Skip to main content

Mystery author #7: Arthur Upfield

Titles: The Battling Prophet & Bony and the Mouse (American title: Journey to the Hangman).
No. in series:19 & 24
Published: 1956 & 1959
Setting & time: Australia, 1950's (but has a timeless feel)
Availability: Both seem to be out of print, but are readily available second hand
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police detective

This time I read two books by the chosen author. Both books come from the same series, about Detective-Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte, an Australian half-aborigine, half-white police detective who uses his instincts as much as he does his police training and his clever mind to solve crimes, usually “cold” murders that other policemen have failed to solve. In fact, he specialises in cold cases. Bony, as he is known, is popular and there have been at least two television series, one based on the books, the other on the name and occupation.

Upfield writes with dry humour and is capable of letting the reader see the funny side of quite serious situations like murder. His character descriptions are rounded and realistic and human nature plays a big part in both books. The two books are totally different in set-up, but Bony’s work methods are similar in both: he quietly and unobtrusively becomes acquainted with the people around him, forms ideas and follows his instincts.

In The Battling Prophet, Bony is on holiday and goes to investigate the death of a man famous for his infallible weather predictions, at the behest of the man’s best friend. The friend claims that the man was murdered, while everyone else believes he died of alcohol poisoning. As the body has been cremated, there seems to be no way of proving it was murder, but the friend convinces Bony, who sets out to look for the murderer. There are plenty of suspects. Heirs, relatives, foreign agents and Australian secret service men are on the prowl, trying to locate the dead man’s notebook where he wrote down his weather prediction formulas. Any of them could have done the deed, and it all comes together in an interesting dance, sometimes funny, sometimes macabre. The solution is so obvious when Bony finally reveals it that you think “of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”. But you don’t, because Upfield breaks one of the cardinal rules of detective fiction – he keeps information that is known to the detective from the reader.

Upfield does the same thing in the other book, Bony and the Mouse. In that one, Bony goes undercover as a drifter to try to solve a series of murders in a small town. In that one, it is well-nigh impossible to guess who the killer is, although the motive can easily be guessed. The “siege” at the end of the book is a brilliant piece of psychological warfare, orchestrated by Bony, who is as much a psychologist as he is a policeman.

I suppose Upfield keeps these clues secret because Bony works intuitively, but it is still a bit annoying and suggests that he can't quite explain how Bony arrives at his conclusions.

Rating: Each book gets 3 stars and so does the author. Would have been 3+ and 4 but for the author giving the detective an unfair advantage over the reader. Am on the lookout for more, especially the beginning books in the series.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove