Customer Reviews

Winds of Evil

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The Winds of Evil is Arthur Upfield at his best. We have Detective-Inspector Napolean Bonaparte using his bush skills and his brain. We have a plot where it isn't obvious "whodunnit". And we have the benefit of Upfield's gift for describing the town, the surroundings, and the winds of evil themselves, as evidenced in the opening pages. This is definitely my favourite so far of all of the Arthur Upfield books that I've read.

Arthur Upfield has an amazing ability to portray the exotic topography, wildlife and weather of the Australian Outback. Winds of Evil is a real tour de force of ominous ambience.

The setting is deep in the bush in New South Wales, in a sandy region subject to ferocious windstorms. The howling dark red-brown fog of sand has the bizarre effect of supercharging the atmosphere with electricity - strangely affecting sensitive people. It also sweeps away tracks.

In the bush outside the one-pub town of Carrie, two people have been strangled. Both murders took place under cover of a windstorm, leaving the police no clues. Two years have past since the first murder. The trail is cold, but Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) likes nothing better than an impossible puzzle.

He arrives on the scene in the guise of a swagman looking for work.

Bony, half white and half Aborigine, has cultivated the strengths of both races to become a formidable investigator. This case permits him to exercise both his rational mind and his amazing tracking skills. But it also requires him to fight his ancestral superstitions. The murderer operates weirdly like a hostile bush spirit (bunyip) lurking in the trees and bushes, hungry for victims.

As usual in the Bony mysteries, there's a quirky cast of characters, and romance (as well as murder) is in the air. The solution to the crimes is a shocker, with some very tense moments leading up to the denouement.

Winds of Evil was first published in 1937. I loved it, but I love them all. The books are not really sequential, so you can start almost anywhere. But do start soon, if you're new to Upfield's half-caste detective. These wonderful books are becoming increasingly rare.

I've read hundreds of cozy murder mysteries and this one is in the top five percent of them all.

A strangler is plaguing an Australian outback village and half-aborigine Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is sent in to solve the case and to catch the murderer. "Boney," as he is called by his numerous friends, is an expert Bushman and an articulate detective and prospective readers should not be put off either by the author's gimmicky approach to his protagonist or by the location -- this is top reading material for fans of Christie, Doyle, Tey, Rinehart, and so on.

The author, Arthur Upfield, was born in England but spent practically his entire life in Australia. He was a superb dialogue writer and the ambiance that he generates is terrific in all his many mysteries. This one, written in 1937, is one of his very best, right up there with Murder Down Under.

Due to the period in which it was written, there is some racially insensitive language here such as we expect to find in the works of Christie and others of the period. But if this isn't an issue for you I can highly recommend this most excellent murder mystery.