[3] His novels display a gift for "dramatic action, landscape description and psychological insight".
[3] AustLit notes that they also focus on "such themes as murder, violence, corruption, racism and love".
[3] The Bush Soldiers imagines what might have happened if Japanese forces had invaded Australia during the Second World War.
[5] Hooker suffered from multiple sclerosis from his fifties and in later years was confined to a wheelchair.
He and his second wife, Rae, moved to Port Fairy on Victoria's west coast, where he wrote a weekly column, "The Hooker Line", for the local newspaper The Warrnambool Standard.