Treasure and Dirt

With special guest:

• Chris Hammer
  … in conversation with Bill Kable

This is the first of Chris Hammer’s books to be set in the Australian outback.

There is a murder in a fictional opal mining town loosely based on Lightning Ridge in a far corner of NSW.

We go immediately to the gruesome murder scene. The early indications are that so-called “ratters” are involved and that is a story in itself as Chris explains to us what a ratter is in the context of small mining operations.

What a pleasure it is to get the latest book from Chris Hammer. Treasure and Dirt includes new characters each with a flaw that we discover just as the characters in the book do. We have to make a decision about which character we can trust.

Chris describes the town so well that we can almost taste the dust and feel the isolation. And there is the suspicion of opal fever throughout. When you throw in some big business shenanigans by rogue billionaires and even a religious cult there is plenty of action to follow as you get into this page turner.

Like all good fiction books we learn a lot in reading the story, in this case there is the world of mining and an insight into stock market manipulation to explore.

Chris Hammer was described by famous American crime writer Michael Connelly as a great writer, a leader in Australian Noir. This type of writing is coming to the fore in Australia and we are lucky to have Chris leading the way. By the end of the book where all the action has occurred in less than a week we are hoping for more. A sequel? Not certain yet but if we do hear more from these Detectives it would be a very welcome development. Maybe next year we will be able to invite Chris back on the program to talk about just that.

Chris Hammer

Chris Hammer was a journalist for more than thirty years, dividing his career between covering Australian federal politics and international affairs. For many years he was a roving foreign correspondent for SBS TV’s flagship current affairs program Dateline. He reported from more than thirty countries on six continents. In Canberra, roles included chief political correspondent for The Bulletin, current affairs correspondent for SBS TV and a senior political journalist for The Age.

Scrublands, Chris’s first novel, was published in 2018 and won the UK Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Debut Dagger Award. Trust was published in 2020 and was longlisted for Best General Fiction at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Chris has a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Charles Sturt University and a Master’s degree in international relations from the Australian National University.

Song selection by our guest: Digging in the Dirt by Peter Gabriel

Podcast (mp3)