Review of Black Wattle Creek by Geoffrey McGeachin (Penguin, 2012)

Ten years after starting a relationship with Rebecca in the Diggers Rest Hotel, Charlie Berlin is living in suburban Melbourne with his wife and two children, Peter and Sarah.  He’s still working as a cop, but his career is in a dead-end, he’s struggling to make ends meet, and he is still living with the demons of his time as bomber pilot and POW in a Polish camp.  When a recently bereaved widow becomes suspicious about the activities of a funeral home, Berlin agrees to investigate.  It’s immediately obvious that the director of the company has something to hide and his interest piqued, Charlie starts to poke around.  It soon becomes clear though that he’s stumbled onto something much bigger than he anticipated and he’s inadvertently put himself and his family at risk.  Rather than turning a blind eye, however, he stubbornly continues to investigate the strange goings-on at Black Wattle Creek.

Black Wattle Creek has two strong elements: the character of Charlie Berlin and his family, and the reason behind his investigation.  Berlin is interesting company, a caring family man who’s haunted by his past, and is tenacious in his pursuit of a solving a case.  When he looks into the suspicions of one of his wife’s friends about a local funeral home he has no idea what he getting himself into.  It soon becomes obvious that maybe he’d be better off keeping his nose out of other peoples’ business.  Where the story seems to become a little unstuck, however, is in its unfolding.  There were two aspects that I had a hard time buying which worked to undermine the fidelity of the tale somewhat.  The first was the strategy of those he’s investigating, who inflict savage violence on those Berlin consults rather than the man himself.  The second was Berlin being enlightened by the same people when there was really no need and then let wander free.  Nevertheless, the tale is enjoyable, mainly because Berlin is a compelling, wounded character and the pacing and prose are nicely done.  The third book in the series is due out next year and I’m looking forward to reading it in due course.

Many thanks to Geoffrey McGeachin for sending me a copy of the book, which has recently won the 2013 Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel in Australia.

Review of The Diggers Rest Hotel by Geoffrey McGeachin (Viking/Penguin, 2010)

1947 in Melbourne, Australia, and Charlie Berlin is back working as a detective after serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force, flying night missions over Germany.  He’s returned to find himself at the bottom of the pile, his colleagues having advanced whilst he was away, and with a head full of demons after being shot down and housed in a prisoner of war camp in Poland.  When the railway payroll is yet again robbed, he’s packed off to the small rural twin-town of Albury-Wodonga to investigate.  By sending him alone to solve a case that has already confounded others it seems that his bosses have set him up to fail, and the local cops are hardly welcoming of the arrival of a city detective.  From his base at The Diggers Rest Hotel, Berlin sets about tracking down the armed gang of robbers with the help of a rookie constable and a beautiful, feisty local reporter, who both see Berlin and the case as a way to better things and places.  Berlin though is not just taking on the gang, but also the memories that haunt him, especially the horror of the anti-aircraft fire, the death march back towards Germany from his Polish camp, and the execution of a young Jewess.

The Diggers Rest Hotel won the Ned Kelly Award for best crime fiction novel in Australia in 2011.  McGeachin drops the reader into rural Australia in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with its small town politics, social unease about change, and folk traumatised through what they’d experienced or lost.  He is especially strong at characterisation, populating Albury-Wodonga with an interesting set of people, all struggling in some way to make do, or get on, or come to terms with the past and the present.  In particular, Charlie Berlin and Rebecca Green make for an enjoyable, feisty pairing.  Add in a compelling storyline of Berlin investigating a set of payroll robberies by an armed gang and you have a very nice mix - a strong sense of place and historical and social contextualisation, wonderful characterisation, and interesting plot, told through engaging prose.  Although the resolution was credible, the only slightly jarring element was the ending, which seemed to come about ten pages too soon and left a couple of threads dangling that are hopefully dealt with in the next book in the series.  Overall, a very enjoyable read on several levels.

Australian publishing: digging a hole for itself?

A little while ago I had a rant about getting hold of Australian crime fiction.  In short, it is damn difficult given the rights restrictions in place around novels published there.  I thought I'd come up with a solution - there are loads of Irish people who have emigrated or travel back-and-forth to Aus; maybe one or two of them could bring me back some selected books.  That's how I managed to get hold of Sulari Gentill's A Few Right Thinking Men, reviewed yesterday, and I'm hoping to get her next book that way as well.  Tracking down Geoffrey McGeachin's The Diggers Rest Hotel has been more difficult.  Despite winning the Ned Kelly Award for 2011 that book is no longer available, even in Australia!  I can't find a single online retailer that has a copy. Nor does the publisher, Penguin, except as an ebook.  I just find this baffling.  The book was awarded the top crime fiction gong in Australia and not only are the rest of the world denied the pleasure of reading it, so too are people in the only region where it was available.  The publishing world often baffles me, but not enabling potential readers a chance to buy and read a book seems a very odd strategy to me.  And it certainly doesn't serve authors very well either.  I'll keep trying to get a hold of this book, but I really shouldn't have to be trying.

A frustrated book buyer

A couple of days ago, Bernadette over at Reactions to Reading posted her reads of the month.  Two of the books took my fancy: Black Wattle Creek by Geoffrey McGeachin and Paving the New Road by Sulari Gentill.  Neither are available on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, nor Book Depository.  I've previously tried to buy McGeachin's other Charlie Berlin book, The Digger's Rest Hotel.  It's available as an audio book but not a paper or e-book.  I've twice had pre-orders for White Dog by Peter Temple cancelled because of delays in being published in the UK, despite the fact that it was published in 2004 in Australia (it is now available at hardback price).  I've also tried to buy Kel Robertson's second novel, Smoke and Mirrors, a winner of Ned Kelly prize for crime fiction in 2009, but to no avail.  I've read the first book in the series because a friend in Australia sent me a copy.

It's pretty difficult to be Fair Dinkum about Australian crime fiction when it is almost impossible to buy the crime novels published there.  In an age of globalised cultural production, Internet buying and e-books, I find it very odd that English language books are still being limited to geographical regions.  I can read reviews of books, but I can't buy them.  It's a practise that seems limited to fiction.  I think all of my academic books can be bought anywhere on the planet relatively easily.  It is very frustrating to potential readers and I suspect also authors who's audience is being deliberately limited.  I know that this is to do with the selling of rights and the launching/marketing of books in different locales, but it seems to me that there should be an opportunity for readers to purchase books online that might not yet be available in bookstores.  If nothing else it might create a buzz about a book, including reviews, and actually aid the selling of rights in different regions.  Especially as so many of the books I'm interested in will probably never be published in other regions.

Anyway, what I want to know is this: can somebody recommend an Australian online bookstore that will post the books to Ireland at a reasonable rate?  Or perhaps an alternative way to buy Australian crime fiction that is presently not available in the Europe or North America?  I know books in Australia are relatively expensive, but I can live with that.  I just want to be able to read the books that I want to read.