Review: The Trojan Dog by Dorothy Johnston

Title: The Trojan Dog

Author: Dorothy Johnston

Publisher: Wakefield Press [2000]

ISBN:1-86254-486-7

Length: 268 pages

Genre: Amateur sleuth

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 1/5

One-liner: A confusing, disjointed mess.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The book is set in 1996 in the lead up to the Australian Federal Election of that year. Amid fear that the government of the day would soon be ousted Sandra Mahoney is contracted to write a report on administrative out-workers for the department dealing with labour issues. Soon after she starts the woman who hired Sandra, Rae Evans, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $900,000. For reasons I still can’t explain Sandra decides that Evans is not guilty and sets out to ‘investigate’ the case (if you define investigate as blunder through a series of conversations and random acts of stupidity).

I struggled with this book thought can’t really explain why. Why I didn’t throw it against a wall that is. Probably something to do with the fact it was given to me as a gift.

It’s the most confusingly convoluted plot I have come across in a very long time. It felt as if someone had laid all the book’s paragraphs out end-to-end then rearranged them randomly before sticking them back together and calling it a book. Some of the several dozen story threads seemed to end almost mid-sentence while others went on interminably but in neither case there was not much advancement in the main story. The case hinged on computer fraud which required complex explanations of hacking and other techno-babble and the parts of the story dealing with these sounded as if they’d been translated from the Martian by a drunk babel fish. When we finally got to the resolution it was a complete non-event, I could barely remember having encountered the bloke who turned out to be the bad guy although I had long since given up caring ‘whodunit’ (in fact I kept forgetting what ‘it’ was).

Another problem with the book was what I took, by the end anyway, for pretentiousness but may have been poor copy editing. I’m way more interested in politics than the average person (I remember election years the way others do World Cups or Olympics) but for the typical reader (and anyone outside this country) I can only imagine that chunks of this book, especially the first third, would make no sense at all. It’s full of obscure references to the political landscape and is peppered with acronyms that I can’t believe anyone outside the Canberra scene would have understood then let alone 13 years later.

The characters were equally difficult to come to grips with. The book is told in the first-person voice from Sandra’s point of view which should have made it a personal story but didn’t. Sandra was vague and timid most of the time which made her occasional risking of life and limb quite unbelievable. Her reason for believing in Rae Evans was only ever hinted at and never explained why she went to such lengths to find out what really happened. Not that I need to like a character to enjoy a book but when everything else is going wrong too an unlikable protagonist is one burden too many so I found Sandra’s insipidity and shoddy treatment of many of the people around her very disagreeable and when at the end of the book she decides she is going to become a computer analyst I wanted to scream “oh really, so all I have to do to get a new job is call myself an air traffic controller eh?”

Sandra’s love interest is Ivan something-Russian and he isn’t her husband (a fact which should have added far more interest to the narrative than it did) and he is a caricature of all things geek. Most of the others who features in the book are so randomly discussed or involved with the story that I didn’t form any other lasting opinions.

I could actually go on some more but I’d probably start getting really rude and/or personal and I really try to avoid that on Reactions to Reading. I’m only cross because I feel I wasted a lot of time on this book and that isn’t the author’s fault because I could have stopped at any point.

Other Stuff

I was relieved when I read this review in the Australian Crime Fiction Database and realised I was not alone in my thoughts about this book because I was beginning to think I was completely mad. Well respected Aussie crime fiction reviewer Graeme Blundell says that Johnston’s series has improved considerably since this outing but I can’t imagine spending another moment in Sandra Mahoney’s company.

 

Forgotten Book: Ligny’s Lake by S H Courtier

This post is a contribution to Pattinase’s Friday’s Forgotten Books

Title: Ligney’s Lake

Author: S H Courtier

Publisher: Wakefield Crime Classics [original edition 1971, this edition 1992]

ISBN: 1-86254-286-4,

Length: 176 pages

Setting: Australia, 1969 (contemporary)

Genre: Amateur sleuth / bibliomystery

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Synopsis

Lewis Ligney is a vaguely mysterious high-ranking official with the Australian Government. He’s physically imposing via his size and the fact his face has been badly disfigured from an incident during WW2. Sandy Carmichael is a freelance engineer who befriends Ligney, his sister’s next door neighbour, and finds him an intelligent. congenial companion. One evening Carmichael sees Ligney at a boxing match in Melbourne but when he tries to make contact Ligney claims he doesn’t know Carmichael and disappears from the venue. Carmichael then reads in the newspaper that Ligney is missing, presumed drowned at Bateman’s Bay. Carmichael knows he saw Ligney after the supposed drowning and sets out to find, and hopefully help, his friend but discovers that Ligney had many enemies.

Things to look for

This book drips its Australian-ness from every page starting with the central premise. In what surely must be a unique event among nations Australia’s serving Prime Minister, Harold Hold, disappeared and was presumed drowned while swimming in the ocean in 1967 so having an important Canberra identity disappear in this fashion is clearly borrowed from the news headlines   There’s also the novel’s language and its protagonist’s journey up and down much of the East Coast of the country. In all the book is as Aussie as they come. Which makes the fact it was never published in Australia during the author’s life something of a mystery itself.

Although I’ve no evidence to back up my theory I wonder if Courtier was the victim of what A A Phillips termed our cultural cringe: a phenomenon which saw, until quite recently, virtually every artistic endeavour in Australia viewed as inferior to that produced elsewhere (especially the UK). It’s certainly interesting to ponder that Courtier’s very Australian books found publishers in the UK and US right up until the 1970’s while  these days many Australian crime fiction authors (such as Michael Robotham, P D Martin and Barry Maitland) set their crime fiction in the UK or the US to increase their chances of being published in those countries.

The plot is well constructed and, aside from the fact I never quite understood why Sandy went to such efforts on behalf of Ligney, fairly credible. Although set long after the end of WW2 the war plays a pivotal role in the story but I think it’s quite realistic that people would have had vivid memories of the dramatic events that took place 20-25 years earlier. The resolution is quite a page-turner and quite unpredictable too.

I’d not heard the term bibliomystery before seeing the publishers mention it in the afterword here but I’ve certainly read my fair share of novels in which books or things associated with them are central to the plot. In Ligney’s Lake it is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden that plays a key role. Courtier did a reasonable job of explaining the significance of the book to Ligney (and therefore this story) but I have to admit that my total ignorance of Walden made for some confusing moments.

Where the book falls down a bit for me is in its characterisations which are quite one-dimensional and a bit ‘blokey’ but quite representative of the time it was written. If, for example, Sandy had been more fleshed out it probably would have been clear why he went to such lengths for someone who appeared to be little more than an acquaintance.

A miscellaneous fact or three

Only two of Sidney Hobson Courtier’s 26 novels were ever published in Australia during his lifetime, with the remainder being published by English and American publishing houses. He also had five novels translated into German.

Courtier was born in rural Victoria in 1904 and died in 1974 and so was a contemporary (though older) of the more well known (and far more prolific) Arthur Upfield and Carter Brown (both of whom also had much of their work published outside Australia instead of or before it was published in this country).

Courtier was a school teacher who wrote 10 standalone crime fiction novels of which this is one, more than a dozen books that formed two series featuring different police inspectors and approximately 200 short stories. All of Courtier’s crime fiction novels are listed here.

When he died Courtier left an unfinished science fiction novel which he apparently hadn’t settled on a title for.

In a 2008 exhibition called Murderous Melbourne: A Celebration of Australian Crime Fiction and Place two of S H Courtier’s books inspired props to be designed by Melbourne University’s architecture students. This is one of the images of the exhibition but you can find out a bit more about crime fiction’s relationship to place by watching this video (the section on the exhibition starts at about 2:44).

A final word

I don’t think I’m alone in being woefully ignorant of my own country’s crime fiction heritage so I am quite chuffed to have found such a decent example by this neglected author who seems to have loved his country even if it didn’t return the favour. I’m not sure I found all the literary allusions the publishers of my edition saw but I did enjoy a ripping Aussie yarn.

 

Review: The Build Up by Phillip Gwynne

Title: The Build Up

Author: Phillip Gwynne

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-4050-3849-2

Length: 339 pages

Setting: Australia (Northern Territory), present day

Genre: Police Procedural (well kinda)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: Funny, sad, perfectly Australian story about weather and sheer bloody-mindedness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Dusty Buchanan is a Detective with the Northern Territory Police in Darwin. As the book opens a phone conversation with her over-bearing mother causes her to miss being there when a body is found in the long-running McVeigh case and so she is removed from the case. Instead she focuses on a tip-off she received from one of the blokes at the local camp for Vietnam veterans. He says his fishing line got caught on the body of a woman in the billabong. When Dusty is further isolated from her colleagues she’s forced to look to some unlikely people for help.

Reading The Build Up reminded me how much fun it is to read a book with language, cultural references and the odd ‘in’ joke that only locals will understand. It’s a bit like watching one of those kids’ movies that has a few strategically placed lines especially for adults and, in me anyway, provoked the same kind of knowing smile. I love a story that provides a sense of its location and this one stamps Australia in general and Darwin in particular lovingly on every page. I share a fellow blogger’s curiousity about whether or not the book will generate interest (or understanding) outside Australia (what would they make of Up There Cazaly for example) but I am delighted that Gwynne doesn’t seem to have written with one eye (and his bank balance) on the international publishing scene. In real life and in this book crude language and political incorrectness exist alongside spectacular places and down-to-earth people you can rely on in a crisis. You have to take the good with the bad or you get neither.

The build up of the title refers to the in-between period between Darwin’s two seasons: the dry and the wet. It’s a period known for provoking odd behaviour in people: suicides rates go up, other crime rates go down. Everyone is affected in some way. There’s also a build up in the way the book says what it has to say about its characters and the world they inhabit. The solving of either case, while being what drives Dusty, is almost incidental to the creation of a quite detailed picture of the place and the people who live in it. It’s an almost linear narrative but not always and the sequence in which what happens is revealed makes for deceptively powerful story telling. Just like the weather, the book teased me into thinking it was a fairly laid-back sort of a tale which left me completely unprepared for the-sucker punch of an ending.

Gwynne has created some truly memorable characters here. Dusty is the only human who is fully fleshed out (the other character that receives the full treatment is the Northern Territory itself) and she is terrific. She’s imperfect but not cripplingly so and is smart, funny and the sort of copper I hope there are plenty of. The rest of the people are generally quite brilliantly depicted via fairly brief but very descriptive scenes. No amount of extra words could have created a better image of a bloke called Trigger than a scene in which he can’t perform with a prostitute unless she’s wearing the football jumper of the player he believed responsible for his sidelining from the game he adored.

As often happens when I read the best ‘crime’ fiction I again thought about how genre labels ruin reading. They set silly expectations and make people worry about unimportant things when what really, really matters is for a book to capture a reader’s heart and imagination. If a book spirits you away for a while or makes you think about things in a different way, if only for a moment, then does it matter how many of the genre tick-boxes it gets right?  This book should be required reading for Aussies and while I’m not sure it’ll make complete sense to the rest of you I’d recommend you try (and I’ll happily provide translations and explanations if required).

Other stuff

The weather phenomenon known as the build up is common to tropical climates and, in Australia, usually starts around October and runs until December. It is recognisable by its unrelenting humidity and the way it teases you into thinking the relief of rain is just around the corner. I have lived through one (not in Darwin but in Far North Queensland) and I never, ever wish to do so again. You can find out more about Aussie weather here.

The book has been reviewed at Crime Down Under, Mysteries in Paradise, Books and Musings from Down Under, Aust Crime Fiction

 

Review: Black Ice by Leah Giarratano

Title: Black Ice (the 3rd Jill Jackson novel)

Author: Leah Giarratano

Publisher: Random House [2009]

ISBN: 978-1-74166-809-4

Length: 323 pages

Jill Jackson is working undercover as Krystal Peters in Sydney’s Fairfield. In a long term operation she’s gathering intelligence on the area’s drug dealers and their suppliers in an effort to help clean up they city’s drug scene. At the same time Serendipity (Seren) Templeton is due to be released from prison after spending more than 12 months in jail for a drug related crime she did not commit. All she wants is to be reunited with her young son. And to extract revenge from the man responsible for her imprisonment. There are other forces at play too: Jill’s sister Cassie, a top class fashion model, has a new boyfriend and is living the high life in the harbour city and a young Chemistry student is learning that you can’t always stop what you start.

I’m sure part of the meaning of the title of this book relates to the drug at the heart of the tale. But as I started reading I was reminded of the winter I spent in the North-East of the US (i.e. a real winter as opposed to its rather laughable cousin we have here in Adelaide). As someone new to walking and driving in the conditions I was warned often of the black ice which was virtually transparent and so invisible until you were right on top of it (which in my case generally resulted in falling over or sliding off the road). There are elements of this story that are hidden in the same way: Jill’s undercover alter-ego whose personality is very different from Jill’s, Seren’s second persona which she uses to embark on the revenge she’s been plotting for months. Even air-headed Cassie, towards the end of the book, shows hidden depths. The unpredictable way all three of these strong female characters are revealed over the course of the story is utterly captivating.

It’s always the characters I love most about Giarratano’s books and this time I think it’s Serendipity who will stay with me after the rest of the book starts to fade. Her life of abuse, teenage pregnancy without any support, and betrayal when the one good thing that’s ever happened to her turns sour is painfully but beautifully depicted. In what might be a new record I was crying by page 38 when her two cellmates turned on her. Then each other. From that point on all I wanted to know was how would life treat Seren and how, or if, she would cope.

Jill is more mature in this book and at times takes a back seat to the other characters although she’s still quite a presence and it is interesting to watch her behaviour change and normalise over time. Aside from her and Seren there are Giarratano’s usual assortment of odd but memorable bit players who manage to leave lasting impressions even if they only appear for a few lines or a few pages. I won’t forget poor Damien who should have known better than to experiment or the nastily bureaucratic parole officer any time soon. And in this book the city itself plays a strong role. Two of its sides, rich and privileged versus limited by poverty, are shown inhabiting the same physical space yet practically operating as if on separate planets and it has quite a realistic feel for this former Sydney-sider.

Rather than answering the question ‘who committed that crime’ this book seems instead to be pondering the reasons why crimes happen and so is far less of a police procedural than its predecessors. Although some of the scenarios were completely foreign to my middle class existence with my happy childhood memories I found myself often wondering what I would have done in the scenarios being described. Although ‘turning to a jelly-like wreck’ is the most likely answer for most instances in this book I always enjoy reading that offers me any kind of vicarious living. And although parts of the book are bleak it’s not uniformly so. Call me an old softie if you like but I enjoyed it more because of that: there are limits to how much bleakness I want in my life.

I probably shouldn’t have liked this book. At least in part it’s about the drug scene (almost my least favourite plot theme ever for reasons I won’t bore anyone with) and, more importantly, it’s quite a departure from its much-loved predecessors. I was anticipating more of the same from Black Ice as I had enjoyed about the two earlier Jill Jackson novels: the creepiest of villains and a put-upon but valiant heroine. I didn’t have to hide undeer a blanket once here and the heroine wasn’t really who I expected her to be. However, despite that departure, or perhaps because of it, I found the book an emotional and satisfying read. It has retained the essence of what made the first two books great: wonderfully drawn characters and an exquisite build-up of tension towards the climax. But it’s also taken me somewhere unexpected, given me new ideas to think about. A thoroughly great read that I’d recommend to both fans of the previous books and people new to the series.

My rating 5/5

Other stuff

Having raved about Leah Giarratano’s first two books (Vodka Doesn’t Freeze and Voodoo Doll) I was contacted by Leah a couple of weeks ago to ask if I would like a copy of her new book (absolutely no strings attached). While supremely chuffed at the contact and excited to get my hands on a pre-release copy I was also a little worried: what would I say if I didn’t like it? Anyone who has known me more than about 3 days knows I am not good at hiding my feelings. Would I be able to say nothing at all? I can tell you I breathed quite a sigh of relief as I closed the book and realised I wouldn’t have to deal with that particular social awkwardness .

At the time of posting this I haven’t been able to locate any other pre-release reviews of the book but feel free to leave a link in the comments section if you have one.

 

Review: The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell

Title: The Darkest Hour

Author: Katherine Howell

Publisher: Pan Macmillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-330-42467-7

Length: 491 pages

Paramedic Lauren Yates is working alone one night when a man bolts from an alley in the heart of Sydney and she stops to see what’s going on. She stumbles upon the body of a convicted paedophile then the man’s killer, Thomas Werner, who is Lauren’s sister’s ex boyfriend and the father of her niece. He warns her to say nothing if she wants her family to be OK. Some months later, after Lauren has lied about the events she say in the alley that night, Lauren and her partner Joe are transporting a stabbed man to the hospital in their ambulance and he makes a dying declaration that the man who killed him was Thomas Werner. Detective Ella Marconi is assigned to the investigative team and realises that Lauren has something to hide when she tries to change her statement about the patient’s dying declaration.

This is the second of Howell’s books to be published and, like the first book Frantic, for me it was more about the psychology of the situations people find themselves in than a standard police procedural. Howell is a former paramedic she really captures the tension and emotion that must be a constant for people in that line of work. Some of the most compelling reading in the book is when the paramedics respond to callouts where they have little knowledge of what they’ll find. But she also, hopefully without the same first-hand knowledge, does a top job of depicting the crumbling of the fragile relationships between the various criminals that feature in the book. Her main characters, Lauren and Ella, are both shown to be fully rounded people with all the foibles and shades of grey that we humans have and seeing what made them tick and how they would handle the increasingly nasty stuff being thrown at them made me want to keep reading.

I did struggle with the plot a bit. Partly this is my fault as I read the book over a week or so rather than my usual couple of days. But even accounting for that I felt the need for a whiteboard and coloured markers so I could keep track of the various telephone calls that connected the many players together. The introduction of the daily investigating team meetings at which the day’s discoveries were summarised was, I suppose, an acknowledgement of the plot’s complexity and while it helped me a bit I think the whole thing could have been resovled more simply.  The beginning and the end were perfectly understandable but I lost my way a couple of times in the middle.

Ultimately though this is a good read, particularly if you like to read about how various types of people will react to life’s nastiness.

My rating 3.5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed at Crime Down Under,  Aust Crime Fiction (Sally) and Aust Crime Fiction (Karen) , Mysteries in Paradise

Katherine Howell’s previous book, featuring a different paramedic but the same police detective, is Franticand I rated it a 4/5 (pre blog days)

 

Review: Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Title: Diamond Dove (alternative title Moonlight Downs)

Author:Adrian Hyland

Publisher: Text Publishing [originally published 2006, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-921145-92-6

No. of Pages: 322

In her mid-20’s and after travelling around the world Emily Tempest goes back to the place she left as a teenager: Moonlight Downs. A run down property in Australia’s Northern Territory, nine hours drive from Alice Springs. It’s where Emily spent her childhood after her mother died and where her dad sent her to the city from when she got into too much trouble. With the Moonlight mob having only recently returned to the property after securing ownership in a Land Rights claim the place is not what it was when Emily left but she still feels drawn to it. Sadly, not long after she arrives one of the mob’s leaders is killed and Emily seems to be the only one interested in finding out who killed him.

I’m not convinced this is crime fiction, at least not in its purest sense. There is a crime, and an investigation of sorts, but, for me anyway, that element of the plot wasn’t particularly important, although in the end it had its share of suspense. At the risk of making this sound like some kind of schmalzy personal-journey tale (schmaltzy this definitely isn’t) solving the mystery played second fiddle to the book’s other themes. Half-Aboriginal, half-white Emily Tempest’s search for somewhere to belong and someone to belong to is engrossing because it isn’t schmaltzy. Indeed all the characters’ search for ‘home’ and ‘family’ ,whatever those terms might mean to them, makes compelling reading. And the exploration of outback Australia after land rights claims started being awarded to Aboriginal groups feels very realistic. I used to be an archivist for a state government here and I did a swag of research for claimant groups and members of the stolen generations so have some small sense of those issues and Hyland’s portrayal of them felt very realistic to me. 

The best thing of all is that all of these issues are treated with a total absence of the brand of political correctness so prevalent these days that involves some group being offended on behalf of some other group. The book shows the good and the bad of everyone involved without once unduly condemning anyone or praising anyone. Things are what they are and the reader gets to draw their own conclusions. For that alone I would love the book.

However there’s more to love. There’s wonderfully dry, very Australian Emily. Although I have little in common with Emily I feel a far greater feminine kinship with her than with any of the fictional women I am supposed to ‘relate to’ (e.g. any character in Sex and the City or the insufferable Bridget Jones). Not bad for a woman created by a bloke. And the other characters are equally memorable: her childhood friend and soul mate Hazel, the neighbouring station owner Earl Marsh, the cops, the hunters are all vividly depicted.

Then there’s a depiction of a country which, for this city girl, is as foreign as northern Europe or southern Africa. But it’s spectacularly drawn and could tempt even me from my creature comforts. At least for another visit (I have ventured to the Territory a couple of times).

There’s also the funny, very irreverent, very evocative writing that made me smile a lot, cry a little and read whole chunks out to anyone who would listen. With a few words Hyland can create lasting imagines in your head.

I should have read this book ages ago but the copy I bought was filched by a friend before I got to read it and it’s done the rounds since then. Being a cheapskate I couldn’t bring myself to buy another copy so I waited patiently for my copy to return. The good thing about having done it this way is that everyone I know has read it so I won’t have to loan it out again. Which is just as well ‘cos this one’s a keeper.

My rating 5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed by Maxine at Petrona

Reviewed by Sally at Books and Musings from Down Under

An interview with Adrian Hyland at Barbara Fister’s Place

 

Review: An Easeful Death by Felicity Young

Title:An Easeful Death

Author: Felicity Young

Publisher:Freemantle Arts Centre Press [2007]

ISBN: 9781920731137

No. of Pages: 299

In Perth, Western Australia a young woman has been killed: her body shaved, spray-painted bronze and posed provocatively with the words easeful death written on her leg. Stevie Hooper, a new member of the city’s Serious Crime Squad, plays a pivotal role in the investigation. When Stevie’s old friend and current boss Monty McGuire goes out on a limb to secure the services of a noted profiler to help with the case, Stevie acts as the team’s liaison in addition to her other duties.

On one level this is a fairly standard police procedural featuring a team of investigators with varying degrees of skill and integrity. Young introduces them all really cleverly in the first chapter just as the case is getting underway and because of this I found it easy to accept them all as realistic people rather than the extreme caricatures that sometimes populate these types of teams. Although Stevie and Monty do take centre stage the addition of a profiler, the wannabe-cop son of the Superintendent, a few ex-spouses and other members of the squad in the mix there’s much more of an ensemble cast than I’ve read in a while. I didn’t like them all equally but I enjoyed the credibility they offered the story.

There’s quite a complex plot but it’s artfully layed out. There are several threads that may, or may not, intertwine with the present case and elements of the investigators’ personal lives play into events too but Young juggles it all expertly. More than one person has secrets which make them, at least for a time, believable in the role of killer. I was smugly sure of my own deductive powers and even though it turns out I had it all wrong the fact that I could just as easily have been right makes this classic whodunnit material.

Something I enjoyed about this book may not even have been a deliberate intention of the author’s but I liked the way it demonstrated the issue of police expecting members of the public to be entirely compliant with their investigative methods, regardless of how invasive or ill-aimed they might be, but react badly when those same methods are used on fellow officers. It’s not the first time I’ve been struck by this dichotomy but it’s a subject that I always think could benefit from another airing and it was good to be reminded of it so cleverly.

On top of delivering a genuinely suspenseful ending Young has captured the desperation of an investigative team having too little evidence and too much pressure exceptionally well in the lead-up to that resolution. I look forward to reading the next in this series and as it was published last year I can do so when it suits me.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Damien at Crime Down Under in January 2007

Felicity Young has two other books published (so far) A Certain Malice (which is a standalone novel and which I reviewed here) and Harum Scarum which follows on from An Easeful Death (and which I haven’t read or reviewed) (yet)

 

Review: The Low Road by Chris Womersley

Title: The Low Road

Author: Chris Womersley

Publisher: Scribe [2007]

ISBN: 978-1-921215-47-6

Technically this isn’t really a review because I didn’t finish the book. In the portion that I read a disgraced junkie doctor (Wild) and a crook with an untreated bullet wound (Lee) are thrown together by circumstances at a seedy motel on the outskirts of town. They head off on the kind of road trip you’d take if you were unlucky enough to live in Hell, ostensibly to find a surgeon who can deal with Lee’s injury. Another crook (Josef) is angry with the Lee and he follows them. Things go downhill from there. 

After I’d read the first 20-odd pages I put the book down and found dozens of ways to avoid picking it up again. I did that same thing three or four more times over the next couple of weeks. But, as I had voted for this book to be the subject of discussion at an online book club and because it’s by an Australian author, I felt obliged to give it another go. I got as far as page 74 before deciding I couldn’t spend my time in the company of these people anymore.

One of the things I love most about reading is that it often provokes strong reactions. I laugh, I cry, I join social justice campaigns, I pull bedclothes over my head in fear. Or, on occasions like this, I feel every crevice of my being becoming full of overwhelming despair. I vowed after finishing Luke Davies’ Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction that I wouldn’t read a book of unending bleakness again, so feeling that despair fill me up like wet cement fills a foundation ditch, I assigned The Low Road to the DNF pile.

I can appreciate the writing. Womersley has a capacity for creating striking and long-lasting images with deceptively simple phrases that I am deeply envious of. It’s the subject matter sucked out my soul. I’ll demonstrate if I may. Josef has broken into Lee’s apartment and before leaving he pisses all over Luke’s bed (don’t ask). Womersley writes

He was unsure to do what to do when he had finally finished. He zipped himself up and waited while the rust -coloured puddle melted into the sheets and mattress. It didn’t give him nearly as much satisfaction as he had hoped, but perhaps he had expected too much.

 That is exceptional imagery. But it makes me want to curl into the foetal position and weep. 

Before I finish I’m going to have a whinge about the book’s eschewing of quotation marks to indicate dialogue. Is there a point? Is it supposed to be edgy? Modern? Was there a memo I missed? The book has commas, apostrophes and all the other punctuation you’d expect to see in English prose so I fail to see what purpose removing the humble quotation mark served but I found the failure to distinguish dialogue from everything else bloody annoying. 

My rating 0/5 (DNF)

Other stuff 

My view on this book is a minority one. Most people, including those who judge the Ned Kelly Awards, think it’s a great book. Which shows what I know. Here are links to a few of the many reviews that speak far more glowingly of the book than I do.

Reviewed by Damien at Crime Down Under

Reviewed by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise

Reviewed by Sunnie on Aust Crime Fiction

 

Review: The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender by Marele Day

Title: The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender

Author: Marele Day

Publisher: Allen & Unwin [1988]

ISBN: 1 86448 772 0

In the first book a four book series Claudia Valentine is a private investigator in Sydney, Australia, in the late 1980’s. She’s called upon by an old acquaintance to investigate the death of her brother, Mark Bannister, who supposedly died from a heart attack. Claudia soon discovers a number of unsettling facts including the fact Mark had heroin in his system when he died and was writing a book before his death but had kept the content secret from everyone he knew. Her investigation takes into the seamier side of life in the harbour city and she’s soon rubbing shoulders with some nasty characters including the shadowy Harry Lavendar of the title.

I was surprised, a few months ago, to learn that in addition to the much loved female private eye series I have followed for years (Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone) there was an Australian-based series featuring a similar character. Despite being a fan of the genre for many years I’d never heard a peep this series which says something about my lack of investigative powers but says more about the paucity of publicity for Australian authors in their home country. On the basis that it is better to have discovered these late than never I thought I’d take a look.

The most noticeable thing about this book when judged by today’s standards is it’s length: 169 pages! Is it only 20 years ago that books didn’t have to be the size and weight of house bricks in order to be published? Amazingly within those few pages an entire story with a beginning, a middle and an end, manages to be told. And it’s a pretty good story too. The plot is logical and has the requisite twists, turns and surprises and Claudia’s investigation is depicted quite realistically. As is often the case with private eyes she uses a combination of friends in the right places and gut instinct to puzzle out whether or not Mark Bannister was murdered and who might have done such a thing and she gets into, and out of, some scrapes along the way. I was bemused by the fact that Claudia’s client never made an appearance after she initially hired Claudia (no worried phone calls were made nor any updates given) but that was the only ‘hole’ I noticed in the plot.

While the story was good, if fairly familiar for the genre, the writing of this book is in a separate class. I can’t think of a word to encapsulate it but it’s very, very good. It evokes a very strong sense of the location. I lived in Sydney at the time the book was set and I was transported back to that time and place by the words. At one point, Claudia is walking through the city noticing the changing nature of the landscape and she reflects

I tried to picture what all this had looked like a few short years ago but couldn’t. Like everyone else, I would accept it once it was a fait accompli, vaguely aware that the signposts of the city’s history and my own were being effaced, as if someone had gone through my photo album and replaced the photos of me with those of another child, more modern, better dressed.

I always marvel when someone can sum up the depth of a feeling so eloquently and so perfectly and there is a lot more of this throughout the book.

It saddens me a little to think I’m not the only Aussie more familiar with US and UK authors than I am with my own country’s literary heritage but I’m rather chuffed to have discovered this author even if it is long after she stopped writing crime fiction (she has written general fiction since this series ended though). If you like private eyes with a lot of guts and a sense of humour you could do a lot worse than track down this book.

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

Reviewed on the Australian Crime Fiction Database

Reviewed on Tangled Web UK

There are three later books in the Claudia Valentine series: The Case of the Chinese Boxes, The Last Tango of Dolores Delgado and The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi

 

Review: Skin and Bone by Kathryn Fox

Title: Skin and bone

Author: Kathryn Fox

Publisher: MacMillan [2007]

ISBN: 978-0-06-135333-8

Kate Farrer has been on extended leave from the NSW Police Force after she was kidnapped and tortured in the line of duty. She’s asked to return from leave early and partner a new Homicide detective, Oliver Parke, when an unidentified body is found in a house that was set on fire. Just as the investigation of this case is getting underway the two are transferred to a high profile missing person enquiry and there are also rumblings of an internal investigation into one or all of the team members.

More of a police procedural than Fox’s previous two books Skin and Bone has lots of plot threads on the go concurrently. It reminded me of a Jack Frost book with several cases being juggled by the investigators and the reader never being sure which elements of which story will turn out to be important. When done well, as is the case here, this makes for very entertaining reading because it maintains your attention for the duration and is probably more reflective of reality than one where the detective can concentrate on a single case.

Another sign of above-average writing is that the forensic elements of the investigations are well integrated into the story rather than the long-winded ‘look at all the research I did’ passages that fill lesser novels. Fire is in the news in a big way in Australia at present and so it was a bit difficult to read the more gruesome details about what happens to a body during a fire but it’s not Fox’s fault I happened to pick up this book just now. Importantly, at no time did I feel that the details which were included were put there for any ghoulish purpose.

Most of the people on the investigative team are well fleshed out even if some are wholly un-likable. The interplay between the two main characters was particularly good. I’m bored by unresolved sexual tension being the driving force behind such relationships (frankly it always feels like the easy way out for writers) and I found it refreshing to the relationship grow and change without that element. And while I don’t have to like my characters to appreciate the craft that goes into creating them it certainly doesn’t hurt. Both Kate and Oliver appealed to me greatly; having enough foibles to be interesting but not so many as to be unbelievable. Kate’s progress as she dealt with the psychological issues of having been abducted was very credible. I hadn’t thought about it much before but there are many fictional coppers who I’d be wary of in the real world whereas I found myself thinking we could do a lot worse than a police force full of Kates and Olivers.

I would thoroughly recommend this fast-paced, entertaining and ultimately satisfying novel.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed on the Australian Crime Fiction Database

Reviewed on Aust Crime Fiction

Kathryn Fox’s previous two books feature forensic pathologist Anya Crichton are Malicious Intent and Without Consent