Peter Temple (1) (1946–2018)

Meet Jack Irish - a lawyer, a gambler, a cabinet maker (in training) and an enforcer when needed. Once upon a time he was a criminal lawyer. Then he lost his wife and things went downhill - he still does some legal work now and then but he is mostly dealing with horse races - both setting up schemes around them and gambling.

Until one day he gets a call from a man he represented once (not that Jack remembers it) and the next day the man turns up dead. Racked by guilt Jack decides to find out show more what happened and ends up in the middle of a few more murders, a corruption scandal that goes to the top of the government and old secrets. That description will fit a lot of the thrillers written in the last decades. What makes that one special are the setting and the character of Jack Irish.

The setting is Melbourne, Australia (although we also see a few more cities - Ballarat and Perth make an appearance for example). The city is not described in any particular details but you can feel it in every page - it is exotic and different. And as the story is told by Irish, we do not get the long winded explanation on things - it presumes you understand why things are the way they are and you recognize the names of TV stations or radios. And Jack Irish is a fascinating character - he has a dry (and occasionally black) sense of humor that makes you chuckle now and then and his decision making abilities need to be questioned more often than not. No, he is not stupid. And he does not sound unbelievable - he can be called naive in places, he can be called delusional in others but he also realizes when he makes a mistake pretty fast.

Add a new love (which he almost manages to screw up), a few other memorable characters (Cam and Henry and the old guys in the bar for example) and the cast is complete. And there are the horse races. I had never been interested in that sport so I was not sure how much I will like the novel. Especially when they started talking in terms I had only heard about in my English classes. But it worked - at one point I realized that I actually enjoy these exchanges - mainly because of the humor of all participants - I still do not care about the horse racing. And you can call the book predictable - the plot twists were more likely to happen than not but when you realize that the book was written in 1996, you realize that it is not using the standard cliches -- it is building them. There is a reason why some of those became cliches after all - and I can imagine most of the twists being really surprising 2 decades ago.

One thing that needs to be noted is the language in the book - it is very Australian which made it hard to read in places. Thankfully for me, I read quite a lot of Gary Disher's books last year (if you had not, you may want to try him) so after a few pages things clicked in and I did not need to stop and think what they are talking about.

I will read the next books in the series - I liked that one enough for that. And the setting is fascinating. show less

Con Niemand is a mercenary whose business is surviving; John Anselm is a struggling intelligence agent whose business is information; Caroline Wishart is a tabloid journalist whose business, until now, has been the sex lives of politicians. Their paths collide when Niemand stumbles across a secret terrible enough to destroy lives and depose governments.

The first half of the story mixes the action-packed adventure of Niemand, former soldier turned mercenary, with the slower, more complex show more unfolding of the character of 'corporate risk manager' Anselm and his equally complicated world of conspiracies and double-dealing. The link between their stories doesn't become clear until about halfway through the novel, but this isn't the end of the plot twists; there are plenty of surprises still to come.

The style of In The Evil Day is often spare, even terse; while there are some richly detailed passages to establish character and setting, some chapters consist of nothing more than dialogue between two unidentified speakers. This befits the shadowy world Anselm and Niemand inhabit, where knowing who you're working for may be difficult, dangerous, or hard to reconcile with your conscience... and while trust may be rare and larger loyalties obsolete in that environment of `plausible deniability', where the interests of nations have become secondary to those of political parties and the corporations who finance them, Niemand, Anselm and Wishard do have consciences.

Temple shows his mercenaries, deadly as they may be, as more honorable than the people who employ them in the hope of being able to disavow responsibility. Niemand is first and foremost a survivor, acting on instinct when threatened, but he protects his friends as best he can, is capable of gentleness, and has no tolerance for those who enjoy killing. Anselm is equally efficient, to the point of being workaholic, but he is loyal to his boss and colleagues, able to empathize with those he hunts, and loves his family.

What could have been a sprawling mess of a book is instead kept on a tight leash through incisive plotting and powerful, lean prose. This is the hallmark of Temple's writing: the sparse style, the diamond-pure clarity that comes from years of distilling words. He pumps more muscle in one paragraph than lesser writers muster in a page, a craft learned in the hothouse of journalism and developed through the influences of favorite crime writers such as Elmore Leonard. show less

Sadly, the best of Temple's series - sad because he passed away and there will be no more from him. Just as he had finally matured into his ability to balance all the elements of the mystery and character and Irish's life, matured into the best of his pitch black noir, he's gone. In the final installment, Jack Irish is searching for evidence to exonerate a woman accused of murder. Each layer of her life he pulls back uncovers dark veins of corruption.

On a side note, if you're a fan of the show more films made from Temple's books, don't put off the books for fear they are too similar to the films. Temple casts a wide net over Jack Irish's life, and it would be impossible to recreate that on screen - so, there's a fair bit of difference. But Temple's skill is something that should draw you to the printed page. I only wish he'd stuck around a little while longer. show less

These books get better as Temple matures into his voice, something I'd call dark noir dripping in witty cynicism. It's hard to suspend images of Guy Pearce and Aaron Peterson as Jack and Cam in the film versions, but the casting in those was dead on for the characters so the reading doesn't suffer from the films. And the film writers were smart enough to pluck whole plots and stretches of Temple's dialog and layer them into the films. Temple's gift for dialog is on the high end of the show more spectrum by leagues. The best thing about the books, and this third entry shines with it, is Temple's focus on Jack Irish as a person, not a plot mechanism. His life, warts and all, are what the story is about, not the mystery. Though the mystery here, a search for a missing man, is a metaphor for Jack's endless search for his own identity. show less