Skip to main content

Bibliophile reviews Man of Two Tribes



Author: Arthur Upfield
Series detective: Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte
No. in series: 20
Year of publication: 1956
Type of mystery: Murder, missing person
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Nullarbor Plain, Australia, 1950’s
Number of deaths: 1
Some themes: Kidnapping, fame-seeking, sexual power and it’s misuse, justice

Story: Bony is sent to try to find a murderess who was recently acquitted of the murder of her husband because she managed to win over the jury. She was last seen on a train going through the Nullarbor Plain, an arid, desolate area on the edge of the Australian desert, and then she disappeared mysteriously in the middle of nowhere. There is evidence that she may be involved in espionage and therefore Bony disguises himself and sets out into the Plain, ostensibly to check on some dingo traps, but really to look around for signs of the missing woman and to try to locate a mysterious helicopter known to have been in the area that night. What he discovers is something he didn’t expect at all. When he finds himself captive among a colony of convicted murderers he has to use all of his wits and survival skills to stay alive and get out of there.

Review: This has to be one of the strangest mysteries I have read. As well as being a nested-doll story, it is a hybrid between a country house-type mystery (the set-up in the middle part of the book is classic country house: a small stage with a small number of suspects, all of whom have motives for the murder), a survival thriller and a prison-break story. The storytelling goes some way towards compensating for the strange genre-crossing, but even all of Upfield’s subtle, black humour and the evocative descriptions of Australian nature and animals and the menace they present to the inexperienced only take it so far. Still, for some reason, I mostly liked it. Upfield gets a point for playing fair with the reader, unlike the previous two books I reviewed by him. The clues to the murder are all laid out for the reader to puzzle together.

Rating: Not the best I have read by Upfield, but has its good points. 3 stars.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
I know.. strange to be posting comments on something from back in February but if you like the Bonaparte series you might want to try a couple of contemporary Australian indigenous books:

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/index.php/Category:Indigenous

I can definitely recommend Diamond Dove and Scream Black Murder.

Love your blog, thank you for the recent discussion on the Jar City Movie.
December 22, 2006 2:17 am
Bibliophile said…
Thank you for the recommendations :-)
December 22, 2006 2:29 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more