Cliff Hardy (character)
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Cliff Hardy is a fictional Australian private eye created by Peter Corris. He was first introduced in the 1980 novel The Dying Trade and featured in over 40 novels and short story collections. He was played by Bryan Brown in the 1983 film The Empty Beach.[1][2][3][4]
Corris later recalled:
It was really just to imitate Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and see if I could. I’d tried a historical novel based on my PHD thesis and about 18 different publishers rejected it. So I had this idea. I’d been reading Chandler and MacDonald recreationally for years, and I thought, well, I’d try this. I felt like I really knew how they worked and what the formula was like and what changes you could make. I thought, Sydney, San Francisco, LA, I felt like there was a symbiosis there and figured, have a go at what you know you can write. Imitation was the stimulus. But after a few books, I felt I had an individual voice and the confidence to play around with the formula, say what I wanted to say, shit on people I wanted to shit on, things like that, so it took off creatively after a very imitative start, you might say.[5]
Corris felt the character became more unique around the time of The Empty Beach.[5]
Introduced in The Dying Trade, Hardy had served during the Malayan Emergency, studied and university and worked as an insurance investigator.
He grew up in Maroubra and his mother was an alcoholic. Hardy has a house in Glebe and his tenant is a university student Hilde.
Corris said "I don’t do a lot of documentary or physical research. The ideas come from my own life, my imagination and what’s around, what’s in the newspaper, what I hear on the radio or see on TV, what friends tell me, you know, just the basics of the life around you."[5]