Category: Adult Fiction

Ruddy Gore, by Kerry Greenwood

‘Come for a walk, Phryne dear,’ said Bernard, looking harried. . . He lead her out into the passage and said rapidly, ‘I need your help. This is only the latest thing that has gone awry. Let me take you to supper, Phryne darling, and I’ll tell you all about it.’

Having been involved in a skrimish with thugs on her way to the theatre, the last thing Phryne wants or expects is to be involved in more off-stage dramas. But her luck is not running well. An actor has been killed while he’s been performing on stage. Sir Bernard, the company manager, wants Phryne to solve the msytery.

But the murder is not the only mishap. A ghost has been haunting the theatre, things have been going missing and the entire cast and crew are on edge.

This is the seventh Phryne Fisher mystery, first published in 1995 and now republished by Allen & Unwin. As well as an intriguing mystery played out in the theatre, it is also the book which introduces the handsome Lin Chun, Phryne’s oriental lover who plays a role in each subsequent title.

Phryne Fisher is a sassy yet classy private detective with a taste for the mysterious, as well as for the fine things in life – fast cars, good wine, beautiful clothes and more.

Ruddy Gore, which takes its name from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Ruddigore (the production on show at the theatre) is an enjoyable and intriguing offering.

Ruddy Gore, by Kerry Greenwood
Allen & Unwin, 2004, first published by McPhee Gribble, 1995

Queen of the Flowers, by Kerry Greenwood

Phryne (she tells us it rhymes with briny) Fisher is a detective with a difference. Living in 1920s Melbourne she is rich, sassy and classy. She’s not in the business to make money or earn fame, but seems instead to be motivated by a fascination for a good mystery and a desire to help those who are worthy of such assistance. She is not above bending the law when it suits her ends and has friends on both sides of the law, who come together to help out when needed.

In Queen of the Flowers Phryne chases a mystery which becomes increasingly personal. She has been chosen as Queen of the Flowers for the 1928 Flower Parade. When one of her four flower maidens disappears, she is called in to investigate. Has the girl run away or has she been kidnapped?

Phryne has no sooner located the missing girl than one of her own adopted daughters, Ruth, disappears. Ruth has been searching for her birth father and, it seems, has run off for a reunion. In the midst of the Flower Festival festivities Phryne must struggle to reunite her family. She might also be struggling to make it to the festival alive.

This is the fourteenth Phryne Fisher novel and shows all the careful research and excellent story-spinning qualitites of the previous installments. Greenwood’s passion for history and mystery combine in a seductive tale which draws readers in to the life of this saucy detective.

Queen of the Flowers, by Kerry Greenwood
Allen & Unwin, 2004

Cry the Night, by Glenn Miller

Reviewed by Molly Martin

A little boy punished by being put into a sack and suspended from a beam in a cellar at the hands of an unbalanced mother is later a youngster made to stand in a darkened cellar for hours on end.

The body of ten-year-old girl, an extended, fruitless search, and a missing six-year-old set in motion a twenty-year odyssey. The town of Traviston, Australia is forever changed in 1981 with the murder of Sarah Nielson and the disappearance of her little sister Rebecca. The only thing left behind were Rebecca’s panties and her dress. Residents who once trusted their neighbours now became suspicious of those living nearby. Children were kept safe at home behind closed doors, or in some cases the family packed and moved to get away from the horror.

On a pleasant day many years after the brutal murder; teenager Sally Smith is happy to accept a ride from an elderly man who has known her family for years. For Sally her ride with a trusted old friend turns into a nightmare from which escape seems impossible. When sixteen-year-old Kirsty and her five-year-old friend Sam set out for a walk on the cattle property where Kirsty is spending her school holiday with the family of her mother’s close friend she knows nothing of the hidden dangers lurking not so far away. A secret place, youngsters filled with a sense of adventure, and a cave filled with bodies all are part of this tale of child abuse, horror and alarm.

Cry the Night is a psychological thriller, set in the austere Australian wilderness, where young bushwalkers are pitted at night against the relentless unadulterated evil stalking them across remarkably arduous terrain.

Twenty years of secrets buried in the hidden backcountry wilds of Australia lie shielded by a lunatic. At an inaccessible creek on the brim of the wilderness where the body of a murdered ten-year-old girl is discovered, the narrative begins. The recital next moves to the present, with four young men and one teenage girl determining they will investigate the craggy valleys, ridges and caverns near where they are staying on a large cattle property. The bushwalkers unintentionally intrude upon the perilous mystery kept secret for more than two decades when they enter the region which a psychopath believes to be his. A demented serial killed living in a world filled with sexual darkness and hallucination will confront the young people who find their day walk becoming a fight for survival during which they will confront their worst fears. The evil stalking them will bring the youngsters faced to face with a terror beyond their wildest imagination.

Well fleshed, potent characters each have their own particular disposition. Twists and turns keep the reading guessing in this tale of a monster created by the derangement of a parent. Specific details of the murderer’s life are set down in fantasy, dreams, memories and loathsome actions by an almost sixty year old man who might be any one of the several fellows fitting that description who live in the area.

Not for the faint of heart, nor for a dark and stormy night when you are home alone.

Cry the Night, by Glenn Miller
Sunny Side Up Publishing, available in ebook or paperback formats.

This review contributed by Molly Martin.

The Hunter, by Julia Leigh

Reviewed by Alex Marshall

The Hunter is an extremely interesting first novel from one of Australia’s up and coming novelists. I found this book a gripping and intriguing read from the first page to the last, despite the fact that the novel focuses upon the inner life of one character who does not have a strong attachment to the outside world. The plot is very simple. A mercenary is sent to search for the fabled Tasmanian Marsupial Tiger, or Thylacine in the heart of the Tasmanian wilderness. If he finds this animal he will become very rich.

Like many great Australian novels,The Hunter focuses upon the individual’s relationship to the wilderness which he both depends upon to survive and which he also resents, hates and fears. He knows that he is a stranger to this place. As the silence of the wilderness grows around him the more the central character – who the reader only knows as ‘M’ – journeys into his memories that still haunt him.

In many ways M. is the classic Aussie male; silent, taciturn, inarticulate, single mindedly focused upon his work, unconscious of the outside world. But unlike the stereotype, ‘M’ is an individualist, he is not interested in reliance upon mates, nor does he believe in sharing with others, such as scientists or environmentalists his discovery of a thylacine. For him this is just a job, and what happens after the dog has been sold is not his concern.

Julia Leigh, who is probably more recognised outside of Australia than within, has created a novel that deceptively unravels the place of the Australian male psyche in a globalised world.

The Hunter, by Julia Leigh
Penguin, 1999

Moral Hazard, by Kate Jennings

Reviewed by Alex Marshall

This is a novel that sneaks up on you. The narrator is a freelance journalist who takes up a position as a speechwriter for a large banking organisation in order to afford the medical costs for her ill husband.

She hates her job, she hates the people she works for, believing that they are all parasites, and that nothing that she writes as a speechwriter has the least significance whatsoever. She has no life outside of of work, spending all of her free time caring for her husband, dying slowly from alzheimers disease. In short, she is in hell.

So what is the moral hazard of the novel’s title? It is the fear that pervades this book that the heroine of the story will become somehow complicit in this world that she hates, that she will somehow become a creature of this world, and lose her dignity as a human being.

She herself is not a particularly likable character. She has a kind of small ‘l’ liberal complaint against capitalism, while at the same time she is fixated by its apparent power, that appears in this novel almost omnipotent. She claims to be a radical, to have a knowledge of Marxism, yet she has been ground down by life, by her duty as a wife and as a citizen. Her closest friend, a colleague at work, she considers to be a terrible hypocrite, railing against the system while at the same time becoming very rich from its spoils.

It is this bitterness that gives the novel its authentic voice. It also gives the heroine’s character a taste of defeat for a life that in many other ways is full of strength and resilience.

Moral Hazard, by Kate Jennings
Picador Australia, 2003

Alex Marshall is a freelance writer and reviewer. You can visit his webpage here.

Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan

A good short story is not just a shorter version of the novel. Rather, it is something fluid – which exists both before and after the written version, both for the characters and, importantly, the reader. Whether the story is contemporary or historic, science fiction or fantasy, it should have readers eagerly turning the page, caught up in both action and emotion. Then, when it is finished, it should leave the reader thinking.

The ten stories in Black Juice achieve these criteria with aplomb. Each story captivates, even as it has the reader squirming with its ruthlessness, its glimpse into deep and dark human nature. Author Margo Lanagan makes the short story form her own, using it to provide extraordinary perspectives and insights.

Each story is unique, but the commonality which binds is the deliberate use of settings and situations which are unfamiliar, yet contain stories which reveal many familiar truths of humankind.

Lanagan’s stories are sure to be used in literature classrooms, but are also likely to find many fans among adult readers, who will find themselves unable to put the volume down.

Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan
Allen & Unwin, 2004

Earthly Delights, by Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Greenwood, creator of the 1920s sleuth Phryne Fisher, has a new, modern-day investigator to delight her fans. Corinna Chapman is a reformed accountant who, having escaped that profession and a boring marriage, now runs ‘Earthly Delights’, a city bakery in Melbourne. She lives in a 1920s apartment building where each flat is named after a Roman God and where the tenants are as colourful as a rainbow.

Corinna is content with her lot, until the morning she finds a drug addict dying outside her back door and later starts receiving threatening notes. Suddenly Corinna is entwined in the double mystery: who is killing the city’s drug-addicts and who is trying to get rid of Corinna and her fellow tenants.

Greenwood makes the transition from historical to contemporary seamlessly. Corinna Chapman is not just a modern-day Phryne Fisher, but there are enough of the ingredients which attract Greenwood’s readers to endear them to this new character. Notably familiar is the prevalence of good food and sensual assignations as well, of course, as a mystery which draws the reader inside the sleuth’s life.

Great reading.

Earthly Delights, by Kerry Greenwood
Allen & Unwin, 2004

The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

Reviewed by Alex Marshall

The novel is a tour de force. Peter Carey tackles one of the great myths of Australia, the figure of Ned Kelly, by recreating the unlettered Irish Australian voice of the angry young man that was Ned Kelly.

Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly is a decent young man, idealistic and naive, who is pushed into rebellion by the bullying of the corrupt and incompetent local police force. He is hard working, clean living, optimistic, strong willed and free spirited. The style of writing appears odd at first but as you read you become used to his style. It is catchy.

Peter Carey does not downplay Ned Kelly’s criminal background, rather he puts this to the foreground. Much of the novel is taken up with his apprenticeship with a bushranger. He puts this behind him, however, until his family is persecuted by the local forces of property owners and police.

Sometimes the style of the writing seems too Australian, as if this book was written with an eye to a foreign readership. It is as if it has to be proved that Ned Kelly is an Australian character and not a second hand Jesse James. As the Nobel prize winning writer Wole Soyinke once pointed out a tiger does not need to proclaim its tigerness.

At other times it seems as if the Kelly gang is being Americanised. For example when members of the gang ride in white dresses a link is made with Irish vigilante gangs, but also there is an unspoken comparison with the American Ku-Klux-Klan.

Overall this is a powerful novel that puts a new spin on a great Australian folk legend.

The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey
UQP, 2000

Alex Marshall is a freelance writer and reviewer. You can visit his webpage here.

Gang of Four, by Liz Byrski

When Isabel decides she needs a break she doesn’t opt for a couple of weeks in a classy resort. No, she wants to take a year out and leave her husband, children, grandchildren and friends behind while she backpacks across Europe. Feeling incomplete, she wants to do something for herself and, at the same time, get to know her dead mother better by retracing her journey decades ago.

When Isabel tells her closest friends – Sally Robin and Grace – of her plans, they initially think she’s crazy. But soon enough each of the remaining members of the ‘gang of four’ are embarking on their own journeys. Sally heads off to San Francisco for a year’s study, hoping also to lay a guilty secret to rest. Robin, sick of being ‘the other woman’, rents a country hideout, hoping for time to heal and to make plans for her future. Grace, the sensible one, isn’t sure she needs to ‘do’ anything, but finds herself heading off for a short holiday in England – where she has to confront someone she hardly knows: herself.

These four very different women, separated by geographical distance, but united by their decades-old friendship, each learn about themselves, their past and their future in very different ways. New friendships are formed, life-changing decisions are made, but when one of the friends needs the others, they are able to come together once more.

Gang of Four is a very different coming-of-age story in that the protagonists are all in their fifties. Author Liz Byrski does a superb job of crafting four very different stories which overlap, diverge and merge again throughout the book. The reader is given the opportunity to know each of the four women intimately and to witness their friendship and their growth on a first hand basis.

Superb.

Gang of Four, by Liz Byrski
Macmillan, 2004

Until Death, by Sandy Curtis

When Libby Daniels wakes, feeling fuzzy and hungover, she can’t believe what she sees. Two men are standing over her mother’s battered body. When she hears one man say “Libby killed her,” she knows she must get away. She flees to Brisbane, hoping to find refuge with her grandfather, who she hasn’t seen for fourteen years.

In Brisbane, however, she finds not her grandfather, but a stranger – Conor Martin – who takes her in and helps in. He could be Libby’s knight in shining armour – if he wasn’t hiding a terrible secret of his own.

Libby and Conor are forced to learn to trust each other in order to ensure their survival, as their respective enemies combine forces, determined to destroy them.

Until Death is a fast-paced thriller, with a twist of romance. This is the fourth offering from author Sandy Curtis who manages to make each successive book a little more complex.

A gripping read.

Until Death, by Sandy Curtis
Macmillan, 2004