What Book to Read?

Here are some comments on two crime stories by relatively new Australian crime writers, and one by one of most established in that genre – though he’s not Australian by birth, and it isn’t set here. Compared to him, however, the other two still have some ground to make up.

Ecstasy Lake, by Alastair Sarre

Ecstasy Lake (2016) is the second of Sarre’s crime stories, featuring Steve West, ex professional footballer, now mining engineer. I liked the first one, Prohibited Zone (2011), which I reviewed here, and this one has many of the same strengths. I’m not sure the plot holds up quite as well though. West arrives back in Adelaide at the behest of his old friend Tasso, who believes a geologist they both know has found gold in outback South Australia. The only problem is he’s been murdered. West is soon involved in a gang war in Adelaide over drugs, as well as moves by Tasso to get an exploration licence for the area covering the putative find. And then there is the question of who killed their friend. All this provides plenty of scope for action, but I found the plot overall lacks the coherence of structure of the previous book. And some of the characters, like Tasso and his off-sider Bert are just a bit too convenient: Tasso is just too rich and Bert is just too competent, making them functions of the plot not fully credible characters. (Bert reminds me of Cam Delray in the Jack Irish stories, always turning up with a car or a gun just when he’s needed. Maybe such a device is always needed by amateur heroes.) West is an enjoyable character, with plenty of zippy dialogue, and I enjoy the way Sarre writes. There’s lots of Adelaide in it too – so no wonder I like it.

In The Evil Day, by Peter Temple

Written in 2002, this is Peter Temple’s sixth crime novel. I’ve read and enjoyed his four Jack Irish books, all except the last of which come before this one. I reviewed the first one, Bad Debts, including comments on the telemovie made from it here. (There’s a 2016 TV series too.) But what made me read this one is the excellence of his two subsequent novels, The Broken Shore (2005), reviewed here, and Truth (2009) reviewed here. I think both these brilliantly supersede the crime genre by virtue of the quality of their writing and social commentary. Here’s some support for that view. So I was interested to see how this earlier book stands up in comparison. Unlike these, this one is set primarily in Hamburg, and briefly in South Africa (where Temple grew up), London and Wales.

There are two main characters, Con Niemand, ex-soldier now working in security, initially in Johannesburg, and John Anselm, a journalist once held hostage in Beirut, now also working in security but the surveillance rather than the muscle kind. In the course of his work, Niemand comes across the film of a massacre somewhere in Africa. He tries to sell it, and then is the subject of a number of attempts to kill him. The company Anselm works for is conducting illegal surveillance of two businessmen, apparently for an entity wishing to recover assets from them. Inevitably, the two stories intersect. I found the Anselm story a bit confusing at times, but there’s quite a big hint which helped make sense of it. Niemand is a conventional tough hero, extraordinarily resourceful in escaping his pursuers, and extraordinarily lucky in finding someone to help him. Anselm is a more fully drawn character, whose feelings and relationships ring rather truer, and whose life in Hamburg is more fully fleshed out. His dialogue in particular is spare and effective. The plot is quite clever, but relies a bit much on conventional crime genre conventions, particularly happenstance; Temple admits as much when Anselm says he ‘knew the buoyancy of the moment when intuition intersected with luck’. It’s also a bit violent for me – though that doesn’t mean it’s very violent. Overall, a very good crime novel, but not rising above genre like Truth or The Broken Shore.

The Falls, by B. Michael Radburn

Published in 2016, this is the third of Radburn’s books, though the first I’ve read. There are two main male leads, Taylor Bridges, a national park ranger who appears in Radburn’s previous book, The Crossing, and Quade Marsden, a detective who has been demoted to uniformed sergeant in a small town in Gippsland, Victoria, apparently as a punishment for exposing corruption (‘Whistle-blower or snitch?’ asks one character). Just before they are forced to flee a bushfire, two rock climbers discover a body in a canyon, but the site is destroyed by the fire. Bridges, a close family friend of one of the climbers, agrees to help Marsden with the geography of the area. But the two discover not only the entrance to an old lost mine, but a number of other grave sites. More help is called in, headed up by Detective Sandra Norton. The action moves between these three, but also involves the viewpoints of the climbers, who were looking for the mine, and someone who could be the villain. Could stories about a religious cult that centred on the mine be true? Could the descendants of the family that owned the mine by involved? Can Detective Norton flush out the murderer? The characters all have a bit of back story, and are adequate for their part in the plot, if not fully convincing. Radburn seems to subscribe to the idea that something dramatic has to happen every three pages, and I wondered if he were writing with a TV adaption in mind; both plot and landscape seem to invite this. I had hopes for the plot, which seemed to be developing nicely into a satisfactory jigsaw, but by the end there were some pieces that didn’t fit, and a strong whiff of deus ex machina in the resolution. Still, it kept me going on a hot summer’s day. But please Mr Radburn it’s bushfires, not wildfires. That’s what they have in America.