PPL#6: The Voice of the Corpse, by Max Murray

 

9781915530318

Galileo Publishers, 2024

originally published 1947

218 pp

paperback

(read in August)

Although The Voice of the Corpse is set in the UK,  Max Murray was actually born in Australia.   A very quick scan through online resources shows very little in the way of biographical information, but the back-cover blurb reveals that:

"The author, Max Murray (1901-1956) began life in Australia as a bush boy. His first job was that of a reporter on a Sydney paper but after a year he set out to work his way round the world. During WW2 he wrote scripts for the BBC Overseas Programme. After the war, with intervals for travel, he devoted himself primarily to writing fiction. He published 12 novels during his life, most of which had the word 'Corpse' in the title." 

 He is also an author who is new to me, so I'm getting in on the ground floor with this guy's work.  I've already bought the next book (also from Galileo), The King and the Corpse, and I'll keep buying the series if more are published.   

Set in the small village of Inching Round, this story begins with the death of Angela Pewsey, a forty-nine year old woman who evidently never married, waiting for someone to return from Ceylon.  She's been expecting him for fifteen years, ever since their meeting on a boat where he had asked her to wait for his next visit home "on leave from the plantation."  Up to the moment of her death, she'd been  singing "appropriate folk songs" while sitting at her spinning wheel, working on a sweater made from the hair of her Chow, so she never heard her attacker come up on her.  Angela, it seems, has made it her business to know everything about everybody in Inching Round, and she didn't shy away from letting people know, in her own way, that she knew.  As we learn, "the method of these revelations was in itself enough to make most most reasonable people feel capable of murdering her," so right away there is a village filled with victims turned suspects.  The time of death was "half past three," when one of her neighbors realized that Angela was no longer singing as the church clock noted the half hour.   The local police are called in, and come to the conclusion that the deed was done by a tramp. 

However, Inching Round isn't just the site of a murder -- it seems that someone has been sending the inhabitants of the village poison pen letters, causing not only a stir but distrust and fear.  As Celia Sim says in conversation with her friend and family solicitor Firth Prentice on a train journey to Inching Round,

"There's something in the atmosphere. There's something furtive about it: the way they look at each other as if they were wondering, suspecting; and then their eyes slide away as if they were ashamed of their thoughts. It is pretty awful."

 Once off the train though, the two hear about the murder, and Firth believes he knows the identity of the person yielding the poison pen:

"When somebody is writing anonymous letters and somebody is murdered, it's not hard to guess who was the author of the anonymous letters, is it?"

 He doesn't, however, believe in the mysterious tramp as Angela's killer, leaving, as Celia so aptly notes, "someone in the village ... one of us."  And when there are so many people who've suffered at her hands, it's not surprising that they're not only happy about her demise but also have a possible motive for getting rid of her.    Celia's mother wants Firth to investigate Angela's murder, but when Inspector Fowler from Scotland Yard enters the case, she is not at all forthcoming, explaining  to him that "the pain you will cause to so many of us will be out of all proportion to the good you do."  And, as it turns out ...

from Abebooks, 1947 First Edition 

While there is an intriguing whodunit at play here, the author also engages in a bit of romance,  humor and the scattering of some pretty good red herrings throughout the story.   There are two little boys who completely steal the show for a while,  offering Firth information they've obtained using their strange skills, including the recognition of the sounds of footsteps made by various people in the village.  I couldn't help it -- these kids were funny and they made me laugh out loud.     The Voice of the Corpse isn't as strong on the detection front as it might have been, but there's a huge twist (or two) that I did not see coming at all that made reading this book on the whole more than satisfying.  It was a fine introduction to the work of Max Murray, whose remaining mystery/crime stories I'll be very much looking forward to exploring.   I also can't believe my good fortune in this book being published while I've been engaged in reading as many poison-pen stories as I can in 2024! 

I can  recommend this novel to readers of vintage crime and to readers who are interested in fictional poison-pen phenomena but want something just a wee  bit different.    It's a bit off the beaten path and definitely not same-old same-old, which makes it majorly attractive for me.  

* and another.... The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, by Fergus Hume

0701210133
Hogarth Press, 1985
originally published 1886
224 pp

paperback

"...life is a chessboard, after all, and we are the puppets of Fate."

In his Washington Post review of this book, critic Michael Dirda asks why The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was so successful, and goes on to say the following:

"I think because it's the detective story equivalent of the kitchen sink," 

and really, I can't think of a better way to describe this book.

According to Stephen Knight in his Towards Sherlock Holmes,  once Hume had decided to try his luck at publishing fiction, he went to a Melbourne bookseller and asked what "style of book he sold the most of."  He learned that "the detective stories of Gaboriau" were extremely popular. After buying "all  his works" and reading them "carefully," he started his book in 1885.  Lucy Sussex reveals in her book Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume & The Mystery of a Hansom Cab that Hume's idea, as noted in his preface, came to him while riding in a hansom cab "while driving at a late hour to St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne." (85)  He revealed to friends that not only was he writing a book, but more importantly, and one part of this "kitchen sink" mix, Hume also noted that he was "going to put on the local colour with a spade." (89)  In fact, the first British edition had been advertised as "a startling and realistic story of Melbourne social life," which really does come shining through this book, not just in terms of the upper classes but also moving through level after level downward into the lives of the denizens occupying the city's underworld.

The story itself is a mix of crime, investigations, courtroom drama, melodrama, and elements of sensation fiction, complete with dark secrets from the past.  The novel begins with a report from the Argus on "Saturday, the 28th of July, 18--"  telling its readers of an "extraordinary murder" that occurred in a most unlikely place -- a hansom cab:

"...committed by an unknown assassin, within a short distance of the principal streets of this great city, ... surrounded by an impenetrable mystery.  Indeed, from the nature of the crime itself, the place where it was committed, and the fact that the assassin has escaped without leaving a trace behind him, it would seem as though the case itself had been taken bodily out of one of Gaboriau's novels, and that his famous detective Lecoq would only be able to unravel it."

Gorby, the detective working on the case, follows a series of clues that lead to the arrest of one of society's own.  While he claims his innocence, the man refuses to disclose any information that might provide him with an alibi, and at first, even refuses to "engage a lawyer," because

"the first question he will ask me will be where I was on that night, and if I tell him all will be discovered, and then -- no -- no -- I cannot do it; it would kill her, my darling,..."

The secret that the accused is holding close to his chest will become a major focus of this story, and will lead the reader through the streets of Melbourne from the gentility of the city's gentlemen's clubs down into its  darker dens of vice. It also belies the idea that the upper classes, these pillars of society,  are immune to corruptibility; how that plays out I'll leave for others to discover.  And while we're busy wondering what exactly is the nature of this secret and why a man is willing to risk his own life for it,  another detective, Kislip,  is added to the mix, this time working for the attorney of the accused.  In fact, as Sussex mentions in her book, there is not just one or two detectives at work, but "the investigating is shared," among several of the characters in this book.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is fun but at the same time delivers strong commentary and criticism on society of the time, which is, I think,  one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much.  And then, of course, there is the mystery of the whodunit, which I didn't guess, and Hume's incredible attention to detail in writing this case which kept me guessing every step of the way.   Add to that the elements of sensation fiction (which I love) and the characterizations (the landladies cracked me up);  putting aside the melodrama, it all made for a couple of days of reading pleasure.

I liked it so much, in fact, that I bought the DVD of the tv adaptation made in Australia.  That I didn't care for as much as I did the book, since for some reason, whoever put it together got the strange idea of giving away tiny pieces of the secret in flashback form here and there.  I mean, I'd just read the book and knew the secret but I couldn't understand why the powers that be couldn't have just let things play out the way Hume had intended.  Had I watched this dvd only, without ever having read the novel, I would have figured things out way earlier than I should have; to be perfectly blunt, I would have also been pissed off.   On the other hand, I love seeing books I've just read played out on the screen, and other than what I see as the major flaw here of practically dumping the unknown right into your lap, I did get caught up in the story and the ending left me with a bit of a lump in the throat.  Positively swoonworthy it was, for sure.

*back to business once again: Force and Fraud, A Tale of the Bush, by Ellen Davitt

kindle edition
Clan Destine Press, 2015
originally serialized 1865 in The Australian Journal
244 pp

"Yes, there they were: Force and Fraud, contending with each other -- the two crimes, which so often unite in the destruction of mankind, now striving for the mastery." 

High marks for this book, which has a dual significance:  since it is most likely that it is the first work of crime fiction written in Australia, that also makes it the first work of crime fiction written by an Australian woman.

Author Ellen Davitt (1812-1879) neé Heseltine, was born in Yorkshire. According to Kate Watson in her Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880, Davitt, who would later become Anthony Trollope's sister-in-law, "spent her early life in the United Kingdom."  She married her husband Arthur in 1845; by 1847 the two were in Ireland where Arthur served as an "inspector of schools" and Ellen taught drawing for three years at Dublin's Irish National Board's Model School for Girls. They emigrated to Melbourne, arriving in 1854, where Arthur had been appointed as the principal of the Model and Normal Schools and Ellen took a job as the "Superintendent of the female pupils and trainees." Arthur died in 1860 while Ellen went on to take several different positions in schools in Victoria. Watson notes that Ellen Davit was a "progressive, proto-feminist figure" who

"refused the role of a conventionally subservient woman, confined to the domestic sphere." (160) 

There is a full biography of Ellen Davitt  at Design and Art Australia Online for readers who want to know more about the author.

Force and Fraud first appeared in Volume 1, issue #1 of The Australian Journal: A Weekly Record of Amusing and Instructive Literature, Science and the Arts.  Lucy Sussex, in her book Women Writers and Detectives notes that from the Journal's beginnings, it had a "crime bent," which is obvious by some of the titles listed here in another article by Sussex; its founding editor was also an ex-policeman.  Watson says that Force and Fraud was "pioneering in its status as the first murder mystery in Australia, and the first 'whodunit'," but sadly, Davitt is yet another woman crime writer who has faded into obscurity.  The good news is that, as Derek Parker notes at The culture concept circle, Davitt's "importance to the modern day crime novel" has been recognized by Sisters in Crime Australia, who have "created the annual Davitt Awards to honour Ellen Davitt and foster home grown crime writing talent."

Considering its significance in the history of crime fiction writing, hopefully more mystery/crime readers will become aware of Force and Fraud, which as I said earlier, deserves very high marks. It is not your ordinary whodunit by any stretch -- while the story progresses, it moves from the bush to small towns to the city of Melbourne, and there's even a brief bit at sea as a ship makes its through a treacherous reef.  These parts of Australia of the time are represented well here; the sense of place is so strong that I could picture it in my mind while reading. The actual story revolves around a young woman, Flora McAlpin, whose father ("a relic of the feudal ages")  is murdered and whose fiancé Herbert Lindsey  is jailed for the crime. He, of course, protests his innocence,  but the weight of the evidence is so strong against him that even he gets the picture.   However, while Lindsey awaits trial in jail, we are made privy to the machinations of the true culprit, suspected by no one.  He's a pretty nasty piece of work and it's pretty obvious from the beginning that he's got a hand in it all, but watching everything unravel is the best part of the book.  There's also a bit of a literary angle going on here, captured in one scene in particular where  Mr. Stewart the jail chaplain opens a book "by chance," after deciding that Lindsey, "the delicately minded young man" could "never have committed murder."  The book happens to be Thomas Hood's poems about Eugene Aram; the point made is as he realizes that "all murderers had not been branded ruffians," something worth remembering as the story progresses to its end.  One more thing that I feel strongly about in this novel is the characterizations, which are unbelievably  realistic and move from lower to upper classes and everything in between.

While not all crime readers will immediately run to pick up a copy of Force and Fraud, I particularly enjoyed this one and once I'd started, was reluctant to put it down.  It's a book I can certainly recommend, especially to readers who are interested in the history of crime writing and to others who like me, are heavily  into older crime novels.  It's certainly worth checking out and the bottom line here is that it's also a lot of fun.

from the "godfather of Australian crime" - Silent Kill, by Peter Corris

9781743316375
Allen and Unwin, 2014
255 pp

paperback - my copy from Shannon at IPG -- thanks!

"Problem simple, solution difficult." 

Not counting the short-story collections, author Peter Corris has written 33 series books  starring Cliff Hardy, eight of which ended up as finalists for the Ned Kelly award for best novel. It's a little embarrassing, but until I was asked to take a look at this book, I'd never heard of Peter Corris before. I also need to say that it is a bit daunting and a bit of a disadvantage to start with this latest book.  I have no clue, except for little peeks here and there, about Cliff Hardy's past or exactly who he is as a character. Normally I'd go back and read what I'd missed prior to writing about a later series novel, but this time, well, you know -- thirty-something freakin' books to catch up on is just a little much.

PI Cliff Hardy gets a visit from Jack Buchanan, "ex-commando, ex-stuntman, and actor." He's also someone Hardy hasn't seen in ten years.  He has an interesting proposition for Hardy, who as it turns out, needs the money -- business isn't so good, and Hardy needs something to occupy his time as his girlfriend has just left for Los Angeles and probably won't be coming back. Buchanan wants Hardy to serve as a bodyguard for a client of his named Rory O'Hara, who Hardy describes as a "firebrand."  O'Hara had worn a number of hats in his past, including student agitator,  "crusading journalist," an MP, and since inheriting a lot of money, he's become "self-funded righter of society's wrongs."  Lately he'd been a whistle blower on a big development backed by "shonky" financing, corrupt officials, and falsification of reports.  O'Hara had people on the inside gathering info for him, and he'd published his discoveries online. Now he's just coming out of the hospital after being the victim of a hit and run, and has a tour planned to talk about his plans to "clear up more" wrongdoing, and "reveal stuff about a big political shake-up."   Buchanan wants to make sure that his investment in O'Hara's tour remains sound -- and wants Cliff along to make sure nothing happens to O'Hara, since his whistle blowing has left  him with a lot of enemies.  Sounds simple, but things start to go wrong almost right away when a woman on the tour is found dead, putting Cliff out of a job. But wait. Her brother offers him a lot of money to find out who killed her and why. Starting with the group of people on the tour, Cliff soon begins to discover that there's much more here  than meets the eye - ultimately putting himself and a woman he's fallen for into a great deal of danger. As he moves across the country, he also realizes that someone is pulling a lot of strings -- but exactly who and why is what he has to find out.

Silent Kill  is not a difficult book to read, and Corris writes very simply.  I sort of felt sorry for the main character, because what I did manage to glean from the little bits of his past here is that he's not lucky in love, and he's just getting back to a good relationship with his daughter. He seems like a tough guy on the job, although  kind of woebegone in the personal zone.   The story takes a convoluted path but is easy to follow, plausible, and it becomes a hybrid mystery/thriller that kept me turning pages. Although the murderer is identified before the end of part one, and that piece of the mystery is over, there's still Hardy's "simple problem" to solve:  who was so worried about what O'Hara might do with his recent information  that they set a killer in his midst? Here things sort of move into thriller zone,  not my usual fare, but for those who enjoy them, there's plenty of high-powered action, conspiracies to sink your teeth into, and a solution that resonates with the times. All you have to do is pick up a newspaper to confirm what I'm saying.

Overall, it's always fun discovering a "new" author -- although Corris has been around a long time, he's a new blip on my international crime author radar that needs tracking.  I think I'd recommend Silent Kill to people who are intrigued with thrillers that lean toward the action-packed, political side - not my usual forte but I did enjoy the way the author writes and above all, I enjoyed meeting Cliff Hardy.

my many thanks again to Shannon at IPG, and I LOVE sharing the books I get with publishers, so if anyone in the US would like my copy, please let me know and it's yours.

Another stunning work featuring a historical crime -- Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent

(reposted from the literary side of my online reading journal)

While this book definitely falls on the literary side of things, it's also a book about a crime that really happened in Iceland in the late 1820s.  If you are so inclined, it's a wonderful novel that focuses on a murder that led to the last execution in Iceland in 1830.

*Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent -- a definite yes!

9780316243919
Little, Brown and Company, 2013
314 pp

pre-release edition from Little, Brown/Hachette, thank you!

Funny thing about this incredible novel -- I preordered it eons ago, and was eagerly awaiting its arrival, and then out of the total blue, the mailman who hates me for getting so many books every day drops this one on my front porch  just last week.  Then, I wander over to Book Passage to see what the Signed First Editions Book Club entry is for this month, and it's (ta-da!) Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent.

The dustjacket description of this lovely novel of historical fiction doesn't quite do it justice. Burial Rites is based on true events that happened in Iceland in 1828, when  Natan Ketilsson and Petur Jónsson were both murdered at Ketilsson's farm in North Iceland.  Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Friðrik Sigurðsson were charged with the crimes and sentenced to be executed by Ketilsson's brother.  There was a third person involved, Sigríður Guðmundsdóttir, who was also arrested, sentenced to death but then had her sentence commuted to life in prison. Agnes was first held at Stóra-Borg, and then the authorities moved her to Kornsá, where she stayed with a family until she was taken to be executed in January of 1830.   According to the author's note, some of the historical accounts of Agnes Magnúsdóttir view her as "an inhumane witch, stirring up murder," but in Burial Rites, Kent sets out to provide Agnes with a more "ambiguous portrayal."  While the blurb inside the cover gives you a taste of the story to come, it doesn't begin to cover just how good a writer Hannah Kent really is.  She has filled this book with so much more than the story of a murder.  Through her excellent use of language,  she brings out  how nature, the seasons, and the Icelandic landscape not only defined the way that people lived and survived in this time and in this place,  but also how people were often left helpless, stranded and in the dark when nature was less than cooperative.  Above all, her writing brings out the psychological damage caused by isolation, loneliness and abandonment in an unforgiving environment.  If I had to describe this book in one word it would be this one:  haunting.

Agnes Magnúsdóttir, abandoned at an early age,  spent most of her life moving farm to farm, working as a servant. As the novel opens, she has been sentenced to die along with two others for her part in  killing two men at a farm along the sea in Northern Iceland. She'd been kept in irons and chains at the first place after her trial, but then the District Commissioner decided she should be moved to the farm of Kornsá to spend her last days, and the family will be compensated for taking her in.   The family at Kornsá is shaken by the news; Margrét, the farmer's wife, protests that she does not want to share her home with "the Devil's children."  As Agnes comes to her final home, it upsets the family dynamic, but Margrét puts her foot down, telling Agnes that she will be put to work, and if there is any "violence, lazing, cheek, idleness" or theft, Agnes is gone. A young assistant reverend, Thorvardur Jónsson  nicknamed Tóti, also receives official word --  he will be Agnes' spiritual advisor during her final days of life, and is urged to get Agnes to repent and confess before she dies.Tóti, who is inexperienced and counseled by his father not to take Agnes on, becomes the vehicle through which Agnes first starts to unspool her tale, and the rest of the book takes the reader through Agnes' story  from her childhood through the fateful day at the farm of Illugastadir, and on to Agnes' last day of life.  Each chapter begins with some form of real official document, or a poem, or in one case, an Icelandic saga, all of which have relevance to what's happening in that particular section.

Alternating voices, dreams and portents, superstitions, haunting imagery, and seasonal routines also help to shape this story.  It is filled with descriptions of the rhythms of farm life, from communal harvesting and slaughter to living in cramped quarters in a turf-walled croft.  But standing above everything that the author writes about is the way she writes it.  It's a book that didn't let go of  me until the very end, and even then I wasn't finished thinking about what I'd just read. You may be tempted to zip through it for the murder story, but don't.  Definitely recommended.  Considering that Burial Rites is the author's first novel, it is highly intelligent, sophisticated, and a novel that readers across the spectrum will enjoy.

 fiction from Australia

*A Temple Twosome: Bad Debts and Black Tide by Peter Temple

Bad Debts
9781596921290
McAdam/Cage, 2005
originally published 1996
318 pp

".... the system is not about fairness. It's not about good and bad. It's not about right and wrong. It's about power...You should know that."

A newcomer to the Jack Irish series by Peter Temple,  a couple of days ago I finished the first novel Bad Debts, became instantly hooked and slid right into the second, Black Tide.  Number three, Dead Point,  is winging its way across the Atlantic as we speak. Heck, I probably should go order #4, White Dog, while I'm thinking about it.  With only a couple of issues regarding Black Tide, I really like this series so far, and I love the writing.

Set mainly in Melbourne, once a criminal lawyer, Irish is now making his way out of a dark period of life that he drifted into after the death of his second wife who died at the hands of an unhappy client.  Trying to deal with his pain, Jack drowned his sorrows in alcohol and became a collector of "serious debts," as well as a gambler betting on the ponies. He does some odd work for a couple of men in the horse racing business. But there's another side to Jack -- as a sort of therapy, he also helps a friend make furniture, finding a bit of peace and pride in his work, and he has a huge heart. He's a dad to daughter Claire.    He tries to stay on the side of law and order, but there are moments when he sometimes has to cross over that border.

As the novel opens, Jack checks his answering machine to find a number of messages from a client, Danny McKillop, who Jack once defended in a hit and run accident.  He pleads with Jack to meet him, but Jack doesn't remember him at the time and the last message was left a couple of days earlier.  Now curious, Jack digs into the case files, where he discovers that McKillop had been accused of the death of Anne Jeppeson, a young activist some ten years earlier. McKillop had pleaded guilty after a witness positively ID'd him as the driver of the car. McKillop had pleaded guilty and received ten years for his crime. Now out, it seems that he really wants to talk to Jack.  As Jack pokes around, he starts thinking that perhaps McKillop wasn't the one behind the wheel; little does he know that he is opening a veritable Pandora's box of an investigation, helped along by a gorgeous journalist named Linda Hillier. It isn't long until he discovers that someone is willing to kill to keep Jack from getting to the truth.  In a story that is part hardboiled noir with added bits of action-packed conspiracy thriller, Jack has to navigate between bullets, explosions and a host of shady people to get to the truth. The problem is that Jack has no idea who to trust.

My first experience with Peter Temple is with his The Broken Shore, which I loved and which has much more of a literary feel to it than does Bad Debts.   Having said that, Bad Debts really kept me on my toes and kept my brain engaged trying to figure out the 10 year-old mystery of Danny McKillop.  And while I'm normally not a huge fan of the fast-paced variety of thriller/conspiracy novel, this one I liked, not only because of the writing in which Temple has crafted a very tightly-woven and controlled story despite the number of crazy twists and turns,  but also because of the characters, especially, but not limited to, Jack himself.  Rarely do I like a first series novel this much, but I was sucked in from the beginning and just couldn't let it go.

***

Moving on, the second novel in the series is Black Tide, another noir/conspiracy/action-packed combo set mainly in Melbourne.

9781596921306
MacAdam/Cage, 2005
originally published 1999

In this second installment, Jack Irish returns to do a favor for an old friend of his father, Des Connor.  Des shows him pictures of his father and mother, and regales him with stories about his father, the dad Jack grew up not knowing.  Des also has a son, Gary, and loaned him some sixty grand which Des now needs back to repay the bank for a mortgage Gary took out on the home, where Des now lives.  If he's not able to pay the bank, Des will be homeless; Gary defaulted leaving it up to Des to clean up the mess.  But Gary seems to have disappeared, and bighearted Jack decides to go find him to get the money for Des.  As was the case in the previous novel, Jack's search for the missing Gary leads him into a very messy and complex situation -- this time involving money laundering, other missing people, hush-hush organizations and once again, finding someone to trust is becoming harder and harder.  While Jack tries to get to the bottom of Gary's disappearance -- no easy task --  Linda has moved on to Sydney, where she has not only a new job, but apparently a new man, leaving Jack wondering about any kind of future with her.

As with its predecessor, Black Tide not only takes on a complicated tangle of shady operations that keep you guessing as to who's trustworthy and who's not, while the author manages to keep his well-crafted plot under a great deal of control.  Temple holds the reins tightly as the disappearance of one man slowly begins to branch out into even more nefarious dealings, so that everything that Jack uncovers fits into the main plotline without going off into tangents.  The author also weaves in different facets of Melbourne's population, from the very wealthy who prefer that the tradesmen use the back entrance to the aging Aussie rules football club fans who've lost their local team, to people who buy sandwiches on plain white bread, no focaccia sold here.  The problem with this book is that in terms of the basic setup, it's much like Bad Debts, but sadly I can't disclose why without giving away important details.  Let's just say that there seems to be a pattern that follows from book one to book two that made it easy to figure out something important;  I'm hoping that with book three the author will fall out of that trap and move on to something slightly different. All the same, even with this most annoying matter of personal contention, Black Tide managed to hold my interest to the last action-packed minute and beyond.  Considering, as I said above, that I tend not to like this sort of fast-paced rockem-sockem type thing, I'm drawn to the main character and his immediate circle enough to where I can't help but want more.

I can definitely recommend both novels -- the plots appeal to the mystery solver in me, and the writing makes these books intelligent reads that don't fail to engage.

crime fiction from Australia

*part of this month's focus on novels from Australia.

*Scream Black Murder, by Philip McLaren

1890768421

Intrigue Press/WorldKrime, 2002

originally published 1995

252 pp.

Although this story is fictional, there is a true backdrop to this novel.  In Sydney, Australia, 1989, a police raid resulted in three arrests and one death, that of the homeowner, David John Gundy. To make matters worse, in 1992, an appalling video was shown on national TV of a police staff party where two cops arrived in blackface, one with a hangman's noose around his neck. Signs were hanging around their necks, one with the name of Lloyd Boney (who mysteriously died in police custody), and one bearing the name of David Gundy, both indigenous Australians. Political pressure had been put on the police regarding the number of unsolved black deaths, and with the death of Gundy and then the airing of the tasteless video, several human rights groups including Amnesty International got involved, protesting against the racist component of policing. 

In Scream Black Murder, a unit known as the Aboriginal Homicide Unit has been created, based largely on this pressure.  [To be honest, I have tried to find any reference to this unit on the internet and cannot, so I can't say whether or not this is a real part of the New South Wales police. Any info would be helpful just to answer my question.]  Out of fifty Aboriginal officers, two made the cut: Gary Leslie and Lisa Fuller. Their first case involves the deaths of two indigenous Australians, one male, one female. The State Police are the first to respond; after Leslie and Fuller arrive, the case is turned over to them. The two face a series of challenges in getting to the heart of the matter -- not the least of which is the fact that their involvement isn't much welcomed. And, as more bodies are discovered, one of them white, the two find themselves under intense media scrutiny, only heightening the pressure to nail the killer.  The narrative is told in alternating points of view -- first, in a third-person narrative detailing the lives of Gary and Leslie both on the job and off, and then the musings of the killer, who offers a look inside his head as he targets his victims and then kills them.

I actually read this some time back and then took some time to give some thought to my response to this novel.  Scream Black Murder gets great reviews on Amazon.com and on Goodreads, with about a 4.5-stars average rating.  I have mixed feelings about this book. Although I appreciated the author's commentary on the problems of the Aboriginal community, the racism of the police department, and his storyline about indigenous children being taken away from their parents at an early age (all done quite well, by the way), the mystery component of the story seemed rather tame.  It's sort of a thing where the tension ratchets and then we're off into a foray into the personal lives of the two officers -- for me, there were just too many interruptions in the flow in the progress of the criminal investigation.  I realize this is a personal issue, but when I read crime fiction, I'm in it for the crime and how it's solved (or not), preferring a tighter narrative that gets to the point and stays on target throughout.   On the other hand, the author highlighted many important aspects of  the racial and social issues confronting indigenous Australians, many of which I was previously unaware.

I'll definitely try more of McLaren's work in the future. I recommend Scream Black Murder to crime fiction enthusiasts who aren't so much on the edgy side of crime reads as I seem to be, and I also recommend it as a work from an indigenous Australian writer who isn't hesitant about setting forth the issues mentioned above. 

fiction from Australia

The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple

9780374116934
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
357 pp.
originally published 2005, Text Publishing Company, Australia


When I finished this novel I realized two things: first, that I'd just read something outstanding and second, that (as it says on the dustjacket blurb), Peter Temple is a "master writer." This has to be one of the best and most beautifully-written crime fiction novels I've ever read, and I can't wait to get back to his next novel, Truth, which I've only just started and am already loving.


Joe Cashin is a homicide detective who's recuperating from physical and emotional trauma in the small town of Port Monro on the south coast of Australia. Port Monro is not his normal beat; he's been posted there to put some distance between himself and the events that left another policeman dead and himself hospitalized. It's a perfect place for Joe; he spends a great deal of his time with his dogs, and to get his mind off of his recent troubles, he's rebuilding an old ruined house, as well as himself,  with the help of a "swaggie" named Rebb. But his peace is shattered when he finds himself smack in the middle of an intriguing crime: one of the town's wealthiest citizens has been found dead and the police in charge of the investigation want very badly to pin the murder on three indigenous teens. Cashin is called to help with the case, but he's not convinced that the racially-prejudiced local police are correct in their assumptions.

What sets this novel apart, making it an outstanding read, is not so much the plot, which is believable and well executed, but the writing.  The reader is plunged into an Australia that is divided over racial issues, plagued by corruption among government and local officials, divided between development that would  create new jobs but would wreck the environment and the landscape.  While a reader can perhaps find those sorts of problems in his or her own country, Temple keeps it Australian through  his use of the local lingo (and then puts a glossary of Australian terms in the back for reference-- which is itself quite funny in parts), description of little things like food, and especially in terms of a sense of place. The small community's colorful characters and the small-town problems he's involved with ("a man about a neighbour's tree, the report of a vandalised bench...")  set the stage, as do the vivid descriptions of the landscape.  Take, for example, the description of  Cromarty's Kettle, located in the Rip:

 ...the huge sea, the grey-green water skeined with foam, sliding, falling, surging, full of little peaks and breaks, hollows and rolls, the sense of unimaginable power beneath the surface, terrible forces that could lift you up and suck you down and spin you...the power of the surge would push you through the gap in the cliff and then it would slam you against the pocked walls...

as well as the descriptions of the small pubs, truck stops, the "roads smeared with roadkill ---" or the road to Port Monro: 

the "pocked junctions where one or two tilted houses stood against the wind and signs pointed to other desperate crossroads."

The characters are also very well developed, especially Joe Cashin -- a broken and damaged, yet decent man trying to get it all back together, whose backstory and troubled past (including an unstable childhood) are unfolded little by little, interwoven with his present.  He doesn't mind solitude, although perhaps not so completely as he would have you believe, and he's the consummate professional, yet willing to go with his intuition when the situation demands.

This is an excellent book, and although I've focused mainly on the writing here, the story itself will also keep you turning pages until it's over. And then, I think, you'll be left wanting more.

fiction from Australia