Customer Reviews

Murder Down Under

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3 star:		(1)
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If you like stylized mysteries, Agatha Christie, Australia, or unusual detectives you will probably enjoy this book by Arthur Upfield. The setting is Western Australia of the '30s to '50s. The unusual detective hero is the half-Aboriginal and half-white Napoleon Bonaparte ("Bony"). His struggle is to fit himself into the full range of Australian life, while being an outsider to both cultural worlds.

The real treat here is the insight you get into life in Western Australia in the first half of the 20th Century. Like Christie, the book is somewhat mannered in its approach. But the detailed view of Australians trying to live an "English" life in this remote corner will remain with you for a long time.

Upfield's view of the Aborigine in Australian society was probably quite daring for its time, but today it may make you shudder at its racist overtones. Never mind, keep on reading. This isn't life today in Australia; it is life as viewed through Australian eyes forty or fifty years ago. You will find yourself rooting for Detective Napoleon Bonaparte with his Aboriginal wisdom and Dreamworld view of crime and mystery.

This book is a classic tale about life in the Outback in Australia in the style of Tony Hillerman who writes about the American southwest . Hillerman admits being inspired by Arthur Upfield. Upfield died in 1963, but had actually lived in Australia. A gripping tale while learning about customs in another land.
Maxine in NW Kansas

The setting is Australia, and the protagonist is half-aborigine, half-caucasian, detective wonder, Napoleon Bonaparte.... Bony to his friends. Bony ALWAYS tells his superiors, in advance, that he will solve even the most difficult of crimes, and he does. The only thing is, his superiors are always pressing him on time and they unfailingly threaten to fire him on every case he works. Bony just mildly smiles and says, "Well, if you have to, then go ahead." But they dare NOT fire him, though (and Bony knows it too!) -- Bony is the top crime-solving detective in the whole of Australia.

This is one of his (Upfield's and Bony's) best mysteries of all time. Here, Bony is on a Busman's Holiday when he gets pulled into a missing person investigation in a small outback village. He follows clues just as the great Sherlock Holmes did, acting upon the most obscure pieces of evidence and information -- a shred of cloth here, a cigarette butt there, or, a partial footprint in the dust. Bony is an expert tracker and "evidence finder," thanks to his aboriginal blood on his mother's side of the family.

"The Rabbits" also come into this one in a big way -- they pretty much always do in Bonaparte mysteries, and it's a fascinating aspect of each work. (For those who don't know, Australia is PLAGUED with millions of rabbits and they have government agencies, and lots of "rabbit fences," to help deal with them).

The thing I like most about Bonaparte is his lack of concern for invading the privacy of suspects -- search warrants be damned! He sneaks right into suspects' houses and meticulously goes through their dresser drawers, sometimes to his demise! He also utilizes "the locals" as assistant amateur detectives to help him solve the case.

When you finish this one, you'll rush right out and grab another Napoleon Bonaparte mystery. Why Upfield's works have remained so obscure, I have no idea -- but I'm darned glad I found him. All his mysteries are real page turners.

To summarize, I hate saying, "Better than Christie".... but, in this instance, I will do so with pleasure. Plenty of atmosphere and action. Real Cream.

Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) likes nothing better than a mystery that has the police stumped. In this case, a farmer in Burracoppin in Western Australia has abandoned his car on the way home and disappeared into thin air.

Bony, half Aborigine and half white, is the best tracker in Australia. But even he can't trace the movements of George Loftus beyond a certain point. Bony confesses he's intrigued. He gets a job working on the Rabbit Fence so he can poke around unsuspected. This is the longest fence in the world (1350 miles), but Bony only repairs posts that are close by the scene of the disappearance!

Bony carefully studies the conduct of ants, dogs, rabbits and blowflies - as well as the human inhabitants of Burracoppin - to uncover the fate of the missing man.

Bony makes friends easily and soon uncovers another mystery in the township. Bob Jelly, a local farmer, is strangely obsessed with murder cases and is prone to sudden moody disappearances. His young daughters are terrified by his behavior. The ever-chivalrous Bony promises them he'll get to the bottom of Mr. Jelly's wanderings.

Arthur Upfield himself patrolled the famous Australian Rabbit Fence. His many jobs in the outback included boundary rider, station hand, cook, gold miner, fence builder and drover. Out of this rich experience comes a vivid portrait of Australia from 1929 to 1962 in the incomparable Bony mysteries.

Upfield's detective was white in the first draft of his first novel, but after a fortunate encounter with a mixed-race tracker, Upfield switched to a half-caste inspector. Thanks to his dual racial strengths, Bony became one of the most fascinating sleuths in twentieth-century fiction.

Murder Down Under is an early Bony mystery, published in 1937, and a good one. There are fewer and fewer of these wonderful books on the market, so I urge mystery lovers to get them while they're available.

MURDER DOWN UNDER--the U.S. title for Upfield's MR. JELLY'S BUSINESS (1937)--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 MURDER DOWN UNDER--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.