4 ideas
Cliff Hardy, a divorced, hard-drinking Sydney private investigator working out of a shabby inner-city office, is hired by the wealthy Bryn Gutteridge to find out who is threatening his sister Susan. The investigation pulls Hardy into the family's private tensions and down into the origins of their fortune.
New money looks legitimate because a generation of development, charity and social standing separates it from how it was first made. Tracing any present threat back far enough shows that 'old crooks' and 'property money' are often the same capital at different stages of respectability. The crime being investigated now is usually a symptom of the buried original one.
A private eye is useful to the rich because he can go where they cannot or will not go, among pubs, cops, crooks and bookmakers, without carrying their name. The same outsider status that makes him hireable also makes him disposable. It gives him no stake in protecting the client once the truth implicates them, so the hired detective becomes a structural threat to the family that hired him.
An imported form like the American hardboiled detective novel becomes native when its fixed machinery is kept intact and every surface detail is replaced with local material. That machinery is the lone investigator, the corrupt rich client and the first-person wisecracking voice. The surface details are real suburbs, local slang, local police culture and the city's own history of graft. The specificity of place is what turns a borrowed template into the founding text of a national school.