Death of a Lake

Upfield is superb at describing a setting, -- so much so that you can feel the fish nibbling at your legs and feet as you wade across the thigh-deep lake, and smell the dry mouldering carcasses of the cormorants. It is about the LAKE... not the deaths of two people... but also about the deaths of the birds, rodents, fish, and other critters who cannot escape their fates as the water disappears. I prefer this fictionalized description to the dry scientific analysis, since it engages your emotions immediately. This was my second "Bony" story. His plots are often slow to develop; in this case plot speed matched the lake... slow, until the last few days! Second only to settings are the memorable characters and their quirks that bring them show more alive. I read this the same way Australians did in the 1950's... serialized in a daily newspaper... with all the social attitudes and language of the day intact, and not "updated" to reflect today's attitudes. show less

As with the previous two Upfield novels I’ve read it is his depiction of the Australian setting that steals the show for me. This novel’s central place is a temporary inland lake: an area that has water for a year or three but which routinely dries up completely when the drought that is inevitable in Australia takes hold. Upfield’s lake is the fictional Lake Otway but it resembles real-life Lake Eyre which is, when it isn’t a dust bowl, is the largest lake in the country. We are introduced to it, and the novel, with these words

Lake Otway was dying. Where it had existed to dance before the sun and be courted by the ravishing moon there would be nothing but drab flats of iron hard clay and then the dead might rise to shout show more accusations shouted by the encircling sand dunes.

The out-station crowned a low bluff on the southern shore and from it single telephone lines spanned 50 miles of virgin country to base on the great homestead where lived the boss of Porchester station which comprised eight hundred thousand acres and was populated by 60,000 sheep in the care of some 20 wage plugs…

Three years ago the lake was so full of water that it was possible to swim in. And even to drown in, as apparently happened to young stockman Ray Gillen. But now, as police Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte arrives on the scene in the guise of a horsebreaker, the lake is rapidly emptying and Bony soon realises he’s not the only person keen to see what the disappearance of the lake will reveal about the stockman’s death. Gillen was a lottery winner and almost everyone connected to the station seems to think they have some claim on the dead man’s money, wherever it might be.

I’ve thought before that the Upfield plots are the weakest elements of his novels but this one was strong, managing not to get bogged down in too much esoteric detail and maintaining a cracking pace with a load of twists as Bony – and readers – whittle down the greed-driven suspect pool. Whether it be the motley collection of fellow workers or the mother/daughter cook and housemaid team that look after the station everyone seems to have had both motive and opportunity to take advantage of the scenario. The culprit, when eventually unveiled, is among the coldest human beings you’ll encounter fictionally.

Although there is much to anchor this book to place – including a heat which literally has birds dropping from trees in death and the kind of mass rabbit skinning that I can’t imagine happening anywhere else – there is not a great deal to pinpoint the novel in time. Mention is made that Ray Gillen had fought in Korea and there are one or two other indicators that this is one of Upfield’s later novels but it does have a fairly timeless quality. At least it does if you ignore the casual bigotry that pervades all these stories (though here it is women rather than Aboriginal people who cop the brunt of the social stigmatising).

I don’t know that I’d recommend this as the best place to start discovering Arthur Upfield and/or Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte but the book is a solid entry to the series and continues to provide a unique voice in classic crime fiction. show less

The audio book begins with the usual warning that the publisher does not ascribe to Upfield's now politically incorrect views. However they do reflect popularly held opinions, particularly abour aborigines, in the 1950s.

The story moves a bit slowly in this tale because Lake Otway, a lake that had filled three years before because of flooding in the north, is in the process of evaporating and dying. There are wonderful descriptions of what happens as the lake gets shallower and shallower and smaller and smaller. At the same time the rabbit population blows out. The daily temperature is well over 110F and the outstation near the lake burns to the ground one night.

You can't help but be impressed by Upfield's detailed observations of life show more on Outback stations.

Bony turns up (undercover) to investigate the Ray Gillen's disappearance and discovers that all the hands living at the outstation have, unusually, stayed on since Gillen's disappearance, not taking holidays and so on. Something is keeping them all there.

The tension builds very well, and the narration by Peter Hosking is in a class of its own. show less

Cake in a Hat Box is the 19th in Arthur Upfield’s Bony series. The story starts with the discovery by a long-distance truck driver of the body of Constable Stenhouse in his jeep on the road to Agar’s Lagoon. Stenhouse, a competent policeman but not a well-liked man, has been shot, and his native tracker is missing. At first, it looks like, the tracker, Jackie Musgrove, has shot his Constable and cleared out with his swag and rifle. But the local blacks are making smoke signals and gathering purposefully. Bony happens to be in the town of Agar’s Lagoon due to engine trouble in his flight home from Broome, and as the case gets more interesting, he relishes being asked to help with the investigation. This Bony book is filled with a show more collection of outback characters, some stoic, some downright bizarre. Despite Bony’s occasional laconic attitude, Upfield gives us fast-paced novel with an original plot, a few twists, especially the motive and the murderer. Upfield’s extensive knowledge of the outback and the aboriginal shines through all his Bony novels. Is there really a cake in a hat box? Does Bony actually get his murderer his time? No spoilers here! Another enjoyable Bony installment. show less

A young wandering stockman (cowboy) wins $12500 (Australian) --worth more then than now --but carries on getting another job on an isolated station (ranch) near a temporary lake (formed by occasional flooding) . One night he supposedly goes for a swim in the lake and vanishes, and his money vanishes too. The lake is now drying up and will presumably reveal his body, so Bony shows up disguised as a horsebreaker to watch the men who work on the ranch, and two women, the housekeeper and (now 19 years old and very sexy) daughter. Most of the tory consists of Bon watching the other characters watch the lake drying up, aside from a vivid but for me unpleasant description of a whole trapping of rabbits drawn to the diyng lake. Toward the end, show more the main house burns down wit the housekeeper in it. Spoiler warning: it turns out te young man really did drown naturally in the lake,but the housekeeper was murdered. Bony solves the murder using only one real clue -- that the womn was apparently dragged by her feet. I was disappointed that otherwise he makes very little use of his bushcraft. show less

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Une enquête plus "policière" que d'habitude. Pas de personnage aborigène, peu de bush.