Crime Fiction

In her previous Phryne Fisher instalment, Blood and Circuses, Kerry Greenwood took advantage of her knowledge of circus and carnival life to weave an intriguing tale spotlighting a whole host of oddball types. Now in Ruddy Gore she uses her insider’s familiarity with the precious world of the theatre to similar effect. Greenwood always handles her material with a deft, almost disdainful assurance, and this book is no exception. The year is 1928, and a special performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Ruddigore is being staged at Her Majesty’s to honour the famous aviator, Bert Hinkler. On her way to the theatre Phryne intervenes in a fight involving a Chinese man, then during the show two of the actors are poisoned, one fatally, and Phryne’s services are engaged by Management to solve the mystery.

As Nicholas Hasluck’s latest novel points out more than once, the adversarial system of judgement upon which this country’s law is based consists of the telling and re-telling of stories. The prosecution presents a version of events, the defence uses the same facts but tells a different story and, in summing up, the judge constructs a third one. Finally the jury is empowered by society to decide the ‘truth’. Counsel for the prosecution and for the defence are obliged to argue their respective points of view to the limit of their professional ability. The most effective way of doing this, as one of Hasluck’s characters points out, involves ‘subverting rational argument – constantly interrupting, confusing witnesses with nit-picking questions, blocking the presentation of crucial facts, shaping the truth to suit his client’s case’.

The chief protagonist in Robert Wallace’s Art Rat is a character about as savoury as Sid Vicious at his worst. The Art Rat begins life as Glyn, then transforms himself into Matthew and finally Lupo, psychopath disguised as conceptual artist. With each new identity he sinks further into madness and obsession.

The publisher’s blurb for Worse Than Death notes that the book is ‘a long awaited move across genres for Jean Bedford’. A backhanded compliment, but no doubt sincerely meant. As it happens, the first Anna Southwood mystery is a pretty lacklustre effort – far from the ‘tight and pacy read’ promised by this same blurb.

Anna Southwood, a tomboy type with – you guessed it – unruly red curls – has set herself up as a private investigator after the death of her husband. He has made a quid or two from shady deals, she has time on her hands, a career in mind and a mate with a PI’s licence.

This volume is subtitled ‘A novel About The Nature of Truth’ and thus marks Frank Hardy’s continuing concern with basic concepts, the source matter of philosophical and theological debate, rather than with the social immediacies tat inspired and formed the texture of his earlier fiction. As with But the Dead are Many, his previous novel, a tour de force of considerable proportions in which Life and Death were set forth as interchangeable terms rather than irreconcilables, the present work is intricately structured in recognition of the complexity of the issues which is being debated, or, put otherwise, the evasiveness and obduracy of the daemon with which the writer-character is wrestling. There is certainly some sense in Hardy of being more than just interested in narrative formulae, modi operandi, recapitulative tactics. (Appropriately enough, since he writes of men in the grip of obsessions which gnaw at their intellectual vitals, and, as suggested, he stands on extraordinary intimate terms with them.)