Barry Jones likes to allude to the fact that John Adams declared that he had to study agriculture and warfare so that his children could study law and government so their children could study poetry and porcelain. Is there a comparable trajectory with the Autralian crime story?

Forget about The Mystery of the Hansom Cab for the moment and think of the last few decades. In 1994 Shane Maloney published Stiff and in 1996 The Brush-Off which featured political aide Murray Whelan who becomes a reluctant investigator and was translated to television in the person of David Wenham in telemovies directed by the late great John Clarke and his friend Sam Neill.

Peter Temple published a couple of detective stories, so called – Truth and The Broken Shore – which had somewhat rudimentary plots but looked distinctly like works of art. The Broken Shore was filmed with Don Hanay and Robyn Nevin. Meanwhile some of Temple’s humbler whodunnits were being being made into television with Guy Pearce as his hero, Jack Irish.

Well, Peter Temple is dead and Shane Maloney has given up writing. But there is a distinct feeling of a movement which is rustling among the streamers. Anyone who picked up The Dry was immediately aware of a writer with a very distinct talent for ratiocination in some idyllic country town setting.

And this survived the fact that Guy Pearce seemed like he would have been better as the sleuth than Eric Bana. But Jane Harper was a magician at murder.

Raymond Chandler said of Dashiell Hammett that he had taken the crime story out of the English country house and given it back to the people to whom it rightfully belonged: the crims and the thugs of cops.

Well, there’s a sense in which bush noir uses the tradition of the Australian soaps – Blue Hills on radio, Bellbird in the Sixties and Seventies, then the long reign of Neighbours and Home and Away – as the equivalent of the country house: an enclosed world, a bush town where improbable murders can flourish among seemingly nice people who are in each other’s pockets.

This is written all over The Survivors which is Jane Harper’s second novel and has gone to the top of the Netflix charts in a ravishing dramatisation by Tony Ayres who films rural Tasmania with a passionate commitment to its lyrical evocation and to a taut and spine-chilling plot line.

Twenty years earlier, two mates died at sea rescuing our protagonist, who bears the guilt of their deaths. Meanwhile one girl attempts to investigate what happened to another – one mid-teens – whom they hung about with. And what about the lustrous Jessica De Gouw who is withholding police evidence – or the guys with criminal records she spends her time with? Then there’s the protagonist’s mother (a superb Robyn Malcolm) who turned away from him long ago so that he fled to Sydney.

And then there is the husband/father (Damien Garvey) who is gaga but wanders about the town, at night, doing we don’t know what. It’s a whirligig of a plot with multiple tensions and betrayals and a twisting – often startling – narrative that’s likely to keep you riveted.

Kieran (Charlie Vickers), the protagonist, has a hard time with his mother and there’s also an utterly remarkable performance by Catherine McClements unlike anything we’ve seen from her before, speaking in a broadish Australian accent with an absolutely convincing sense of grief and passion.

If you have the chance, watch this in the longest sessions you can manage. The fullness of the colour and the sense of a credible resolution to catastrophe is heightened by the sheer authority of what Tony Ayres as creator and producer brings to life as a landscape of massed greenery, the wonder of waters and the sense of slithering doom.

But the new cult of bush noir is not an unambiguous boon. The first season of Scrublands from the Chris Hammer book had the unforgettable spectacle of Jay Ryan as a priest pushed to an extremity where action of a ghastly kind was inevitable. The upshot was dynamised and you couldn’t look away. The second Chris Hammer book is disconcerting because Silver starts in the aftermath of its own confusions. As a book in your hand it all seems a bit too wilfully novelistic as if Hammer was somehow – paradoxically – presenting himself as his own Hitchcock. It’s not that he can’t write, he has all the sumptuous equipment of a born colour-magazine profiler but he’s not Dostoyevsky and the upshot is a style that would be fine for a high-class trashmeister but not beyond that.

To be fair, Silver on Stan is a much tauter vehicle than on the page. Yes, the central couple (Luke Arnold and Bella Heathcote) are troubled but why did the murderee contact the hero and why did he have such a vast supply of Rohypnol, the date rape drug, and why can’t she remember a thing? All of this is enough to be getting on with and there are powerful performances from Tasma Walton, from a very grand Debra Lawrance and from that dazzling actress Caroline Brazier.

But the improbabilities do mount with Silver. Important characters disappear. People die as a consequence of fentanyl in ketamine. Potentially central figures are glimpsed almost momentarily so that it feels as if Silver should be a couple of hours longer. And it all seems to come from a committed though insecure attachment to novelistic seriousness and a positively reckless disregard to the mechanics of the plot.

The creators should have a look at Billy Wilder’s version of Witness for the Prosection which despite its infidelity Dame Agatha said was superior to her original. And Christie knew everything about the absolute importance of plot.

Incidentally, Tasma Walton and Caroline Brazier are veterans of Mystery Road and it’s worth remembering that this indigenous series with Aaron Pedersen and later Mark Coles Smith – some of it directed by the great Warwick Thornton – is the greatest crime television we have made.

By the way Raymond Chandler complicated his own representation of California in the hands of the rough guys by making Philip Marlowe a man of honour as well as irony.  Robert Mitchum was the greatest Marlowe.