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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific Australian "Golden Age" type mystery (details),
By Patrick W. Crabtree "The Old Grottomaster" (Lucasville, OH USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Mr Jelly's Business (Paperback)
First, I need to let prospective buyers of this book know that they can also purchase it under the American-release title of: Murder Down Under. It's exactly the same book and I own and have read both versions. The one I'm reviewing here is the 256-page Angus & Robertson 1964 hardcover edition with the green dust jacket.
The story: On a busman's holiday, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (who happens to be half-Aborigine and half-Caucasian) travels west across the continent to take on a difficult missing person case for a policeman pal in Western Australia. As usual, pretty much all hope of locating this farmer has been lost and "Bony" (as he insists that all his friends call him) goes incognito into the small community of Burracoppin to resolve the matter. The missing man's attractive wife says that he left her high and dry which is a little suspect noting that the ranch foreman seems to be every gal's dream. It's also fishy that the missing man's car was found crashed near the government rabbit fence, just after a local saloon-keeper and he were out late at night on a drinking spree, and no one has seen him since that evening. A nearby farmer, Mr. Jelly, also conducts himself in a mysterious and furtive manner in an intermittent exodus from his ranch, leaving his two daughters alone there, and returning a few days later with more cash than when he left. Bony covertly arranges with the authorities to be taken on by the local rabbit department supervisor as a "rabbitoh" (rabbit fence mender) which raises local suspicion since the agency had only recently laid people off. Still, with the aid of a youthful motorcycle-riding roommate, Bony manages to garner clues which were missed by his predecessors -- but then the shooting starts by a deadly assassin and Bony is soon on his list. This is one of the very top Napoleon Bonaparte mysteries of which there are about thirty. It compares in quality to other terrific Upfield tales including, Wings Above the Diamantina (A Scribner Crime Classic) and The New Shoe. If you've never read any of the works of Arthur W. Upfield then you're in for a huge treat. These are classic British mysteries in every sense and fans of Tey, Christie, Marsh, Sayers, and Doyle will discover lots of savory treasure here. Upfield's literary painting of the wild Australian landscape tenoned with his articulate exposition of the Aboriginal culture serves as a splendid springboard for his intricate mysteries. Highly recommended!
5.0 out of 5 stars
A VERY ENJOYABLE AND ENGAGING PUZZLE STORY,
By
This review is from: Mr Jelly's Business (Paperback)
MR. JELLY'S BUSINESS (1937)--published in the U.S. as MURDER DOWN UNDER--is an interesting, engaging, and often touching fair-play Puzzler which I would give a grade of "A-" to. The main investigator is Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (aka Bony), a half-white, half-Aborigine, who is an expert tracker and an all-around genius. On the minus side, among the book's flaws are a fairly large number of scientifically dubious statements about Bony's inherited abilities and a similarly large number of would-be "poetic" descriptions of the landscape and weather of western Australia, which usually didn't work for me, chiefly because they were not attributed to any character's viewpoint. On the plus side, Upfield is able to project into the minds of his key characters in a vivid and convincing way, especially the minds of his two murderers; his overall plotting and clueing are very good; and he very neatly and very satisfyingly ties tightly together the two main strands of his story on his final page. Furthermore, some of his attempts at humor are genuinely funny. Like many other people, I often am reading two or more books at the same time. I happened to start this mystery while I was also reading another mystery: P. D. James's THE PRIVATE PATIENT (2008), which is one of her Adam Dalgliesh cases. James's book is approximately twice the length of Upfield's and coincidentally is similarly burdened with many would-be "poetic" descriptions (similarly unconnected to any character's viewpoint), but it is much more loosely plotted, much less engaging as far as its characters are concerned, and never emotionally touching. Although James's narrator burrows into the thoughts of her characters, we readers are never shown feelings of great intensity, as we are with Upfield's people. James's THE PRIVATE PATIENT is coolly impersonal in tone, even where Dalgliesh and his relationship with his fiancée are concerned, and at its ending both Dalgliesh and readers are kept in the dark about two main points of the case, which I found unsatisfying. Yes, REAL life is often like that, but James has been using an omniscient narrator, who does report on the thoughts of her characters and does make satirical comments about society in general, so the secrecy seems arbitrary, as if James, at age 87 or 88, simply forgot or simply changed her mind about the format of her book while writing the final stretch. No doubt some of Upfield's readers are able to guess the solutions to the two mysteries in MR. JELLY'S BUSINESS--though I was not one of them. But then even Bony did not correctly figure out the answer to the mystery of Mr. Jelly's "business" and had to be told by another policeman. Finally, most non-Australian readers probably would be wise to keep a LARGE dictionary handy (or be prepared to do occasional Internet searches) in order to understand some of the special vocabulary Upfield uses.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Aussie Mystery,
By
This review is from: Mr Jelly's Business (Paperback)
The car lies wrecked and abandoned near the world's longest fence, the "rabbit fence", in the wheat belt of Western Australia. Of it's owner there is no sign. Has George Loftus simply decamped, for reasons of his own? Or is it a case of murder? Detective-Inspector Bonaparte suspects the worst, and is determined to find the body- and the murderer.
One of the best from Arthur Upfield
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