Jon Cleary (1) (1917–2010)

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

At the end of May 2019, Criminal Element ran its weekly piece on the past winners of the Edgar Award for best crime/mystery novel of the year. They were up to 1975, and the winner was this title by Jon Cleary. A thriller set in Rome and the Vatican, it details the accidental kidnapping of the recently-elected Pope, a German survivor of Dachau and the first non-Italian in the job for over 450 years. Unpopular with the Vatican bureaucrats and conservative Catholics, a show more liberalizing and revitalizing figure beloved of the people, the Pope's past in Germany was going to come and play merry Hell with his present.

So Cleary, Australian and Catholic, clearly saw the election of John Paul II in 1978 and foresaw that the controversial figure would be the subject of much opposition as well as adulation. Way to go, Cleary!

This story, however, goes deeper into geopolitics as it involves the IRA, then in the midst of that bloodbath we call The Troubles, although I myownself would call it "the stupid bloody pigheaded gobshites killing anyone they damned well pleased and calling it patriotism," but there you are. The Vatican's oodles and buckets of treasures are to be raided from within via a forgotten, now-subterranean, grotto. A Vatican insider, American so immune from suspicion (that would NOT have flown in 1975 Italy, BTW, paranoid in the grip of its own terror from the "Communist" Red Brigades), one Fergus McBride helps identify a way in to the Vatican's storied hoard and co-ordinate the holding-for-ransom of the objects. This is all in aid of stopping the killing of The Troubles. With the Vatican's ransom money retrieving their objects, the IR-no-longer-A would resort to bribery and intimidation instead of murder and mayhem.

So we can see this is a fantasy.

The Pope throws a wrench into the doin's by deciding to send these very objects (just think! such a coincidence!) on a world museum tour that he's just thunk up and is going to send the stuff off the very day the IRA dudes planned to steal it, so their plan goes into 24-hour-earlier chaos.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious idiocy of this turn of events because I expect anyone old enough to care about this book will also be worldly-wise enough to know that musea take YEARS to set up exhibitions, the insurance companies require *detailed* plans and proof of adequate security before they'll insure a move, and no museum on the surface of the Earth would *dream* of touching uninsured relics. Not even in 1975.

The forgotten basement of the Vatican is breached (!) and there is a major structural collapse, yet all our IRA thieves are alive! And then the Pope decides to wander downstairs to have a look at the goodies he's blithely consigned to unknown destinations (apparently far and wide, again not remotely realistic as stuff like that in the Vatican's hoard moves in curated bunches or not at all), thus putting himself in line for kidnapping.

Like Aldo Moro, ex-PM of Italy, just three years later. Only Moro ended up dead after 55 days, not rescued in two.

Anyway, onward the plot careens, a juggernaut crushing many vestiges of realism in service of excitement and action. That is this book's raison d'etre: Excitement and action, which Cleary delivers. Sensible plot developments, no; fun set-pieces and chases, yes.

Cleary brings us into the station with a skeleton crew (y'all who bother to read the book will now wince) but the Pope intact. There was no doubt from the get-go that the Pope would not die. That's not the way of the thriller in 1975. Assassinations are headlined, not thrown in as plot twists. But the point was the ride, no doubt about it, and if you're up for a midcentury misogynist's fast-paced and exciting romp, this is a good choice. It didn't win the Edgar for its intricate plotting. But win it did, and judged by the purpose the book was written to serve (action thriller), it deserved the accolade. show less

Pearl Rule 14 (p50)

Rating: 2.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Paul Tancred, First Secretary at the American Embassy in Beirut, walks a tightrope. On either side, war is imminent. Caught between a passionate desire for peace and loyalty to an old friend and in love with an Arab girl, Paul is sucked into a whirlpool of espionage and violence.

My Response: On the first page, the author drops the w-bomb. Over the next three pages, he uses the very 1960s racist shorthand of Arabs being shifty show more bargainers, Western educated if intellectual and violent primitives if not, Americans being honorable if dimwitted, Welsh people being romantic and shifty....

It's got balls...the first line is "You could help us kill Nasser." That isn't exactly the least PC line in the first fifty pages, either. But balls, love them though I do, aren't anywhere near enough to compel me to wade through an American diplomat's loss of innocence told in this period-perfect voice.

I have no idea if anyone I know will want to read Season of Doubt, but believe me it's not one to go on an extended search for. Thus I bid farewell to Author Cleary, after having read [Peter's Pence] at the cyber-behest of Criminal Element's The Edgar Awards Revisited series of articles. (It won for 1975.) I've reviewed that book already. This one, I'm sorry to say, never overcame my distaste for its period politics with a cracking story the way Peter's Pence did. show less

Although published in 1987 DRAGONS AT THE PARTY is set in Sydney in late January of the following year during the series of ceremonies and events which would kick off the country’s bicentennial celebrations. Rather awkwardly Australia has been coerced into taking in some high profile refugees in the form of President Abdul Timori of the (fictitious) Pacific island of Palucca and his entourage. His Generals having staged a successful coup, Timori is now a President in exile and due to some show more questionable behaviour in his home country has only managed to secure a temporary home in Australia due to his wife’s connections to the country’s Prime Minister. When one of his aides is killed by a sniper’s bullet it is assumed the President was the real target so Harry ‘Scobie’ Malone, an Inspector with the NSW Police, is assigned to investigate the attack while the Federal Police take on the role of protecting the former President from further assassination attempts. The thing that struck me first about the book, bearing in mind I was reading it begrudgingly, was how quickly it won me over. I was only a few pages in when I started chuckling at its sharp dialogue and witty observations about people and politics. On page 8 for example our leading man is introduced in a paragraph that describes him physically in some detail and ends with

He suffered fools, because there were so many of them, but not gladly.

That was my first chuckle. It was quickly followed by another when Timori’s background was provided

His election as President for life was no more than a formality, like high tea, monogamy and other European importations, and was looked upon as just as much a giggle.

I could go on at some length quoting the many lines carefully and successfully crafted to delight, but either you get the point now or you don’t share the love of language and sense of humour and no amount of repetition will make you do so. I also, and again surprisingly, enjoyed meeting Scobie Malone (I didn’t learn the nature of his nickname but only one person ever calls him by his real name). He is a happily married sober chap who loves his kids, works well with his colleagues and even gets along with his boss. Despite having so little in common with most of his fictional counterparts he is still engaging and able to retain the reader’s interest and attention (lest it not be glaringly obvious my subtext here is an increasingly desperate personal plea that not every detective in crime fiction has to be a permanently morose alcoholic who has to work alone because being around him would induce suicidal thoughts in even the cheeriest of souls). He is a hard worker and scrupulously honest, something of a rarity in both fictional crime stories and the comparable real world police force he was ostensibly part of, but he doesn’t have a holier-than-thou attitude that would make him unlikable. I particularly liked the way Clary depicts Malone and his fellow officers struggling to deal with the more emotional parts of their work because blokes, especially Aussie blokes, aren’t known for their overt displays of sensitivity. When dealing with a young Aboriginal activist who becomes embroiled in the investigation we see an insight into Malone’s character

…His stubbornness, his total distrust of the police jacketed him in an attitude that would eventually bring him to disaster. For a moment Malone felt sorry for him, but it lasted only a moment: pity, they had told him years ago, should never be part of a policeman’s equipment. They had been wrong, of course, but he had learned to use it sparingly.

I moved To Sydney to take up my first full time job after graduating University almost exactly at the time this book was set (to be specific, about ten days before the weekend during which events unfold) so that period is etched more strongly into my memory than many other periods of my life and Cleary seems to me to have done a superb job of depicting both the small details and bigger picture. The carnival atmosphere of the city as people jumbled together to celebrate the bicentennial is well drawn and although it is a relatively minor component of the story the inclusion of disenfranchised Aboriginal people is unerringly accurate as evidenced when the assassin observes about a young activist

…It was difficult to be militant in a country that ignored you.

Equally believable are the high level political shenanigans that form the backdrop to Malone’s investigation. The state’s first independent body examining public sector corruption would be established one year later and a Royal Commission into entrenched police corruption would follow a a couple of years after that so it doesn’t take a genius to realise that Cleary’s depictions of back room deals and other grubby behaviour were at the very least plausible if not based on things he knew to be true. Finally I suppose I should make mention of the story which, although thoroughly enjoyable in its own right, has taken a back seat to other elements of the novel for me. We learn early on that an international assassin is responsible for the attempt on Timori’s life but the investigating team must still catch the man and attempt to find out who is financing his work so there is much suspense to be had even without the more dramatic chase passages which really ratchet up the tension. I’m generally happy enough to read a book about which I have no expectations but these days rarely bother to even start a book I don’t think I will like. Life is too short after all. But reading DRAGONS AT THE PARTY has reminded me that I should not base my expectations on misguided notions picked up from…heaven only knows where. My only criticism of the book is some clunky exposition that can only have been added for the benefit of international readers (no adult Australian needs to be told that Perth is the capital of Western Australia or what the ABC is for example) but that I suspect that is more due to publisher pressures than the author’s own wishes. I’ll be making up for my personal neglect of this author in the not too distant future. show less

Christian Rodka's brilliant narration added great pleasure to listening to this novel. There is quite a cast of characters and his voice portrayal made picking one from the other relatively easy.

I've been on a bit of a Jon Cleary kick in the last few months and have listened to
4.6, WINTER CHILL- set some time before THE EASY SIN and
4.7, DEGREES OF CONNECTION which was Jon Cleary's last Scobie Malone novel, following on from THE EASY SIN.

There are passages in this novel which crack a smile, show more despite the seriousness of the story line: an abduction and a couple of murders thrown in for good measure; a gang that by any standards is incompetent, but at the same time amoral. I thought some of the characters were overblown and parts of the plot definitely unrealistic. On the other hand the collapse of the dotcom bubble pointed to how ordinary Australians lost money in a world financial phenomenon.

And then for Scobie Malone fans, historically this was his last case at the head of Homicide and at the time they must have wondered what Jon Cleary was up to. With hindsight we know he was preparing to bow out of crime fiction. show less