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.

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.
Bibliophile said…
Thank you for the recommendations :-)

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

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

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme