REVIEWS
GILES HUGO
FICTION, reviews
Peter Temple - The Broken Shore
TEXT PUBLISHING, 2005
Dick-Fic is like making love to a beautiful woman, as ‘Swiss’ Tony would say – all smoke and mirrors, deception and perception, craft and cunning. So listen, Dogbreath, you just can’t judge a book by eyeballing its cover – there’s always more to a body than meets the eye, and in Dick-Fic there are always enough fresh bodies around the corner to delight any undertaker.
CueNoir– shrouded lamps shiver in the foggy drizzle, shadowy figures glimpsed doing or dreaming murky things through the blinds.
Am I right? Or am I right? quoth he, examining the bloodstains with nose, finger and tongue – strawberry jam!!! – and assuming the side-of-mouth tones of Philip ‘The Singing Detective’ Marlow, a suitable guise for pondering the undying appeal of the genre.
In particular, Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore, in which an ageing dick is posted away from the big-city homicide squad to his home town to recover from injuries sustained while fighting the sordid, almost-thankless fight.
Detective Senior Sergeant Joe Cashin’s recuperation is interrupted when local squire and philanthropist Charles Bourgoyne is found bashed unconscious in his home. Suspicion falls on locals Donny Coulter and Luke Ericsen, from the Daunt Settlement, a nearby Aboriginal enclave.
They have absconded in a ute to Sydney and are reported to have tried to sell a rare watch, like one missing from Bourgoyne’s home. When it is learnt they are on the way back, it is decided to intercept them before they enter the ‘Indian territory’ of the Daunt. Because Ericsen is the nephew of Bobby Walshe, an Aboriginal activist now standing for the United Australia Party, the police hierarchy insist that an Aboriginal, Detective Sergeant Paul Dove, is brought in on the case.
The interception is a fiasco – the kids run a red light, hit a pole and emerge with a shotgun. The police respond and Ericsen and another Aboriginal youth, Corey Pascoe, die. The survivor, Donny, is jailed, bailed, then suicides. And Bourgoyne’s life support is turned off.`
Case closed? Ah, but we are only on page 168. There is obviously more to this than meets the eye – even a blind Venetian could tell you that, old darling.
By page 345, much more has been explained, ugly things have crawled from under harmless rocks, worms have turned turtle, and more stiffs have come to light through veils of miasmic fetor.
Peter Temple is acclaimed as the best of Down-under Dick-Fic, even favourably compared with fellow comrades in crime James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard. Having read all of the former, and a few of the latter, I would agree. And, having become slightly jaded by Ellroy’s evermore gratuitous violence, often riffing to a pun-itive accompaniment, I welcome Temple’s more restrained, realistic delivery.
His characters are dinkum folk – the haves, have-nots and all the in-between schemers – well-defined by their verbal sparring, idiosyncrasies and rich and varied pasts. Equally, the darker forces are not just gratuitously evil, but believably motivated – including some victim/villains, whose vengeful inclinations are understandable, if extreme.
Cashin, in particular is well-drawn; a life-battered man trying to find truth, or a reasonable approximation, in a terminally toxic world – ‘Cashin thought that there was no firm ground in life. Just crusts of different thicknesses over the ooze.’ That ooze includes ambitious politicians, small-town psychos, seriously bent racist cops and pillars of the community whose souls are deeply buried sewers.
Endearingly, Cashin finds relative peace in opera, reading Conrad, and his pair of poodles – while battling lingering pain from his injuries, a kind of survivor guilt, and the shadows of a disturbed childhood. Yet his worst agony is in discovering some of those he trusted most have deceived him and lied.
Altogether a compelling tale from the diseased underbelly of Oz.
But for me the denouement is marred by being truncated; the outcome of a kind of stone-paper-scissors death match – played out with gun, knife and diamond-tipped crucifix – is ambiguous. What exactly happened? Fading to blackout at the climactic moment without a final accounting left me wondering not whodunit, but who all got done? Did the priest survive, and what of the ‘already once dead’ Jamie?
I mean, if you’re tying up all the loose ends – which otherwise Temple does as deftly as a hangman with professional pride in his noose – what’s with the body count? A sequel?
Am I wrong? Or am I wrong? !
GILES HUGO lives in Hobart, plays pool, loves beagles, writes fiction. His novel in progress is The Bishop’s Wife.
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