The Sydney Writers Festival is on this week. We have a great overview of the history of literature in Sydney on the Dctionary of Sydney, written by Elizabeth Webby, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Elizabeth's entry covers the whole gammut of novels and poetry. If you want a list of great novels that are set in Sydney this is the article for you! Today, I thought, we'd focus on Crime Fiction. We all love a bit of murder mystery set in Sydney. One of the earliest pieces of detective fiction dates from 1842 - the same year that Sydney was formed as a city -  was Legends of Australia by John Lang but it wasn't until the 20th century that the genre really took off. Two sisters who wrote as 'Margot Neville' set most of their crime novels (18 in total, beginning with Murder in Rockwater from 1945), in Sydney, as did Pat Flower, who also published crime fiction from the 1950s to the 1970s using Sydney as a setting. Particularly significant is the work of Peter Corris, whose Sydney detective Cliff Hardy first began tramping the mean streets of Glebe, Bondi, Palm Beach and all places in between in The Dying Trade (1980) and continues to do so. Marele Day's Claudia Valentine, introduced in The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender (1988), appears to have ceased detecting after four cases. But Jon Cleary's Scobie Malone, first introduced in The High Commissioner (1966), is also still going strong. Others who have written detective or crime series set in Sydney include Claire McNab, Jean Bedford, Jennifer Rowe, Gabrielle Lord, Susan Geason and Robert G Barrett. While Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher usually detects in Melbourne, she pays a visit to Sydney in Death Before Wicket (1999). More experimental, one-off works in this genre include Jennifer Maiden's Play with Knives (1990), Finola Moorhead's Still Murder (1991) and Dorothy Porter's verse novel, The Monkey's Mask (1995). PM Newton is a current writer of crime fiction set in western Sydney. She is speaking at the writers festival down at Walsh Bay. Catch her as part of a panel Keeping it Real: Crime as Social History this Friday at 1pm. It's free. And if you're into history, then don't miss the History Council's panel of premier's history award winners discussing Stranger than Fiction - Historical Memory and the Past. That's st 30m and it's free too. I'll be there soaking it all up. If you missed my chat with Mitch this morning, you can catch up on the 2SER Breakfast podcast here. More next week - same place, same time! That's 107.3  8:20am.