What Book to Read?

This is the book which beat Michael Robotham’s The Night Ferry (my previous post) for the Ned Kelly award for Australian crime writing in 2007, and while I can see its virtues, I wouldn’t have given it first prize.

It is the fourth in a series of police procedurals featuring Detective Inspector Hall Challis and Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, who are based at the fictional town of Waterloo on the Mornington Peninsular outside Melbourne. Challis and Destry obviously have something of a history, but you don’t need to have read any of the earlier books to enjoy this one. And this time they are not working together. Challis has gone to visit his dying father in the mid north of South Australia; he also wants to find out more about the disappearance of his brother-in-law five years previously. He has left Ellen in charge of the Peninsular East Crime Investigation Unit; she is soon involved in the case of a missing child. There are therefore two stories in the book, linked only by the personal relationship between the two detectives.

The stories are told primarily from the point of view of Destry and Challis, but we also get the perspective of some of the other CIU detectives. This sounds a bit messy, but actually works well, as it keeps the tension going, both between the separate stories of Destry’s and Challis’s investigations, and within the case of the missing girl. It allows all of the detectives to contribute something different – though not always helpful – to the case, giving a depth to the story. It also gives space for realistic and empathetic character development; several of the characters face some sort of personal test in the story, not always successfully. Can Ellen cope with the extra responsibility? She feels ‘an ever-present, low-level anxiety’ – she believes her male colleagues ‘expected her to fail’. Challis rarely considers ‘his own heartaches and vulnerabilities’, but in his old family home, he has ‘things to face up to’.

Disher writes very convincingly about the daily realities of policing – the inefficient lab procedures, the squabbling over insufficient resources, the constraints of hierarchy. He also gives a detailed and rather depressing picture of life on the Peninsular; despite its natural beauty, there is much that is bleak and dysfunctional. Driving through Frankston, Ellen muses ‘Frankston is Australia … with its modest, usually disappointed expectations and achievements, its anxieties and conservatism … A great, banal sameness defines us, making us mostly soporific – but nasty if cornered’. Working as a detective is likely to give anyone a jaundiced view of the world, but there is relatively little joy for anyone in this book.

My problem is, as always, with the ending – of both Challis’s and Destry’s stories. Challis can’t conduct an official investigation; it is soon made clear he is treading on South Australian toes. His method has to be to ask questions, to make people uncomfortable. The result he gets seems to me contrived and akin to the ‘villain confesses all’ approach. Destry’s investigation produces much more evidence of who done it, and Disher has carefully prepared the sub-plot which ultimately intersects with the investigation. But there remains for me a whiff of deus ex machina about it. Not enough of a chain of evidence, in fact.

It’s quite clear by now that I’m an ending tragic. But don’t let that get in the way of reading Disher. In my view he’s not quite up there with Peter Temple at the very top of Australian crime writing, but he’s working in the same tradition, and doing it well. It’s difficult to compare him with Michael Robotham and his English settings, as the sense of place is so important in Disher’s work. But I still think Robotham is the better plotter. Now if Disher can just fix those endings …

Disher has written in a range of genres, including ‘general/literary’ novels, short stories and children’s books. Another Challis and Destry book, Blood Moon, came out in 2009 and he has recently revived his anti-hero career criminal Wyatt, winning the Ned Kelly for 2010 for Wyatt. Definitely worth another look. Check him out here.