Originally published 1990 | ||
Play With Knives has been described as an "impressive psycho-thriller" by The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, and as a novel that "never becomes one particular genre (rather it remains as many different genres, intactly and simultaneously)." Jennifer Maiden wrote the manuscript in the early 80s, and it was published in an abridged form by Allen & Unwin in 1990. It was translated into German by dtv Verlagsgesellschaft as Ein Messer im Haus in 1994. After being approached by online publisher Quemar Press in 2016, Jennifer Maiden collaborated with them to create a revised edition, believing the work should be available free on the internet.
Contents
Plot
Play With Knives takes place in Sydney's Western Suburbs and focuses on Clare Collins, a young woman released from prison, after murdering her siblings at the age of nine. The narrator is George Jeffreys, her probation officer. As a serial killer begins targeting women, a complex relationship develops between Clare and George.
Sequels and Later Use of Characters
Play With Knives: Two: Complicity was written by Jennifer Maiden in 1990-1991 as a sequel to Play With Knives. It was published by online publisher Quemar Press in late September 2016. John Hanrahan, the Australian critic and author, wrote that the original manuscript 'explored power, manipulation, control, violence as sexual foreplay, and yet... [is] a novel that has the strength of insight, acceptance, optimism and gentleness. This is a novel about darkness, it walks in darkness, trembles in darkness. But the images of light and of sunshine are also appropriate because they come not from Dracula special effects but from a confident awareness of the aspirations, at once grubby and soaring, of that workhorse muscle, the human heart'.
In December, 2016, Maiden's new novel, Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker, was published online by Quemar Press as a prose/verse sequel.
The online Review, Compulsive Reader, states 'All three novels explore guilt and innocence, good and evil, and the individual versus the state or government, using changing tense and viewpoints. The grand conception is fairly ambitious, but Maiden handles it all smoothly and the stories read like ordinary thrillers... the characters swap positions, power matrices, emotional landscapes, and unravel the structures in which they work'.
The characters Clare and George are also amongst those featured in Jennifer Maiden's later poetry collections, from 2005 onwards.