| Scobie Malone | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | The High Commissioner |
| Last appearance | Degrees of Connection |
| Created by | Jon Cleary |
| Portrayed by | Rod Taylor Jack Thompson |
| In-universe information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Policeman |
| Nationality | Australian |
Scobie Malone is a fictional Sydney homicide detective created by Australian novelist Jon Cleary.
Named after the jockey Scobie Breasley, Malone made his first appearance in Cleary's 1966 novel The High Commissioner.[1] 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.[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
"I'm trying to write something more than detective novels", said Cleary in 1989. "I am offended if my book is called a potboiler."[5]
Cleary admits that sales of the last few Malone books declined and he decided to end the series before his publishers did.[6] He also felt he was running creatively dry. "When I found myself making notes on a serial killer, I knew that I'd got to the bottom of the barrel because that's the cliche in crime writing today", he said in 2004.[7]
Cleary once stated that, "There's more than a bit of me in Scobie. We both come from fighting Irish stock, we're both from Erskineville, the wrong side of the tracks, and both of us slugged our way up."[2] Malone was a Catholic family man with rigid principles who mostly worked in Sydney, although his adventures occasionally took him overseas.
Malone was described in The High Commissioner as:
Tall, six feet. His face was too bony to be handsome, but [Inspector] Leeds guessed women would find the eyes attractive: they were dark, almost Latin, and they were friendly. The mouth, too, was friendly. Malone gave the impression of being easy-going, but there was a competence about him that had marked him for promotion from his first days in the force.[8]
In the same novel it is mentioned that Scobie once played a game for New South Wales in the Sheffield Shield as a bowler and was "belted... all over the field".[9]
Regular characters in the series included:
A noted feature of the books was starting them with a striking opening sentence.[10]
There have been two feature film adaptations of Malone novels. Cleary was dissatisfied with both. He did not do the adaptation of Nobody Runs Forever (1968), which he thought "had no sense of humour at all" and lacked reality.[6]
He wrote a script for Helga's Web which was not used in the film that was eventually titled Scobie Malone (1975). "When I saw Scobie nibbling on the fourth nipple I thought "that's not my Scobie"", said Cleary.[6]
In 1997 Peter Yeldham adapted Dark Summer for a proposed telemovie but this was never made.[11]
Cleary thought Rachel Blake would have made the perfect Lisa.[6]