Murder in the Groove by Dave Warner

Dave Warner, one-time singer and satirist, has been at work as a detective story writer for a few years now, penning long excoriations of West Australia Inc. style shenanigans and, according to reports, working pretty much in the shadow of that L.A. master (with all his fizz and stammer and sparkle), the great James Ellroy. Whatever you make of him, Ellroy is at any rate a trash writer who wants to be great, who makes no bones about wanting to be the Tolstoy of crime writing. Dave Warner might seem to have come out from under the same trench coat given that his novel The City of Light actually won the West Australian Premier’s Award for fiction but in fact his new book Murder in the Groove is conventional in shape, rather charming in tone and distinctly low on machine gun yammer yammer prose. It’s a difficult book not to finish if you start it and I’m not surprised that this squat pocketbook with its iridescent green lizard on the cover and its burnt orange background plus guitar {all looking very seductive) has been selling out of bookshops everywhere. In fact, the cover although pleasing in itself (and not as downright unhelpful as the covers Text gives to that other sleuth-meister, Shane Maloney) doesn’t quite fit the bill because the ‘Lizard’ who figures in this book is not green and cute and fierce; he is long and thin and oh so cool and is the kind of thirtysomething ex-rock star you could imagine played in the movie by the older Noah Taylor or perhaps by a sardonic and chilled out Guy Pearce. ‘Lizard’, or Andrew Zirk as he is occasionally known to his intimates, did well out of rock music and even better out of dreaming up a pap TV show but he is trailed with the sorrow of the death of his girlfriend who was anorexic and lost the will to live. Zirk himself lives in some fabulously beautiful and expensive part of far-flung Sydney with his female butler Fleur, who needless to say adores him but is entangled with him in a kind of humoresque stand-off that involves lots of mutual lust and affection (even the arching suggestion of lerve) but which, for one reason or another of happenstance and mishap, resolved celibacy and lame-brained impercipience on Zirk’s part remains hands off. In this first of what one can only hope is a series extending long into the future, Zirk (who is, of course, descended from a long line of Hungarian Hussars) finds himself at a celebratory dinner in honour of (wait for it) Sydney Melbourne, the most odious and abusive of scumbag drug-stuffed Australian rockstars who finds himself, in the course of a crowded evening, dead; as does the head of his crew, the gloriously named Grog. So, who knocked them off? Was it Daphne the neurotic and dead-plain publicist who was besotted with Sydney Melbourne? Was it Cerise Du Pont, the Super Bitch manager with a dark past or Rocky, the record producer, who is into coke and horses? Or could it be Thistle the waif-like girlfriend with a head that seems as empty as her life history is blank? Dave Warner plays on the suspicion-engendering qualities of each member of his cast of glittering and shady characters. There’s a vengeful Preacher, some down and out gentlemen of the turf, a beautiful female singer – with the beguiling name of Sarah Sahara – an Asian couple, a group of street kids and a number of more or less believable policemen. More or less because the best and brightest of them, one Foster, is such an admirer of Lizard Zirk’s that he allows this would-be knight errant with tickets on himself to collaborate in the investigation. Then for no reason that seems to make much in the way of Aristotelian, or any other kind of structural sense Foster is hospitalised midway through the book and Zirk has to make do with his rather less respectful underling. It has to be admitted that in this, as in other, respects Murder in the Groove doesn’t quite live up to the promise of one of the more dashing starts to an Australian thriller since Shane Maloney had two people armed for sexual congress at the Botanical Gardens in the vicinity of not only a gallery opening but a recently dispatched corpse. But Dave Warner’s flaws are not fatal. He has the great gifts of the natural pulp fiction writer: unforgettably vivid characters (who can walk the catwalk of cliche without falling off) crisp, constructive dialogue that doesn’t go off the boil too often, and a passion for simile that’s like a juice extractor’s feeling for oranges. He is, in cold fact, a rather excessive sloppy writer. There are spelling mistakes (‘unctious’ for ‘unctuous’) and grammatical infelicities (‘Joseph Ireland looked like he may personally have chosen the collection’) that don’t bring glory on the publisher, as well as a certain inability in medias res to allow the plot complications to amass sufficiently or be arranged intriguingly or mysteriously enough for the action to compel attention for its own sake. Fortunately, this doesn’t matter too much because his human figures (and especially the supercool sadsack of a hero) are vivid enough to keep us going. Admittedly Warner could be more careful about his plotting and perhaps work more to enliven the action with set pieces like the opening to give it lightness and shade and the illusion of a middle as well as a beginning and an end. At times, Murder in the Groove is a little too much like a clever scriptwriter’s book or (for that matter) like a script which is clever but underdone. Something which is all concept and naked ‘appeal’ – like Good Guys, Bad Guys – but without enough complexity and detail underpinning the script. It doesn’t loom too large because David Warner gets away with it anyway. If Murder in the Groove is not as well written as its best moments might suggest, or anything like as classically well timed as the expectations it arouses, it nonetheless does that rare thing of creating a stereotype hero you will want to flesh out in your mind as a human being. Sometimes Zirk seems too much of a lizard, too cool for his own good. Sometimes his social perceptions smack of the social perceptions of a boy who had it easy making money milking the public. And sometimes he seems just a bit self-admiring in a way that sounds as though it might be just slightly reflective of his author’s self-satisfaction. Who cares? I would cheerfully read any new book about Lizard Zirk. There’s something charitable and benign about this particular murder story, an almost Agatha Christie-like sense of the bounce and plod and fatuity of everyday life, of the romance of an almost comically ordered world plus puzzle. And Zirk, I think, will kick on. With just enough of an Achilles heel to be an unconscious klutz he has that rarest of all Australian qualities – glamour. Someone should rush to put him on film or TV.

Peter Craven

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