Tony Smith

Stella Sartori and Jack Rogers, both Australians, work for a New York bank. Their boss, Frank Spiteri, sends Stella and her team to Peoria to report on the takeover of Collins Military Systems by the Kradel company. Spiteri’s friend Daniel Cross, now head of Kradel and formerly head of CMS, complains that Stella has stolen an important file. Spiteri promotes Jack from the market floor to the mergers and acquisitions section, and sends him after Stella and the file. Cross’s aggressive behaviour convinces Stella of the accuracy of her intuitive belief that the file is very sensitive indeed. Jack keeps an open mind about her motivation and does not accept Cross’s claim that she wants to profit from the theft. At the core of Stella’s concern is a poem ‘The Virgin’s Secret’, written in the 1960s, which seems to hold the key to Cross’s past.

It is ‘Schoolies’ Week’, and Waterloo, on the Mornington Peninsula, hosts a crowd of teenagers who, for various reasons, shun more fashionable parties on the Gold Coast. The police try to ensure that the kids practise safe sex and don’t become victims of their own excesses with drugs and alcohol, nor of the ‘toolies’ who scavenge the festival fringes. Liaison officer Constable Pam Murphy, recently transferred to detective duties, has encountered few serious problems but warns her superiors that an impending lunar eclipse could produce ‘the ultimate high’.

Detective Rubens McCauley has recovered almost fully from a gunshot wound suffered while exposing corrupt Melbourne cops: see Head Shot (2005). Colleague Cassie Withers supports McCauley, but his superior officer wishes him elsewhere. His private life teeters on the brink: he has neglected his mother who suffered a stroke; he has unresolved issues with his father; his brother wants him to counsel his niece about the dangers of party drugs; and he hopes to revive his relationship with his estranged wife.

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell famously deplores Ernest’s loss of not one but both parents. The great polymath would approve of Peter Temple’s easy mastery of not just two but three popular literary genres. In the Jack Irish series, Temple created a likeable rogue who approximates a Melbourne private eye, and with The Broken Shore (2005) he won crime writing awards for a disciplined police procedural set in rural Victoria. In the Evil Day is an international thriller that moves mainly between Hamburg and London. Again, Temple’s control is strong and deft.

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

Despite predictions that globalisation would homogenise cultures, ethnicity continues to split states asunder. Democratic theorists fear that consensus, equality and social capital are retreating before competition, materialism and resentment. The 2004 federal election campaign became a festival of individualism as alternative governments courted voters not with visions of a richer community but with promises of greater disposable household income after health and education costs.

When the Australian government urged older workers to delay retirement, some observers saw this as ‘wedge’ politics. One ageing media personality joked about younger women refusing to have babies sufficient to care for him in his dotage. For electors, the falling birth rate may be a controversial economic issue, but for some couples, and especially women, decisions about procreation are not theoretical exercises but painful personal dilemmas.