daughter died in 1987, his wife became ill and did not want to travel. As Cleary liked to research his books thoroughly this meant he had to write about Australia. I wondered how if I were to write about Australia would I keep my overseas readers. I'd written three Malone tales but was resisting publishers' urging to write more because I didn't want to get trapped by it. Then I realised I could use him by hanging it on crime, which immediately intrigued the international market, and write about what it was like living in Sydney in the late 80s and through the 90s.