Peter Corris’s novel “Gone Without a Trace” (1983) fully follows the tradition of the American hard-boiled detective, and at times you even forget that the action takes place on the Australian coast rather than in California, where private detective Philip Marlowe worked, known from Raymond Chandler’s novels. Corris’s private detective Cliff Hardy resembles Marlowe above all in that he is the most ordinary of men, not especially lucky and often escaping danger, and even death, only by a miracle. Like Marlowe, by virtue of his profession he finds himself in the world of the very rich, where he feels ill at ease.