Death of a Swagman (1945) by Arthur W. Upfield

Arthur W. Upfield's Death of a Swagman (1945) is the 9th novel about one of the most unique and striking characters from the genre's golden era, Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte of the Queensland Police, but the book could have easily been the first in the series – as it can be read as a character introduction to Bony. I don't remember any other title in the series in which Bony's personality and philosophy is as central to the story as here.

Bony is an half-Aboriginal police detective and expert tracker who became "an investigator of violent crime in Australia's outback." A vast, untrammelled place where "the science of crime detection" differed enormously from its city counterpart.

In the city, the sciences of fingerprinting, blood grouping, photography and a close examination of the crime scene is of "paramount importance," but a crime scene in the bush is not confined to a single room, flat or street – extending instead for beyond its immediate locale. As criminals don't sprout wings, they have to get around on foot, horseback or in a car, which inevitably leave tracks for Bony to read. Bony refers to the soil as pages in the Book of the Bush that are regularly wiped clean by the rain and wind. So, in the bush, it's more important to be able to tell "the difference between the tracks made by a dog and those made by a fox" than finding fingerprints or analyzing drops of blood.

Bony's skill as a tracker is complemented by his personal, almost Buddhist, philosophy on crime and how to apprehend criminals. A philosophy that reveals Bony to be a terrifyingly efficient manhunter with an inhuman amount of patience.

Bony believes "evil is always countered" and, having recognized this universal law years ago, he never proceeds with undue haste. He calmly waits, watches and observe as Providence tosses the clues in his open hands, because Providence is always kind to patient detectives. So he's basically a big black, blue-eyed cat who patiently stakes out a mouse hole, but his method has a serious drawback. While he waits for Providence "to lend a hand" another "poor devil may be murdered." A serious possibility that comes to haunt him in Death of a Swagman.

Death of a Swagman takes place in Merino, a small township of eighty souls, in the south-west corner of the state of New South Wales where the view is dominated by an extraordinary, wind-built barrier of snow-white sand some twelve miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide, and several hundred feet high – referred to locally as the Walls of China. Six weeks before, the body of a stockman, George Kendall, had been found in an isolated hut lying within the sunrise shadow of the Walls of China. Kendall had been beaten to death and the local police had gotten nowhere near an explanation.

So, eventually, the murder comes to the attention of Bony and his specialized skill set and a record "unblemished by failure" afforded him the luxury to pick and choose his cases, because he refuses to stultify his brain with common murders. What excites him are the "unusual circumstances governing" some murders. The unusual circumstance here was gleaned from a crime scene photo of the hut with a game of naughts and crosses scrawled with chalk on the door. Six weeks later, Bony arrives in Merino in the guise of a stockman, Robert Burns.

The first thing he does upon arriving is getting arrested for loitering outside a licensed premise and being insolent to a police officer, but, once safely behind bars, he reveals his identity to Sergeant Richard Marshall – who's the senior officer of Merino Police District. Bony convinces Sergeant Marshall to arraign him before the local magistrate and ensure he gets two weeks detention to paint the police station. So, while he paints the station by day, he gets to spend a little money in the evening at the hotel saloon and people will talk freely to that poor stockman ensnared by the strong arm of the law. However, while Bony patiently observes and listens, the body count begins to climb.

Edward Bennett is an elderly man who lived in a makeshift hut, on the outskirts of the town, where he was found dead by his daughter. Apparently, Old Bennett had died of fright and cut his head as he fell. A short while later, Bony and Sergeant Marshall find the body of a swagman hanging from the crossbeams of the hut where Kendall was murdered, but it's not until someone goes missing that Bony begins to doubt his own philosophy. A person very near and dear to Bony. And he knew if this person were to die, the "edifice of the philosophy responsible for his success in crime detection would fall" possibly "without replacement by any other." So "the mood of self-condemnation" was heavy upon him towards the end. What baffles them the most is the apparent absence of a motive for any of these crimes.

Upfield retraced and thoroughly redressed the plot of Winds of Evil (1937) in Death of a Swagman, which mainly hinges on the psychological motive of the murderer, but that hardly detracts from the story, because the plot is of secondary importance here – taking a backseat to show how Bony struggles with the case and with himself. Normally, this is a grave, inexcusable offense to plot purists, like myself, but Upfield's writing is so evocative and rich that he can get away with it. Upfield was a master storyteller and an artist who can paint vivid, colorful landscapes with words, which is what makes him the best of the so-called regional mystery writers. But he also knew how to stage good, memorable set pieces. Such as Bony's Jail Cell Tea Party with Sergeant Marshall's 8-year-old daughter or the hearse that comes racing back to town from a half-finished funeral with a mighty thunderstorm licking at its heels. Bony also has a nighttime encounter with the masked murderer, on horseback, which is a scene that would not have disgraced the pages of a good western.

When it comes to the plot, Death of a Swagman is not the strongest title in the series, but, even with the plot taking a backseat, Upfield wrote another enthralling and fascinating story about strange crimes and peculiar characters that are as unique to Australia as the kangaroo and koala. A one-of-a-kind detective series that's not appreciated enough these days.

Lost at Sea

"It sounds to me like one of those yarns you fishing fellows tell..."

- Assistant Commissioner (Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks, 1940)

The Mystery of Swordfish Reef (1939) is Arthur W. Upfield's seventh novel about his half-caste policeman, Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte, who's plucked out of "his natural background," the Australian bush, and dropped on the coast of New South Wales – tasked with prying one of the many, tightly-held secrets from the ocean. One that concerns the fate of a fishing launch that vanished from the surface of the sea.

The exact locality of the story is a coastal town, called Bermagui, which grew from a small, isolated hamlet into "a centre of big game fishing" when the swordfish was discovered in its surrounding waters. So the place quickly became "a fisherman's paradise" and deep sea anglers usually flog the place during swordfish season, but this time the place is flooded with cancellations after an angler, a Mr. Ericson, did not return from a fishing trip.

Ericson was accompanied by two launchmen, Bill Spinks and Bob Garroway, when they were "trolling for sharks northward along Swordfish Reef," but their launch never returned back to port and an extensive search-and-rescue effort failed to turn up as much as a piece of wreckage.

Several weeks passed without any news until a trawler made a gruesome discovery in one of its dragnets: a severed, crayfish-eaten head with a bullet-hole in it!

As it turns out, the human head is that of the missing Mr. Ericson, who retired several years previously as a superintendent from Scotland Yard, where he was "one of the famous Big Five," which is why one of his friends, NSW Chief Commissioner of Police, arranged the temporary transfer of Bony to the New South Wales C.I.B. – whose expenses for this special assignment are to be paid from Ericson's estate. Something that can only be described as an extraordinary state of affairs, but then again, Bony's involvement in an investigation rare makes for a proper police procedural.

Usually, the involvement of Bony is a cast-iron guarantee that you're embarking on an original, well-imagined tale of crime and detection, but I'm still not entirely sure what to think about The Mystery of Swordfish Reef. It's almost as if Upfield used his detective series as a vehicle to write the kind of sport story that was so popular during the 1930s.

Bony is granted unlimited time and a good amount of money to properly investigate the murder of Ericson and the disappearance of his launchmen, which he liberally uses to "impinge himself upon this unfamiliar background" of his watery surrounding. As he philosophizes, in his bush cases he had many allies, "the birds and the insects," alongside the soil that can be read like "the pages of a huge book wherein were printed the acts of all living things" and the actions of rain, sunlight and wind – which cannot be said about the heaving water which retained "nothing on its surface for long." However, the way he went about familiarizing himself with his new territory is by hooking a couple of big ones.

During the first half of the book, Bony takes a small launch with crew out to sea and let the reel on his rod scream, as yards of lines were torn off it, in a long, tiring struggle with two marlins. One of them is average sized, but the second one, a black marlin, proved to be a beast of a monster and got them in a spot of trouble when their prize was towed astern and attracted the unwanted attention of a shark – requiring them to take a shot or two at the slippery beast.

Admittedly, these long, intense struggles with the marlin were actually pretty good and well written scenes, but would, perhaps, have been more at home on the pages of Sport Story Magazine. Sure, they would compliment any detective novel with deep sea angling as a backdrop, however, the overall plot was far too slender for that being the case here. The premise had a ton of potential, but Upfield had evidently more interest in exploring the region and showing the exciting thrills of big game fishing rather than crafting a clever, or simply a passable, plot.

Upfield quickened the pace of the story towards the end, which saw Bony being kidnapped by the villains and losing his cool civility, but the last leg of the tale was more of a thriller-type of story than a proper detective. However, I liked some of the imagery in this part of the book: a wilder version of Bony sneaking up on his captor and the rolling boulder. Or how Bony's cover was blown by a newspaper headline screaming, "Brisbane Detective-Inspector Captures Giant Swordfish." So that gave the narrative in the second half some much needed urgency.

Well, as you probably noticed, my mind is devided about The Mystery of Swordfish Reef. On the one hand, I have to drag myself through this review, because there's barely anything to say or remark about the thread-bare plot. Upfield pretty much used the book to write about swordfish angling and this came at the expense of the detection and plot. So you're actually reading a piece of sports-fiction masquerading as a detective story. On the other hand, Upfield was a splendid writer whose forte was pulling the reader into a setting that he could bring alive like no other and this is no exception.

I prefer when there's also a solid plot to go with the evocative backdrop (e.g. Cake in the Hat Box, 1954) or actually focused on the story at hand (e.g. Man of Two Tribes, 1956), but The Mystery of Swordfish Reef is not bereft of Upfield's attractive and vivid writing style – which still makes it a pleasant and mostly leisurely read. Just don't expect the rug to be pulled from underneath your feet. The Mystery of Swordfish Reef is mostly a sports story with some crime-and thriller-ish elements, but I'm beginning to repeat myself here. And you probably got a rough idea what my opinion about this book is.

So let me end this blog-post by pointing to my previous two reviews, which discussed Philip MacDonald's The Maze (1932) and Willoughby Sharp's Murder of the Honest Broker (1934). Plot-wise, they were far, far more satisfying than the subject of this blog-post.

The Weather Eye

"One's idea must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, 1887) 

Back in June, I posted a review of Venom House (1952) by Arthur W. Upfield and concluded the blog-post with the promise to return to his work more often, which, somehow, I actually managed to achieve – posting one review every month since that post. So why not continue down this path?

The Battling Prophet (1956) numbers twenty in the series about Upfield's half-caste policeman, Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte of the Queensland Police, whose special abilities makes him the man for "special assignments in the Outback" or "outer urban areas." Originally, the book was published as a serial in a weekly newspaper, The World's News, in 1955, which probably explains one uncharacteristic aspect about this particular entry in the series.

One of the hallmarks of this series are the bright, colorful and vividly described backdrops that can be found on the Australian continent. And turning these settings into full-fledged characters was one of Upfield's talents. Over the course of twenty-nine books, Bony traveled to desert lagoons, isolated cattle stations, lonely swamps, valley towns and braved the parched, treeless grounds of the Nullarbor Plains, which impressed on the reader the sheer size of the continent, but a large chunk of The Battling Prophet takes place in-and around a small cottage – giving off the impression that you’re reading a novelized version of a stage play.

The cottage in question belongs to eighty-four year old Mr. John Luton, a man of the old guard, who represents a dying race of men "who had left their mark so indelibly on the Outback." A stock of men "the like of which will never again be seen," because they "were born long before motor traction could weaken their bodies" and "the craze for luxury and mental distraction" came too late to get a firm grip on their minds, but they were prone to some of the old-world weaknesses – such as an Australian predilection for blackout drinking. However, even these drinking binges were done in accord with old-school rules: an observance that's "a relic from the old days" when hard workingmen would go on a weeks-long drinking spree after a long, self-imposed period of abstinence.

Tragically, the last of these benders at the riverside cottage resulted in a casualty. Ben Wickham is a long-time friend of Luton and had as many enemies as admirers, which he accumulated during "a stormy career" as a pioneer of modern meteorology.

During the 1950s, the science behind modern, long-range weather forecasts was still largely theoretical: the plans from the 40s to launch cameras in orbit, to observe weather and cloud patterns from space, would not come to fruition until April 1, 1960 – when the first weather satellite, TIROS-1, was launched. So to be able to make accurate forecasts, before the dawn of the space age, has serious (geo) political implications.

Wickham has a weather record, dating back five decades, which allows him to make accurate prediction about the weather four, five or even six years ahead. One of Wickham's recent victories was the spot-on prediction about a great draught, but the accuracy of this forecast earned him as much scorn as admiration. As a result, the farmers who took Wickham seriously did not fallow their land, sown crops, bought manures, hired farm hands or took out any loans – which saved many of them from potentially bankrupting themselves. However, the people who had a financial or political interest in the farmers spending all of their money were not amused. Not amused at all.

This is the reason for Luton's refusal to accept that Wickham had "died in the hoo-jahs of alcoholic poisoning," which he slipped into after one of their drinking spells, but was killed on account of him preventing the enslavement of farmers and graziers by "the big merchants" and "the banks." So on the recommendation of his neighbor, Knocker Harris, the old man dispatched an urgent letter to Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Upon his arrival, Bony is confronted with the first of many complications and obstacles: if it is the murder, the culprit was clever enough to fool both the local doctor and the medical examiner from the police department. A death certificate was signed, stating Wickham had died "from heart disease accelerated by alcohol," after which the body was cremated and the dust scattered to the four winds. A perfect murder!

A good security for the murderer, but, regardless, someone starts pulling strings and Bony finds his own police apparatus is starting to work against him. Officially, Bony is on a fishing holiday and a guest of Mr. Luton, but rather quickly begins to receive urgent summons to make an early return to duty – orders he ignored and this makes him eventually a wanted man. But that's not all. Bony and Luton find themselves confronted with a couple of foreign agents, from behind the Iron Curtain, who proved to be prone to violence and prefer to enter a room with a gun in hand.

I think this betrays the episodic nature of the story's original run as a newspaper serial, but makes for a fun, well-paced yarn. And loved how much Bony was enjoying his precarious situation.

By the end of the book, Bony should've been so deep in trouble that it would've taken a platoon of gravediggers to get him out of it again, but he simply lifts himself out of the hole. How? Bony blackmails all of the involved police organizations and government branches by threatening to expose their, less than legal, activities. This makes for an excellent closer and recalled Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang (1965), in which Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin also use the illegal activities of a government agency (i.e. FBI) to close a case.

So all of this makes for a good and even excellent read, but there's one blemish that keeps The Battling Prophet from a place in the first rank. The revelation of the murderer was anti-climatic and was not really connected to any of the other plot-threads, which was slightly disappointing. I found the background of the victim fascinating and the murder should really have been tied to his activities as a meteorologist.

Unfortunately, The Battling Prophet ended on a slightly disappointing note, but the journey to the final chapter was not bad. There were some pretty good or fun scenes. One of them has Bony telling Rev. Weston about his past, while they cast a fish line, which recounts his birth and how he acquired his peculiar name. Bony alluded to his origin in other novels, but this telling of his story seemed to have a bit more details. I also liked the scene when has inside a hidden cellar listening to a policeman making enquiries about his whereabouts. As I noted, Bony was having far too much fun in this outing.

To sum this overlong review up, I would not recommend readers who are new to the series to start here, but fans of the series will find this an interesting inclusion in Bony's casebook. 

My other reviews from this series: 

Winds of Evil (1937)
The Bone is Pointed (1938)
An Author Bites the Dust (1948)
Venom House (1952) 
Cake in the Hat Box (1954)
The Battling Prophet (1956)
Bony and the Mouse (1959) 

Song of Storms

"The more we dig in the surer we get. The picture, atmosphere, are the same. A killer who came and went and didn't even leave a shadow on a windowshade."

- Inspector Richard Queen (Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails, 1949)

Arthur W. Upfield's Winds of Evil (1937) is the fifth book about one of the genre's most unusual policeman, Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte of the Queensland Police, which tells an equally curious tale about "a mad strangler who strikes only in dust storms" and was deservedly praised by Anthony Boucher – extolling the clear-cut plot and "a new quality of horror" permeating the story. It definitely deserves the attention of genre historians and mystery scholars as an early incarnation of the modern serial killer novel.

The initial setup of the plot tailgates one of the series familiar patterns: in a far-flung corner or settlement of the Australian continent a murder is committed or a person vanished under mysterious circumstances, but the local police failed to find an explanation and the trail grew cold. So the authorities usually assign these cold, dead-end cases to Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Bony is of mixed blood, a "half-caste," whose aborigine heritage endowed him with the tracking skills of his maternal ancestors, which he used to rise through the ranks of the police force and carving out a name for himself as a relentless man-hunter in Western attire.

His talent for tracking in the wild and uncanny ability to draw conclusions from observation about his immediate surrounding, plants, trees and animals has a prominent role in Winds of Evil – which adds an additional layer of interest to the plot. But more on that later.

The setting of the book is a small, wind-swept township in the dusty outback of New South Wales, called Carie, which is ruled over by the owner and licensee of the only hotel in town, Mrs. Nelson. She clinched her rule over the town by holding the mortgages on most of the property there, but it was a quiet, peaceful settlement. That is, until the murders started happening.

Two years prior to the story's opening, the body of a young, half-aborigine girl, Alice Tindell, was found on the bank of a watering hole: she had been strangled! A police sergeant from Broken Hill came down to investigate the case, but failed to uncover as much as a shadow of a motive for the murder. The story was repeated a year later when a recently arrived laborer, Frank Marsh, was found near a fence gate with strangulation marks on his throat. Only two facts could be asserted with certainty: they were both strangled to death and their killer struck when "the wind sang its menacing song" – assuring "the strangling brute" that the storm of dust and sand would wipe all of his tracks out of existence. So the case requires the attention of an expert tracker and Bony is dispatched to this "wind-created hell."

Bony takes on the identity of a fence-rider, named "Joe Fisher," who finds an ally in the local police officer, Mounted-Constable Lee, but also a common enemy in the Sergeant Simone from Broken Hill – whose uncouth personality and bully-boy tactics were completely useless in this bush case.

As Lee observed, "you can't get anything out of bush people by bullying them." Bony further notes that "the detection of criminals in a city is much easier than the detection of the rarer criminal in the bush," because the city criminal "operated against a static background," such as a house or a street, but the background of this case is "composed of ceaselessly moving sand" and "exposed to the constant action of sun and wind."

Bony gives an interesting demonstration on how the interpret the many hints left behind in open wild of the Australian outback, which consist of a series of observation about twisted tree branches, green tree bark and wisps of brittle grass that was left behind in abandoned nesting holes – all of them lineup to form a route along the creeks. These places are described with Upfield's accustomed vividness and given such unusual names as Nogga Creek, Catfish Hole and Wirragata Station. While roaming around these places, Bony meets an array of equally colorful and unusually named characters such as Hang-dog Jack, Bill the Cobbler and Dogger Smith.

This makes Winds of Evil as rich in character, setting and atmosphere as all of his other Australian-set mystery novels, but, what really deserves praise, is how the extremely simplistic plot was handled.

Despite the appearance of both murders and several attempted murders, the killer does not use the sand storms as a cover for his crimes, but is "periodically governed by his lust to kill" and this urge to kill seems to coincide with "the rising wind." So it is very obvious Bony is tangling with a mentally disturbed individual and this leaves no room for the clever serial-killer devices of the Golden Age. However, Upfield expertly avoided bitter disappointment with a clever bit of misdirection. Oh, the false solution that sprang from this was bitterly disappointing and was afraid I had to write another lukewarm review, but the twist, revealing the actual murderer, made more than up for this and the misdirection also made a part of the murderer's action easier to swallow – which drew on Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (1912). But more acceptable and down to earth.

I would not place Winds of Evil among the very best of Upfield's work, which includes Venom House (1952) and Cake in the Hat Box (1954), but it's a very solid and remarkable entry in the series. And one that precedes the modern serial killer novel by several decades. So it's a very interesting read all around.

The Mouse Trap

"Give a man enough rope and he'll hang himself."

- American proverb 

Last month, I reviewed a Gothic-style mystery novel, called Venom House (1952), which received a glowing notice from my side and concluded that blog-post with a promise to return to Arthur W. Upfield's crime-fiction more often. So here we're again!

Bony and the Mouse (1959) has an alluring sounding, alternative book-title, namely Journey to the Hangman, but the original one fits the plot better. The book is a late entry in the Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte series, but follows a familiar pattern of the series: a terrible crime has been committed in a far-flung corner of the Australian continent and the passage of time deadened the trail – at which point the authorities assign the cold-case to Bony.

Bony is a blue-eyed, brown-complexioned man of mixed heritage, a "half-caste," who can be accurately described as a relentless, but patient, man hunter in a three-piece suit with a police badge. He can stake out a spot for weeks, follow any trail across miles of desert land or dense bushes and find a body by observing the behavior of scavengers. Simply put, he is the ideal investigator to break open a cold, dead-end investigation. You can find aspects of all of these elements in Bony and the Mouse, which was written and published on the tail-end of the genre's Golden Era.

The backdrop of the story is a small, fictional mining town, called Daybreak, which Upfield placed in the Western part of Australia. But the place is best known as the land of Melody Sam.

Daybreak is a one-pub town and the place is founded, owned and ran by an old-time prospector, Melody Sam. He financed and built the general store, church and even a school of arts, but was prevented, by the authorities, to do the same for the police station and post-office – preventing him from completely dominating the town. Well, on paper, anyway.

Even so, Melody Sam turns out to be a rather sympathetic, if a somewhat eccentric, character who means well and his personality plays nicely off Bony. Particularly towards the end of the story. As the town patriarch, he took care of the town and it was as peaceful a place as one can expect from such an outpost, but then the murders happened.

The first victim was an aborigine girl, named Mary, who was employed by the parson and his wife as a maid, but, one night, she was lured from the house and had her head clubbed in – which was, initially, written off as a tribal killing. Then a second inhabitant of Daybreak was brutally murdered: the wife of a cattleman, Mrs. Lorelli, was chocked to death in the kitchen of her homestead. Finally, a young lad who worked at the local garage got a knife across his windpipe near the mine. Your name does not have to be Sherlock Holmes to observe that "there was no pattern in method," but the murderer left an abundance of footprints that apparently belonged to a person with "a slight limp in the right leg."

A youthful delinquent, Tony Carr, seems an obvious suspect, but the local police is unable to bring any direct evidence home to the young boy and he has some people within the town who are on his side – closing the book on the murders as fast as they had began. And thus the trail began to grow cold. So the Australian police apparatus dispatched Bony to the small town and he assumed the identity of an itinerant horse-breaker, Nat Bonnar.

As Nat the horse-breaker, Bony takes approaches the problem from several different angles. One of the town's people, Sister Jenks from the hospital, recognized him as Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte and he employs her as "the magnifying glass" to examine both the victims and "all others living in and about Daybreak" – as well as interacting with the locals as a newly arrived yardman. He's also given an opportunity to display some rudimentary tracking skills when inspecting a fresh track of footprints, but, mostly, he has to confine himself to playing the part of the patient cat who lays in wait for a fidgety mouse.

One of the latter chapters, titled "Bony Smells a Mouse," gives an exposition of the psychology of the patient cat and the fidgety mouse, which illustrates the relationship between the undercover police-inspector and the hidden killer. After the cat "sniffs at the hole," assuring there's a mouse within, he "settles in a coma of patience," but the mouse, "being a natural fidget," cannot stay inactive for very long – and he must adventure. Every time, the mouse ventures further out of his hole and this will eventually prove fatal for the pip-squeak.

There is, however, one downside to this method of patience: a fourth murder is nearly impossible to prevent, but it shows there's truth in the old adage that if you give a man enough rope he'll hang himself. And the illustration of the cat and mouse proved prophetic for the capture of the murderer, which is done in a great scene spread across the final chapters. It shows that Upfield really knew how to write a yarn.

However, I have one single complaint about the plot of Bony and the Mouse: the motivation that fueled the murders was not very original and Upfield was not even the first mystery writer to refurbish this plot-idea by 1959, which was slightly disappointing. I suspected such a game was being played, but I was hoping Upfield would pull-off a different kind of solution. Regardless, Bony and the Mouse was still a very readable detective story with lots of great characters, atmosphere, some unusual detective work and lots of vivid local color – which truly never fails to impress me in this series. Obviously, the English-born Upfield loved his adopted homeland and setting has always been one of his strong suits.

I also reviewed: The Bone is Pointed (1938), An Author Bites the Dust (1948), Venom House (1952) and Cake in the Hat Box (1954)

An Unnatural Place

"This is a house of evil—of evil, I tell you!"

- Hannah (Agatha Christie's "The House of Lurking Death," from Partners in Crime, 1929)  

Back in February, I reviewed An Author Bites the Dust (1948) by Arthur W. Upfield, in which he transplanted his series character, Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte, from Australia's dense bushes and sun-blasted plains to a small, picturesque valley town – where a pretentious, snobby novelist and literary critic had bitten the dust.

One of the draws of the series is tailing Bony, as he tracks across stretches of dessert or cuts a way through a sweltering green hell, but regardless, the book worked surprisingly well as a quiet, domicile detective novel. In many ways, the book reads a warm, loving homage to the mystery writers from Upfield's time. He would resort back to this traditionalists approach for the writing of Venom House (1952), but this time the earmarks of his descriptive outback-fiction left their mark on both the writing and the plot.

In his review of the book, Curt Evans described Venom House as "a throwback to the Victorian sensation novel" or "the Gothic tale," which is a fair description for a story about a decaying mansion, a cursed family and even a mad relative, but the book is much more than a mere nostalgia act – as it did more than just play a familiar tune on those Victorian-era tropes. So it's not entirely harkening back to the days of the Victorian and Gothic tales of crime and horror, such as was the case with The Third Victim (1941) by J. Jefferson Farjeon, but stands comparison with John Dickson Carr's Poison in Jest (1932).

Speaking of Carr, I think he would've probably approved of the setting of the story and the haunted history clinging to the place.

The "wretched history" of the Answerth clan is firmly rooted "in evil times" and "evil has clung to it all way down the years," which began when the first Morris Answerth of the family came down from Brisbane in a covered wagon – collecting "a dozen runaway convicts" and a woman, "he bought with two gallons of rum," along the way. They laid claim to all of the land in the area, but they had to fight over it with the natives. A battle that had been indisputably won by the settlers, but a lot of blood had to be shed to secure the claim to the land. According to local legends, the last of the Aborigines from the region "pointed the bone at them and their descendants," which for many is an explanation as to why misfortune, tragedy and death has stalked the family for generations. It's also the reason why locals refer to the place as Venom House.

A number of family members have committed suicide, were flung off a horse or simply murdered. The erection of the titular house was as costly in human life as it was in material resources, because the builders were flogged or shot when a strike occurred. A river once "snaked over the valley," but "a cyclone or two" and hundreds of tons of dirt chocked the natural outlet to the sea – which flooded the land and created a dreary moat around the house called Answerth's Folly. Dead or dying trees surround the house and swampy waters. It seems like a perfect place to dump a body or two and that's exactly what happened!

Before the story's opening and arrival of Bony, two bodies were pulled from the dark, murky waters of the Folly: the first body belonged to a local butcher, Edward Carlow, who had been forcefully held under water and the other one, elderly Mrs. Answerth, had been strangled to death.

Bony finds a small, close-knit group of people on the artificial island and they make for interesting posse of potential killers. First of all, there are the two sisters, Mary and Janet. As Bony observed, "no two sisters could be more widely apart than these," which is true in both physic and personality: Mary is a large, rude and discourteous Amazon who could take down anyone in a brawl. Janet has more refined and feminine personality, which comes from having enjoyed a first-class education and assumed control over the family after their father passed away. They have to manage their local empire of cattle stations and flocks of sheep, but they're not particular fond of each other and this provided Bony with several angles to the murders.

There's also a half-brother, Morris Answerth, who's the son of the dead woman, Mary and Janet's stepmother, but he suffers from arrested development and has the mind of a child. As a result, he spends all of his days locked away in his bedroom and is always dressed as a schoolboy. Usually, these kind of mentally ill or disturbed characters aren't the most convincingly-drawn characters in traditionally-minded detective stories, but I found Morris to be a surprising exception to this rule and his childish manners were often convincingly played up – such as his pathetic childish reaction of wonder and want when sees a pocket light for the very first time. The housekeeper-and cook, Mrs. Leeper, who had been the matron of a large mental hospital, rounds out the household. She has been saving money to buy her own hospital and a perfect character to run the day-to-day routine of that decaying madhouse.

However, my favorite characters from the book were two of the hanger-on's and they had, alas, only minor roles in the story. The first is a bright, young and a somewhat reckless driver, named Mike Falla, who tells to Bony that "a bloke's not a real driver if he has to use brakes." Bony takes him along for one part of his investigation, regarding the theft of bales of wool, which showed why Falla deserved a larger part in the story. He would have been perfect as an Archie Goodwin-type of character to Bony's Nero Wolfe. The second character was an elderly, former stockman, Albert Blaze, who tells Bony about the history of the family and place, but he was basically one of those coarse, rugged and rough-tongued outback characters Upfield was so good at describing.

Bony roams around this slightly grotesque gallery of suspects and mournful surroundings, asking questions and poking around in rooms, which is what one comes to expect of a fictional police officer from this era and gives the plot a far more traditional structure – especially compared to such unorthodox entries in the series such as Man of Two Tribes (1956) and The Valley of Smugglers (1960).

The final chapters is somewhat of a departure from this traditional approach and has Bony sneaking back into the pitch-black home, under the cover of night, where he finds a battle of wits and hatred is fought out in the dark. It's not battle that concludes with pulling the rug from beneath your feet, but one that makes sense and neatly ties up all of the loose ends. You can argue that the solution is almost too neat and clean, but a dark, brooding ending would have left the door open to a sequel, which would have never happened with this series.

So the ending also closed the book on several generations' worth of gruesome deaths and domestic violence, which makes for an excellent read and another top-notch entry in this series. I really love Upfield's writing and should return to his stories more often. In the meantime, you should make an effort to discover these books for yourself.

Literally Dead

"One reader's literature is another reader's garbage can liner... whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."

- Elizabeth George 

Arthur W. Upfield was an Englishman transplanted to Australia and exploring the outback as a Jack-of-all-trades provided him with an opportunity to accumulate a vast wealth of knowledge, experience and understanding about his adopted homeland – which served him well when he finally settled down behind a typewriter. However, the aim of his literary ambitions reached far beyond a volume of reflections on his Australian experiences.

Upfield was far above mere literature and pursued one of the noblest ambitions of man: to craft and forge great, imperishable detective stories that'll be with us long after their creators became dust. This was a task that lasted for several decades, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, which saw the publications of twenty-nine novels about Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte of the Queensland Police.

The Barrekee Mystery (1929) introduced and added a detective to the genre who was truly unique in every single aspect of his character. Bony is of mixed race, a "half-caste," who drew on both his white and aborigine heritage to ascend the ranks of the police force. A tracker and hunter in a suit who can stake out a desolate location for weeks, track across endless, sun-blasted planes and dust choked flatlands or hunt down anyone who sought refuge from the law in the dense bushes of the Australian outback – giving this series a distinct and unique character of its own. But, sometimes, Upfield confronted his creation with, what could be labeled, as a domesticated murder case.

An Author Bites the Dust (1948) is the 11th entry in the series and takes place in the fictitious town of Yarrabo, situated in the valley of the real Yarra River, where two of the ringleaders of the Australian literati have settled down. Mervyn Blake is a novelist, critic and president of the Australian Society of Creative Writers, but, above everything else, he's a snob with a bloated opinion about the importance of his own contribution to the field of Australian literature. His wife, Janet, only published several short stories and some verses, but she is right beside her husband as they organize weekend parties for a small coterie of back-slapping authors/critics – who go through great pains to differentiate "between literature and commercial fiction."

As to be expected, they fancied themselves to be the pedestal the first column was erected on, but the Australian public response was, "if this was literature," they "would have nothing to do with it." Hear, hear!

You'll get a glimpse of the nature of these people when the reader is allowed, briefly, to be a silent observer at one of their gathering. There's a haughty response to detective-and commercial fiction when, while "discussing the novel and novelists," someone accidentally mentioned "the atrocious efforts of a 'whodunit' writer," because their sole interest is Australian literature and the influence their small clique "may exert upon its development." It is also stated "there was never yet a best-seller that had any claims to being good literature" and with literature they meant the kind that is "understood by the cultured." Thankfully, the end of that particular chapter reports to the reader the unexpected and inexplicable passing of Mervyn Blake.

Blake is found on the floor of his writing room, clawing the closed door, but the local authorities are unable to determine how he had died and the result is an open verdict, which leads the case to grow cold over the stretch of several months. Until, that is, Superintendent Bolt puts Bony on the case, because he did not want the case to become stone cold and believed the peculiar circumstances would interest him – which it did.

So Bony becomes a paid lodger of the next-door neighbor of the Blakes, Miss Pinkney, who shares her home with the memories of her dearly departed brother and an enormous all-black cat. The animal listens to the name Mr. Pickwick and is fond of playing with an old, gnawed ping-pong ball, which will eventually provide Bony with an important clue that puts him on the path towards the solution.

In spite of the months that have passed and the scattered group of suspects, An Author Bites the Dust can still be classified as a traditional mystery with a closed-circle of suspects. Considering the characteristics and profession of the victim, as well as that of his potential murderers, I got the impression Upfield purposely lifted Bony from his preferred surroundings in order to explore a traditionally plotted murder in a domestic surrounding – because he reportedly really hated those kind of critics and some of them were apparently modeled on real-life examples. The story also impressed me as an unabashed homage to his fellow mystery writers and everyone who attempted to write exciting stories. Upfield mentioned Joseph Conrad, John Buchan and S.S. van Dine, but there's also a character in the book, a mystery writer by the name of Clarence B. Bagshott, who impressed me as the Ariadne Oliver to Upfield's Agatha Christie.

Now that I’ve mentioned Christie, the story and plot seems like a conscious imitation of one of the British Crime Queen: there's a very bizarre, but original, poison used that you would expect to find an Edgar Allan Poe story, but a Van Dinean footnote assured the reader the substance was not an unknown poison as it was authenticated by Prof. Alfred Swaine Taylor – which can be looked up in a dusty old book titled The Principles and Practices of Medical Jurisprudence (1873). There's the depiction of Miss Pinkney, which is one of the kindest and warmest I have seen of a spinster in mystery fiction, but also the type of character you'd expect to find in Crime Queen novel.

But the most attractive aspect of the book is Upfield giving a well-crafted finger to the no fun having literary crowd who look down their nose at, what they call in Australia, commercial fiction.

So, An Author Bites the Dust was a bit different from the books that initially lured me to the series, such as Death of a Lake (1954), Cake in the Hate Box (1954) and Man of Two Tribes (1956), but, as is obvious from this review, I enjoyed this little sidetrack in the series. And I think it's safe to say that I share some opinions with Upfield on what's good fiction. Even though I still haven't read Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), which I have remedy one of these days.