The Red Hand: Stories, Reflections and the Last Appearance of Jack Irish

‘One of the world’s finest crime writers.’ The Times

‘He was to terse blokes with hard jobs and wounded souls what Proust was to memory. He made every sentence count and shot the stragglers.’ Shane Maloney

Peter Temple didn’t start publishing novels until he was fifty, but then he got cracking, writing nine of them in thirteen years. When he died, in March 2018, there was an unfinished Jack Irish novel in his drawer. This substantial fragment, entitled High Art, reveals a writer at the pea...