{review} the rowland sinclair series

Sulari Gentill A Decline in Prophets (2011) 

Sulari Gentill Miles Off Course (2012) 

Sulari Gentill Paving the New Road (2012)

Rowland Sinclair, Milton Isaacs and Clyde Watson Jones lined up at the foot of her bed, all leaning against the rail as they asked about her health. Annie Besant regarded them warmly. It was a particularly Australian habit, she observed - to lean. Australian men seem to lean whenever possible - against walls, posts, chairs… Australians had the ability to relax in any company or circumstance - they would face Armageddon itself leaning casually on a fence.

Sulari Gentill's 'Rowland Sinclair' series goes from strength to strength. She is such a refreshing new voice in Australian crime writing: no brutalized female corpses; barely a hint of sex; lots of solid historical background (and some wonderful bits from old newspapers), memorable characters, classic locations, and a sprinkling of little historical and literary riddling to tease the reader. I reviewed her first book (A Few Right Thinking Men) here, and have recently devoured the next three in the series. 

The second in the series is A Decline in Prophets. I was wondering how Gentill would manage her large cast of regular characters, and a highlight of this book was how she took her time to flesh out the groups' dynamics. Their witty badinage is a delight. We discover our hero Rowly - semi-voluntarily exiled from Australia after his disastrous run-in with the New Guard - travelling in style on RMS Aquitania, along with a group of Theosophists (including Annie Besant), a hot-headed Catholic Bishop, various eligible young ladies, and - of course - his faithful coterie of Clyde the artist, Milt the Red poet, and Edna, sculptress and unattainable love of Rowly's life. The action shifts - with murders aplenty - from the luxuries of life onboard to New York (where Edna makes a hit with one Archie Leach) then back to Sydney. Mysterious pregnancies, mad prophets, ambiguous suicides, Masons, mortuary chapels, dodgy poetry, and lots of fun and games. Can the gang make it safely back to lovely Woollahra with a murderer hot in pursuit? And has Rowly pushed his conservative elder brother's tolerance of his Bohemian lifestyle too far this time? A Decline in Prophets won the 2012 Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel by an Australian woman.

The third in the series, Miles Off Course, is, I think (and at the moment!), my favourite. It has such a wonderful Australian setting, moving from the sophisticated high life of the rich in the Blue Mountains to the harsh life of the stockmen who graze their animals in the 'High Country' of the Snowy Mountains. Rowly is sent by his brother Wilfred (a 'Mycroft', and one of my favourite characters - perhaps I relate to being the oldest sibling?) to track down a missing stockman. Harry Simpson is no ordinary stockman - an Aboriginal hand who grew up with the Sinclairs, he is far more than an employee to the Sinclair men. Rowly's stint roughing it in the High Country is more than welcome to him for other reasons: someone is gunning for him - could he be the next high-rolling victim of a spate of abductions? If the travelling snake circus doesn't get him first… This book also has the single best opening line I have read in the last decade. 

No 4., Paving the New Road, offers a change of scene for Rowly and his mates; it is also rather more brutal than its predecessors. It is quite an achievement on Gentill's part to create a veristic 'What If?' as she transports her gang of Bohemian Australian artists to Munich, 1933: "it was decided that they would pose as art dealers. Art was a language they could all speak." Rowly agrees to go to Germany to sabotage the plans of his old enemy Eric Campbell, the New Guard politician who would bring Fascism to Australia. Campbell is touring with members of the British Union of Fascists, whose members include the repellent Unity Mitford (with whom Rowly makes rather a hit). Along the way, Rowly also makes the acquaintance of a young blonde lady called Eva who works for a photographer and has a very secret boyfriend… Gentill does a lovely job manipulating people, events (and dates) to place her hero at the centre of an Australian-led fight against Fascism. There's a lot of humour in this book, despite the grim subject-matter and the knowledge of what is to come for the world. Where will Rowly and co. be in 1939? At the rate Gentill is producing these books, that won't be long! (Two incidental points: does "taught-haired" = tow-haired? And how freaky is it to discover someone you know has given his name to a character. My equilibrium is still awry.) 

If you liked this... for crime-loving history-nerds? It is hard to avoid comparison with Kerry Greenwood's 1920s' heroine Phryne Fisher, who is rich, strong-minded, and (er... unlike Rowly) not always a lady.

   

{weekend words}

Not only am I currently spending a long, long weekend interstate in lovely Melbourne, but I am lucky enough to be staying at The Windsor, a wonderful old hotel in the Grand Hotel tradition. Kerry Greenwood captured the Windsor so beautifully in her first Phryne Fisher mystery, Cocaine Blues (1989), set in  Melbourne in the 1920s.

'Where we goin' first?' yelled Bert. Phryne screamed back over the noise of the labouring engine, 'First to the Queen Victoria Hospital, then to the Windsor Hotel, and we aren't in a particular hurry.'

…

'You staying at the Windsor, Miss?' asked Bert, removing his pendant cigarette and flinging it through the rattling window of the taxi. 'Toffy, are you? The time will come when the working man rises against his oppressors, and breaks the chains of Capital, and. . .'

'. . . then there won't be any more Windsor,' finished Phryne. Bert looked injured. He released the steering wheel and turned his head to remonstrate with the young capitalist.

'No miss, you don't understand,' he began, averting death with a swift twiddle of the wheel that skidded them to safety around a van. 'When the revolution comes, we'll all be staying at the Windsor.'

'It sounds like an excellent idea,' agreed Phryne.

As this publishes, I shall be having Afternoon Tea.

{review} out of print

June Wright Murder in the Telephone Exchange ('First Novel Library No. 122'; London: Hutchinson & Co. n.d. [1948]).

This is probably the best 20 cents I've ever spent on a secondhand book (esp. as I just saw it here on amazon for US$62). Murder in the Telephone Exchange is  set during a long, hot Australian summer in the Melbourne Telephone Exchange in the late 1940s. The heroine is a telephonist on the 'boards' in the 'trunkroom' (long distance call switchboard) of the Exchange and the narrative is from her point of view and possesses the innocent unreliability of the narrator who cannot, yet, see everything.

I have seen girls, beaded with perspiration from hot apparatus, putting calls through every minute for hours on end during bad bush-fires and crises in Europe and the Pacific, until they collapsed from sheer nervous exhaustion. I know that strained concentration which is needed to complete connections, with half a dozen lines under your tense fingers, that must not make mistakes.

But is the narrator really so innocent? And what is going on in the telephone exchange? Who is listening in? Who is rifling the lockers? Who whacked the prying busybody supervisor over the head with a 'buttinsky'? Who is picking off the telephonists one by one? What's the connection with national security? Will the heroine find love with the freckled basketball-loving Sergeant? Why is everyone called John?

The author worked in an exchange (the book is dedicated to its employees) and the details lend an authentic air to this tale of the 'inside job'. The atmosphere of growing, claustrophobic fear is spot on, especially as the body count grows. It's a first novel (it won a competition with the prize being publication) and suffers from being a bit over-complicated. The dialogue is a tad hysterical:

"You fool, you hopeless little fool," he continued, gripping my arm. "Don't you realize that you may be holding in that silly brain of yours some half-forgotten fact that may make your life a danger to this inhuman creature?"

This isn't a great book, but it does grip the reader and, in its way, it's a lovely piece of Melbourne social history. There's more here on crime fiction in Melbourne and more on June Wright here.

Rating: 5/10

If you liked this... maybe some less innocent portraits of Australia: 

• 1920s Sydney/N.S.W.: D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (1923);
• 1930s Sydney: Sulari Gentill, A Few Right Thinking Men (2010) - review here;
• 1940s wartime Sydney: Dymphna Cusack and Florence James Come in Spinner (1951);
• 1950s Sydney: Madeleine St John's The Women in Black (1993);
• and Kerry Greenwood does a nice recreation of Melbourne in the 1920s in the Phryne Fisher mysteries.