Cliff Hardy Books
Meet Cliff Hardy. Smoker, drinker, ex-boxer. And private investigator. The Dying Trade not only introduces a sleuth who has become an enduring Australian literary legendthe antihero of thirty-seven thrillersbut it is also a long love letter to the seamy side of Sydney itself.
Cliff Hardy, an Australian private detective, is hired to find the missing daughter of Ted Tarleton, a wealthy bookie
Lady Chatterton, widow of an eminent judge, hires Cliff Hardy to locate her missing grandson, but the only man who has proof of the boy's existence is found murdered
Cliff Hardy, an Australian private detective, agrees to help find Paul Guthrie's adopted son, who has run off with some known criminals
When Cliff Hardy, an Australian private detective, investigates an apparent sighting of John Singer, who disappeared two years ago, he encounters a series of murders
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Australian private investigator Cliff Hardy searches through Sydney's drug-pervaded underworld to track down the criminals determined to destroy a friend's car rental service
Politician Peter January is having trouble staying alive so he hires Cliff Hardy to help him. Hardy dislikes the role of politician's 'security consultant' but he dislikes bombers, hit men and hatemailers even more. Protecting January leads to protecting his assistant, Trudi Bell, which is a more enjoyable assignment. It also takes Hardy to Washington DC where the threats are real and the rules are different. To stand close to January is to stand close to danger and corruption, but there are even greater evils and Hardy cannot back away . . .
How did a simple car accident suddenly become a murder? The answer will bring Cliff Hardy into contact with some of the seediest men in Sydney, in his 12th case. Everybody liked Barnes Todd: ex-Korean War veteran, slightly dishonest businessman, good drinking buddy. When he was wiped out in a car south of Sydney, people were lining up to say how sorry they were. Head of the line was Todd's widow Felicia, closely followed by his business and army cronies. So how did a simple car accident suddenly become a murder? Cliff Hardy hadn't a clue, but business in the private eye game was slow, so he agreed to try and find out. And quickly came into contact with a lot of less-than-lovely people—especially the enigmatic Kevin O'Fearna, known as O'Fear.
The third adventure of the Australian private detective pits Cliff Hardy against a serial killer who haunts the waters underneath the Sydney Harbor Bridge, disposing of elderly men. Reprint.
Hardy's 14th hardboiled case When Oscar Bach's body is found crushed under rubble, his death was classified as another tragic statistic of the earthquake. So how could he have been seen alive five minutes after the quake? Who would want this man dead? Oscar's quiet life was not all that it appeared to be. He was a man with no apparent past. But something—and someone—has caught up with him now, and they are trying to stop Cliff Hardy from finding the answers.
Aussie private eye Cliff Hardy narrowly escapes a fireball that kills two lovers and lands him on the trail of deception that leads to a hell guarded by a snarling dog and filled with a family's darkest secrets. Reprint.
Cliff Hardy's 17th case forces him to revisit his first! "Tell me about your first case Cliff. You must remember it." "Sure, but Christ, I haven't thought of that in a long, long time." "What was it about?" "Back then? Divorce—what else? But there was a bit of perjury, fraud and murder as well." The early 70s, and in Cliff Hardy's first case there were perjury, fraud, murder, crooked cops, lawyers, PIs, and a call girl—scarcely an honest citizen in sight. Cliff Hardy was caught in the middle with a client he couldn't trust and nothing but questions for guidelines. In the end his survival became more important than the answers.
Hardy's 18th case Cliff Hardy is flattered to be offered the job as head of security at the new Sydney casino. But the thought of office hours and wearing a suit put him off and he refuses in favor of his friend, Scott Galvani. But when Galvani is murdered and the police are indifferent, Galvani's widow pleads with Hardy to help. How can Hardy refuse? In the course of his investigation Cliff reluctantly takes the job at the casino where he meets the attractive but unpredictable Vita Drewe who is quickly added to Hardy's list of enemies. Galvani's killers are closer to home than Hardy anticipated; his life is on the line and so is his relationship with Glen Withers.
Cliff Hardy's 19th case—one of his grittiest yet The Washington Club takes Cliff Hardy to the edge. He might never work again. Claudia Fleischman is beautiful, rich, intelligent . . . and has just been charged with the murder of her developer husband. Hardy, hired to look into the background of the case, is soon up to his neck in trouble. When his car is blown up and then a friend is killed, Cliff finds himself with a personal stake in the action. His investigations introduce him to the shadowy world of corporate high-fliers at Sydney's exclusive Washington Club and bring him into contact with loose cannon 'Haitch' Henderson and his soft but unpleasant pimp of a son, Noel. In one of his grittiest cases ever, Hardy has to take drastic action before the pieces fall into place and very rough justice is seen to be done.
Cliff Hardy is called to investigate the death of a prominent athlete's girlfriend, in his 22nd case They called him the Black Prince. Southwestern Uni's top athlete, Clinton seemed to have it all: he was destined for sporting stardom and lucky in love—then it all went horribly wrong. Now Clinton won't rest until he's avenged his girlfriend's death. He's after the dealer who sold Angie bad steroids and nothing's going to get in his way. Can Cliff Hardy find him before he ends up on a murder charge—or worse, dead? The trail leads the Sydney PI all the way to an Aboriginal community in Far North Queensland and back to the shadowy world of illegal boxing.
Hardy's 23rd case finds him in the throws of corruption, murder, and a missing girl: routine for Cliff Hardy—except this time it's personal Cliff Hardy is stunned to get a phone call from his ex-wife Cynthia. It's been more than 20 years since she last shouted she never wanted to see him again . . . and she was never a woman to change her mind. But that surprise is nothing to the bombshell Cynthia is about to drop. Dying of cancer, she's desperate to get in contact with the daughter she gave up for adoption—and the daughter in question, she confesses, is Cliff's! A shocked but skeptical Cliff agrees to search for their missing daughter. But this is never going to be a straightforward investigation . . .
Drug-dealing and corruption are at the center of Cliff Hardy's 24th case I was about to punch in the number when a man loomed up beside me. When I say loomed I mean loomed—he was tall and wide with a shaven head, and the pale hand that plucked the mobile from my grasp and threw it away was super-sized. "Hey," I protested. He just stood there, a pace away now—a hundred kilos of bone and muscle in T-shirt and jeans. I had a gun and a tyre iron and I thought I'd need both to make an impression on him, but they were in the car. For now, it was just me. When it's only 24 hours into a new case and PI Cliff Hardy's already been heavied, you know that the job is going to get his full attention. Cliff has been hired by high-flying consultant Martin Price to find out who's been supplying heroin to Price's teenage daughter—who in turn has got her beautiful young stepmother hooked. The wealthy suburb of Lugarno seems an unlikely hotbed of drug-dealing and corruption, but Cliff is finding out the hard way that crime and violence come calling even at posh waterside addresses.
I reached gingerly to the back of my head and felt the blood in my hair and the tenderness underneath it. How do they check if a footballer's concussed? Ask him if he knows what day it is. I thought I did. I was pretty sure. An old flame, Glen Withers, has come back into Cliff Hardy's life - but this time it's strictly business. Former policewoman Glen is now a PI too, and with a much classier clientele than Cliff's - she's been told "money's no object" by her latest, a wealthy family from Sydney's eastern suburbs. Together, Cliff and Glen take on the case of Rodney St John Harkness, recent inmate of a mental institution and a recovering alcoholic with a murky, possibly murderous, history. But Glen is also a recovering alcoholic - and the combination proves disastrous. When Rod and Glen vanish, Hardy finds himself in a race against time to untangle Harkness' tortured past and find the pair. The trail leads up to the central coast and some of Sydney's bust-known beaches. Will Cliff be in time, or will the "salty tang of blood" fill the air?
In this hard-boiled detective novel, private investigator Cliff Hardy is looking forward to his new assignment. When rich, beautiful Lorraine Master hires him to look into the circumstances surrounding her husband's conviction for smuggling heroin on the island paradise of New Caledonia, Hardy welcomes the idea of a week on a generous expense account under a tropical sky. But his island escape proves to be anything but relaxing as he finds Stewart Master's business associates to be a difficult and dangerous bunch. The action returns to Hardy's normal stomping grounds of Sydney, Australia, where he and his client become targets in an intricate conspiracy gone seriously wrong and tangle with a tricky lawyer and a corrupt ex-cop. With punchy dialogue and exotic settings, this is a fresh adventure for a well-established character with an international following.
Cliff Hardy trades the mean streets of Sydney for the Illawarra escarpment, a rugged undeveloped area of Australia, in this latest hard-boiled detective novel. First hired by the daughter of the late, wealthy Frederick Farmer to investigate his mysterious and fiery death, Hardy is then called in on a second case—the disappearance of the young daughter of Marisha Karatsky, an exotic, dark-eyed interpreter who gets under Hardy's thick skin. Questionable insurance agents and feral bikers round out the colorful cast as Hardy battles through personal turmoil on the road to justice.
Private investigator Cliff Hardy tackles one of his most difficult cases yet in this gripping detective novel that finds him in the far southwestern suburbs of Sydney. When a journalist hires him to find Billie Merchant, a woman with incriminating information about media-giant Joanas Clement and who is being tracked by both Clement and Clement's rival, Barclay Greaves, Hardy must work hard to stay one step ahead. After Hardy tracks her down, he must juggle her self-destructive behaviors while negotiating his escape from Clement and Greaves. Set against the backdrop of a federal election campaign, all outcomes are uncertain in this gritty, action-packed story full of colorful characters and close calls
In his latest investiagion, private eye Cliff Hardy comes to the aid of retired senior policeman and longtime friend, Frank Parker. Haunted by a case from his early career involving two doctors, Parker needs Hardy to uncover the truth and find out if one of the doctors, now deceased, was wrongly convicted and if Parker was blinded by the passion he had for the presumed-guilty doctor’s wife. Granite-faced Hardy discovers that teasing out the truth is not easy as he sorts through old memories, aging names and faces, and his friend’s guilt while encountering the likes of dodgy plastic surgeons, a broken-down ex-copper, a voyeuristic cripple, and a hired hit man who wields a mean baseball bat. Animosities, arrogance, and ambition create a dangerous spider’s web around this reluctant hero as Hardy searches for the hard truth.
Stripped of his investigator's license, Cliff Hardy faces an uncertain future when something personal happens that provokes him into his best role: a confrontational investigator with a taste for violence and no regard for his lost credentials. Taking and dealing out punishment, mostly in Sydney's exclusive suburbs, Hardy encounters degenerate cops, bereft wives, and computer challenges. In a shadowy showdown at a chic Sydney beach, Hardy challenges those in his way, but his future remains even more clouded than before. An internationally loved yet reluctant hero, Hardy struggles to sort out corruption from loyalty as he tries to determine his future as an Aussie investigator.
Cliff Hardy, with his PI license cancelled and his career in Sydney at an end, is preparing for a trip overseas. Cleaning out his office, he comes across an open filean unresolved case from the 1980s. As he starts reading he’s thrown back to his investigation of the disappearance of Justin Hampshire. At first glance this investigation was a straightforward missing person matter, but the investigation took on twists and turns involving military history, Sydney criminals, and corruption at high levels that caused it to remain unsolved. The Hampshire case took Cliff from the south coast to the Blue Mountains and posed some unresolved questions which have preyed on his mind continuously since it opened. Now, 20 years later, will he finally be able to put the case to rest?
Stripped of his private detective license and devastated by the murder of his partner Lily Truscott, Cliff Hardy travels to the U.S. to help Lily's brother's tilt for a world boxing title. In San Diego he suffers a heart attack and undergoes a quadruple bypass. He meets nurse Margaret McKinley, an expatriate Australian who is concerned about the disappearance in Sydney of her father—renowned geologist Dr. Henry McKinley. Hardy undertakes to investigate in association with Hank Bachelor, his former associate who now runs his own agency. It turns out that McKinley had discovered a way to tap into the massive Sydney basin acquifer, a possible solution to the city's water problems. Working with Margaret who visits Sydney, Bachelor, and his daughter, Megan, Hardy confronts an old enemy and contending forces bent on exploiting the discovery and prepared to kill for it. Energized by the case and by his attachment to Margaret, Hardy obeys the strict rules for the restoration of his health—but in pursuing the truth and the malefactors, he makes his own rules.
He's semi-retired and de-licensed, but Cliff Hardy is once again fighting for justice and tracking down evil when his cousin is brutally murdered—did the shotgun blast find its target, or was it meant for Hardy? Hardy has never been much of a family man, so when he meets his second cousin Patrick Malloy it's like being hit with a left hook to the solar plexus—Malloy is his double. Cliff and his cousin become friends and travel to attend a gathering of the Irish Travellers, the gypsy-like folk from whom they are descended. On their return, Malloy is brutally murdered—but perhaps the shotgun blast was intended for Hardy. He is semi-retired, but this investigation is personal. The plot becomes still more personal when Malloy's ex-wife, Sheila, comes onto the scene. Hardy has his own enemies and Malloy's to consider as he searches for the killer. Clues point in many directions—to Sheila's motives, to Malloy's suspect business dealings, and to his time as a mercenary in Angola. The search takes Hardy north to a paramilitary training camp and south to a meeting of Traveller descendants in Kangaroo Valley. Other players have other interests and their playing style is ruthless.
When the battle-scarred but indefatigable PI loses all his dough to an unscrupulous financial advisor, he has to follow the money trail deep into Sydney's underbelly—the territory of big money and bent deals—to get himself back in the black When beautiful young women kiss you on the cheek you know you're over the hill, but I didn't really feel like that. As Wesley said, I still had the moves. Cliff Hardy may still have the moves but he's in trouble. The economy's tanking and he's been conned by a financial advisor and lost everything he's got. Cliff only knows one way, and that's forward, so he's following the money trail. It's a twisted road that leads him down deep into Sydney's underbelly, into the territory of big money, bent deals, big yachts, and bad people. Cliff's in greater danger than ever before, but he's as tenacious as a dog with a bone.
Cliff Hardy might have his license back, but does he still have what it takes to cut it as a PI on the seedy streets of Sydney? Cliff Hardy has his PI license back. He reckons the skills are still there, if a little rusty, and actor Bobby Forrest's case looks promising. Bobby's a nice enough guy, but why is he being stalked by a red-hot brunette, and why did he have to go online to find a date? When Bobby is murdered, it comes as a shock. Cliff's only solid lead is a white Commodore, the most ubiquitous car around. When a surprising connection with his own past surfaces, Cliff is forced to put some of his skills to the test—but is he heading in the wrong direction? Somehow he has to put it all together without losing his license again, but in true Hardy fashion he's managing to find his way into trouble, not out of it.
PI Cliff Hardy's 39th case sees him investigating what a famous 19th century shipwreck has to do with a multi-million dollar heist featuring a cast of characters that shouldn't be trusted The idea of enjoying creeping along an underground alley in half-light was alien to me. But the secret of getting things done is to do them and not waste energy complaining. A famous 19th-century shipwreck, a search for lost documents, a two million dollar heist, a Newcastle criminal family tearing itself apart, an undercover cop playing both sides against the middle, and an alluring but fiercely ambitious female journalist give Cliff Hardy all the trouble he can handle. What started as an almost academic exercise—tracing lost documents to do with the 1857 wreck of the SS Dunbar—explodes into a here-and-now power struggle between criminals, police, lovers, and unseen forces. The first person Hardy interviews is shot dead and the body count mounts as he pushes closer to the truth about the people, the documents, and the loot.
Hardy's 40th case finds him bodyguarding a promising politician When Cliff Hardy signs on as a bodyguard for charismatic populist Rory O'Hara, who is about to embark on a campaign of social and political renewal, it looks like a tricky job—O'Hara has enemies. A murder and a kidnapping cause the campaign to fall apart. Hired to investigate the murder, Hardy uncovers hidden agendas among O'Hara's staff and powerful political and commercial forces at work. His investigation takes him from the pubs and brothels of Sydney to the heart of power in Canberra and the Northern Territory. He teams up with a resourceful indigenous private detective and forms an uneasy alliance with the beautiful Penelope Marinos, formerly O'Hara's PA. A rogue intelligence agent becomes his target and Hardy stumbles upon a terrible secret that draws them into a violent—and disturbing—confrontation.
Is Sydney gun city? It certainly seems so when Cliff Hardy is hired by entrepreneur and one-time pistol-shooting champion Timothy Greenhall to investigate the violent death of his troubled son. Soon Hardy is pitched into a world of crooked cops—former members of the Gun Control Unit—outlaw bikers and honest police trying to quietly clean the stables.Two more murders raise the stakes and relationships are stretched to breaking point. Hardy hooks up with a determined policewoman and forms an unlikely alliance with a charismatic biker chief. Uncovering the tangled conspiracy behind the murders takes Hardy to the Blue Mountains and Camden, to plush legal chambers and a confrontation in an inner-west park—all against the roar of 750cc engines.
Legendary PI Cliff Hardy has reached an age when the obituaries have become part of his reading, and one triggers his memory of a case in the late 1980s. Back then Sydney was awash with colorful characters, and Cliff is reminded of a case involving "Ten-Pound Pom" Barry Bartlett and racing identity and investor Sir Keith Mountjoy. Bartlett, a former rugby league player and boxing manager, then a prosperous property developer, had hired Hardy to check on the bona fides of young Ronny Saunders, newly arrived from England, and claiming to be Bartlett's son from an early failed marriage. The job brought Hardy into contact with Richard Keppler, head of the no-rules Botany Security Systems, Bronwen Marr, an undercover AFP operative, and sworn adversary Des O'Malley. At a time when corporate capitalism was running riot, an embattled Hardy searched for leads—was Ronny Saunders a pawn in a game involving big oil and fraud on an international scale? Two murders raise the stakes and with the sinister figure of Lady Betty Lee Mountjoy pulling the strings, it was odds against a happy outcome.
A missing girl, drugs, yachts, the sex trade and a cold trail that leads from Sydney to Norfolk Island, Byron Bay and Coolangatta. The police suspect the father, Gerard Fonteyn OA, a wealthy businessman. But he's hired Cliff to find her, given him unlimited expenses and posted a $250,000 reward for information. Finally there's a break—an unconfirmed sighting of Juliana Fonteyn, alive and well. But as usual, nothing is straightforward. Various other players are in the game—and Cliff doesn't know the rules, or even what the game might be. He's determined to find out, and as the bodies mount up the danger to himself and to Juliana increases.