Customer Reviews

Murder Down Under

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.