Peter Temple leads charge of Aussie crime writers

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This article was published 12/06/2010 (5611 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If it isn’t the sullen Scandinavians taking over the international crime-fiction trade, it’s the bleedin’ Irish.

Now, as if the wine biz were not enough, the rough-and-tumble Aussies are horning in on the action, with Peter Temple leading the breakout.

Temple’s blistering new foray, Truth (Random House, 400 pages, $32), crams a menagerie of police-procedural conventions into the greasy probe of a call-girl’s murder in a glitzy Melbourne hotel-casino, which may or may not be linked to the torture and murder of three drug-trade thugs.

There’s the driven, embattled and flawed copper in Victoria’s homicide boss, Insp. Stephen Villani, whose Shakespearean family estrangements, moral dilemmas and clashes with authority dog every step of his brutal 18-hour days.

There’s official corruption and cover-up aplenty, with odious politicos, arse-covering police brass, smarmy developers and on-the-take Blue Heelers. Kinky, fatal sex completes the drill.

Yet, somehow, it’s all fair dinkum, with raw, visceral players and serpentine sub-plots fired by edgy, splatter-gun prose that makes Hemingway seem effusive.

The shorthand, cop-speak dialogue gives new meaning to spare, and you’ll covet an Australian-English glossary right off.

Temple’s 2008 masterpiece, The Broken Shore, won every top Australian fiction award and the world’s richest crime-writing prize, the U.K.’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger. In Truth, he and Villani both manage to "bomb it to snake" — do all the right things, imploding the genre with a world-class, gobsmacking novel.

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It may be the last call for 24 (until the movie), but there’s another Jack out there who epitomizes the brooding, loner-vigilante type so key to Brit and, in a more violent form, American culture.

In Lee Child’s 14th Jack Reacher outing, 61 Hours (Delacorte, 400 pages, $31), the endlessly drifting ex-army cop is drawn into helping to protect a drug-trial witness from a drug-cartel assassin in small-town South Dakota.

The requisite mayhem is centred on a meth lab in a decommissioned military facility, with lots of bodies, a cliffhanger ending and things that blow up real good.

Still, it’s a bit less unbelievable than previous Reacher gambits (or 24 scripts), with Child tempering slightly the frantic, countdown pace by allowing his anti-hero a few wee deductive flaws, fleeting character insights and the sniff of an actual, adult relationship.

Child, a former Grenada TV stalwart now living in the U.S., has merged Brit pop-fiction and movie archetypes with American ones (Robin Hood/James Bond meets Dirty Harry/Pale Rider) into a wildly successful series. 61 Hours is a pure, unapologetic thriller, ripe for the beach.

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Benny Cooperman is a bit of a shlub, and a brain-addling knock on the noggin hasn’t improved the small-town Ontario P.I.’s chances of making the studly sleuth list.

Toronto crime-lite fixture Howard Engel suffered a stroke in 2001 that left him able to write but not to read, and Benny suffers the same impairment coupled with short-term memory loss and a faulty internal GPS.

This mass-market reissue of the 12th Cooperman jaunt, East of Suez (Penguin, 246 pages, $24), opens with Benny one foot into retirement — until that fatal knock on the door.

For no discernible reason and despite protestations of incompetence, Benny is soon off to the fictional southeast Asian state of Miranam at the behest of a half-remembered high-school friend. Her husband is missing and presumed dead, his scuba-diving operation may have been a front for drug-dealing, and she’s fled with the kids.

Engel has been dubbed "Canada’s favourite soft-boiled detective" and, true or not, there’s much of the sanguine and little of the sanguinary in Cooperman tales — no blood-and-guts, zero sex, no explosions or global conspiracies and a paucity of zippy wisecracks.

More of a travelogue with a bit of mystery thrown in, it should keep Benny fans cosy.

John Sullivan is editor of the Free Press Autos, Homes and Travel sections and specialty websites.