What will history make of the superior crime stories we seem to be churning out? The late Peter Corris’ Cliff Hardy stories owed a bit to the Californian hard-boiled genre of which Dashiell Hammett was the diamond-hard master and Raymond Chandler was the footnote:  beautifully wry, gorgeously written. And there were Shane Maloney’s comic Murray Whelan detective stories, which were filmed for television by John Clarke and his friend Sam Neill.

But there was another kind of crime story waiting in the wings. Did it take its bearings from Peter Temple, the inventor of the Jack Irish stories you can see dramatised on TV with Guy Pearce. If so it was not the Jack Irish stories that set a precedent but the extraordinary meta-crime novels Temple wrote like The Broken Shore. There is a very impressive telemovie of this but the thing about the most ambitious Peter Temple was that the crime plot provided a context for something darker and grander and more richly novelistic.

Is this what lies behind the sort of crime writing which gets called ‘rural noir’? Back in 2016 Pan Macmillan published Jane Harper’s The Dry and anyone who picked it up was liable to be captivated by the narrative hook, the way the reader was in a humanly fascinating situation. The Dry became a telemovie with Eric Bana. Its successor seemed less seductive. In the meantime however there was the rise of Chris Hammer, in particular of his first novel Scrublands. This and Hammer’s subsequent novels have a very overt novelistic aspect. They begin in a luxuriantly writerly way as if the crime novel and the novel proper were close cousins.

Now it’s also the case that popular fiction is very frequently filmed or put on TV and there is a brand new four-part series on Stan of Scrublands with Jay Ryan in the lead and by coincidence he is also a leading character in No Escape from Paramount+ which is adapted from Lucy Clarke’s The Blue and is about a yacht (so named) together with stolen passports, diamonds, you name it. And it’s interesting that in some ways No Escape has virtues Scrublands lacks.

There’s no denying that Scrublands has a spectacular opening and central dramatic paradox. Jay Ryan in the Roman collar of a Catholic priest is seen gunning down a group of people in a small Riverina town. Why? Well, he’s apparently been labelled as a paedophile and there are a couple of teenage boys willing to testify and say they witnessed it.

Jump forward a year and an investigative journalist Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold) has been sent to the town to write a puff piece for the following Saturday’s paper. This makes little sense, the town would be an anathema given the killings. In any case our hero – who is the protagonist of the next several Chris Hammer books gets to know a young woman who runs the local bookshop and who is played with luminous sympathy by Bella Heathcote. There are also rapid glimpses of the priest handling a British passport.

It’s interesting in the context of Chris Hammer’s patent literary ambitions that the TV streamer makes various improvements to the story. Our hero reads Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously which is a nice touch. And characters shift around. We first meet the heroine’s father in the book as an old dero whereas the figure who neglected his dying wife Alison Whyte is played by that urbane and superlative actor Robert Taylor and is a rather more sinister presence for his urbanity. A few characters are altered in the interests of diversity. Someone who runs a bar now has an Asian background, and the investigative journalist has a background in West Papua and is out to prove himself.

There are gaps a mile wide in the story. If there’s more to the priest’s background the Church aspect remains unexplored where it would be an obvious avenue. If humane riches have any relation to dope crops this could be explored with rather more suspense and ambiguity. Is there or isn’t there a connection somewhere with soldiering in foreign wars? It could be indicated both more coherently and with greater suspense. The Stan Scrublands offers so much fictional data on a stick we tend to have to take it on faith. None of which stops Scrublands from being some kind of winner even though Hammer’s novelistic trimmings often seem the flimsiest aspects of a story with intrinsic narrative flaws.

No Escape is a more down-to-earth book without the swooping spectacularism of Scrublands but it is put on the screen with a constant sense of some new danger or horror attending the two British girls who nick credit cards, cash, whatever’s going. Again, Jay Ryan is a commanding figure if less palpably heroic in his ambiguity. The central point-of-view figure Lana is superbly played by the Scottish actress Abigail Lawry and No Escape has a consistent thrill a minute quality as well as a lot of directorial elan.

There is a flash-forward here too with a couple of superior cross-examining coppers played by Susie Porter and Josh McConville with an effortless grace and efficiency. There is also the vignette of an upper middle-class couple, Gary Sweet and Anne Looby, and again there is extreme elegance and economy in the depiction.

No Escape has its diversity shifts too. Shell, the American crew member, is played nicely by Cameroonian-British actress Colette Dalal Tchantcho. There is plenty of episodic variety in the plot which is reflected in the novels jam-packed crackling prose. No Escape has a constant rhythmic sense of danger as well as plenty of human variety. Narayan David Hecter is very likeable as the Franco-Filipino Joseph. Everything is always close to the point of perdition but the effect is open, not crowded, or full of gaps like Scrublands.

Both these streamers however, linked by Jay Ryan’s pretty powerful performances, show what crime fiction can give when it is dramatised. It’s a form of writing which calls out for dramatisation. The famous film and TV versions of le Carré, Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Robert Mitchum the best of Philip Marlowes: they’re all part of the trash and treasure mix of how we entertain ourselves with the imaginable shadow-world of crime.