Customer Reviews

AN AUTHOR BITES THE DUST

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As always with Upfield, when he takes his main character out of the bush (e.g., Swordfish Reef), things do deteriorate. Still, because the literary establishments of Melbourne and Sydney disliked anyone who wrote for money, the book, a thinly disguised assault based on two real members of Melbourne's intellectual elite, the result is a wonderful blast at intellectual pretensions anywhere. As such it is as much document as novel. Still, it is a good read, but nowhere near the best of his books (he considered Drought his best)

A good read about N. Bonaparte. It harks back to Swordfish Reef.

Somewhat typical and formulaic, except that it skewers the custodians who foster and exalt serious literature, protecting it against practitioners of what is deprecated as merely commercial fiction.

Did Mr. Upfield feel some animosity toward his artistic "betters"?

An Author Bites The Dust is the 11th novel in the Bony series by Arthur Upfield. Bony finds himself spending his vacation time incognito, much to the displeasure of his wife, at Yarrabo, in the Yarra Valley, because famous author and critic, Mervyn Blake, has died, and it looks, to some, like an interesting case of murder. There are very few clues: a cat, a ping-pong ball, a crystal whiskey glass, some shoe-prints and an alcoholic gardener, but Bony manages, as always, to solve the case. In this novel, a hybrid of a cold-case investigation and a closed-room murder mystery, Upfield uses his characters to make a running commentary about the value and popularity of "capital L" literature versus commercial fiction in Australia. This novel has an interesting plot with a great twist and some unusual characters. A great Bony read.