Bad Debts

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 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 show more 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

Set mainly in Melbourne, once a criminal lawyer, Jack Irish is now making his way out of a dark period of life that he drifted into after the death of his second wife who died at the hands of an unhappy client. Trying to deal with his pain, Jack drowned his sorrows in alcohol and became a collector of "serious debts," as well as a gambler betting on the ponies. He does some odd work verging on the shady for a couple of men in the horse racing business. But there's another side to Jack -- as a sort of therapy, he also helps a friend make furniture, finding a bit of peace and pride in his work, and he has a huge heart. He's a dad to daughter Claire. He tries to stay on the side of law and order, but there are moments when he sometimes has show more to cross over that border.

As the novel opens, Jack checks his answering machine to find a number of messages from a client, Danny McKillop, who Jack once defended in a hit and run accident. He pleads with Jack to meet him, but Jack doesn't remember him at the time and the last message was left a couple of days earlier. Now curious, Jack digs into the case files, where he discovers that McKillop had been accused of the death of Anne Jeppeson, a young activist some ten years earlier. McKillop had pleaded guilty after a witness positively ID'd him as the driver of the car. McKillop had pleaded guilty and received ten years for his crime. Now out, it seems that he really wants to talk to Jack. As Jack pokes around, he starts thinking that perhaps McKillop wasn't the one behind the wheel; little does he know that he is opening a veritable Pandora's box of an investigation, helped along by a gorgeous journalist named Linda Hillier. It isn't long until he discovers that someone is willing to kill to keep Jack from getting to the truth. In a story that is part hardboiled noir with added bits of action-packed conspiracy thriller, Jack has to navigate between bullets, explosions and a host of shady people to get to the truth. The problem is that Jack has no idea who to trust.

My first experience with Peter Temple was with his novel The Broken Shore, which I loved and which has much more of a literary feel to it than does Bad Debts. Having said that, Bad Debts really kept me on my toes and kept my brain engaged trying to figure out the 10 year-old mystery of Danny McKillop. And while I'm normally not a huge fan of the fast-paced variety of thriller/conspiracy novel, this one I liked, not only because of the writing in which Temple has crafted a very tightly-woven and controlled story despite the number of crazy twists and turns, but also because of the characters, especially, but not limited to, Jack himself. Rarely do I like a first series novel this much, but I was sucked in from the beginning and just couldn't let it go. show less

Crooked horses, crooked politicians, dodgy land deals ... With gold-toothed thugs threatening him with sub-machine guns and the corpses piling up, Jack Irish needs to find out what is going on and fast.

This is Temple's debut novel and the first in the Jack Irish series.

Irish is smart, witty and a dab hand in a fight with an empty champagne bottle. Dead wife, live daughter, he's a reformed binge drinker, an occasional cabinet-maker, an Aussie rules and gee-gees fanatic, and a part-time lawyer currently filling in the gaps between cases as a debt collector. Not a CD in sight you'll be relieved to know, but just occasionally (and not in front of his mates) he uses words like 'exculpatory', an ability no doubt due to his fondness for the show more odd 'Bolivian novelist' or two. But don't try looking them up – they're fictitious.

After a hard day out of the office, Irish picks up, too late, a phone message from an old client, Danny McKillop, just out of jail after serving a term for hit-and-run driving. McKillop is now dead, shot whilst acting suspiciously in a pub car-park by a local policeman – the pub where that night Irish should have met him. Seems also that, for various reasons, McKillop did not get the full benefit of Jack's legal training in the hit-and-run case. Irish, whilst not above the odd horse-racing scam, responds as a true knight errant should.

Chandler territory then, but this is Chandler on speed, crackling with wit, ripe language in every sense of the term, and with a sharp eye for hypocrisy and political shennanigans. The plot is a little over-signposted, so that it's more a howdoesheget'em than a whodunnit, but it is none the worse for that. Just relish the mechanics and most of all the cast of characters assembled for our delight, particularly the deadpan, cynical wit of Jack's horse-racing buddies, Cam and Harry.

As you might expect, Irish wraps the case, and then, not anti-climactically, goes horse-racing. Man's got to get his priorities right. Get yours right and buy this book. show less

A solid detective story. Takes place in Melbourne Australia in the 90’s, a lot of Australian slang and their habit of shortening words but the main hits come through. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Fun hard-boiled political mystery that involved nigh on everything - child porn, developers, horse racing, murders, shady politicians, isolated shacks, rooftop chases and more. Experienced mystery readers can see plot points developing miles (or kilometers?) ahead, but that's just fine. Looking forward to book 2.

I love to read a book about my home town - Melbourne, and Peter Temple describes Melbourne well. There this a good mix of anxiety and humour that kept me wondering "god, what else could possibly go wrong". This was the first time I have read a Temple novel and I suspect it won't be the last.

A thriller that starts promisingly, wanders around too much in the middle as the private eye protagonist fails to notice some fairly obvious signs of just how much of a hornet's nest he has disturbed, and then picks up to a tense conclusion. Worth reading, especially for anyone who knows Melbourne - but could have been much stronger with a more tightly-written middle and a protagonist who kept his wits about him more consistently.