An Author Bites the Dust (1948) by Arthur Upfield
Genre: krimi
GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.93/5.00 by 228 litizens.
Verdict: Parody plus
In the Yarra River valley the self-appointed, self-satisfied gatekeepers of Australian literature gather at the home of Mervyn and Janet Blake, having removed themselves from Melbourne to concentrate on their labours refined and many. He has published several novels but recently has concentrated on devastating critiques of the works of others, while she publishes short stories. They are much celebrated in the tiny world of the antipodean literati, almost as much as they celebrate themselves – legends in their own minds.
There are frequent gatherings of their acolytes at this quaint country retreat. Among the number are Martinus Lubers, Arvin Wilcannia-Smythe, Twyford Arundal, and others. As fine a pencil-necked crew of four-eyed paper-shufflers as Upfield could imagine. Of course these aristos do not mix with local hoi polli, but are much observed by the locals, including Mr Pickwick, a neighbouring cat.
This smug world shatters when Mervyn is found dead one morning in his study. There is no discernible cause of death. Inspector Cardboard from Melbourne Criminal Investigation Bureau arrives to muddy the waters and does so energetically, concluding there is no crime to investigate. He congratulates himself on his perspicacity and returns to Melbourne.
Still suspicions remain because there is no discernible cause of death and Bony is summoned from far Queensland, being the only sensible detective in the wide brown land, and he is seconded to the case. He sets about learning the ways and wherefores of the village and its villagers.
It has all the Upfield features:
A careful and respectful description of the locale and locals.
A stalwart local plod stymied by the aforementioned Inspector Cardboard.
Grizzling about government while relying on it.
Bony reading footprints on cement sidewalks, well, almost.
His many annoying habits, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking many cups of tea with exaggerated courtesy.
A school of red herrings among the cast.
A crime within a crime to roil the depths.
An off-stage persona who was there all the time.
A beautiful woman to admire Bony.
Published in 1948 and set immediately after World War II there are may references to shortages of goods except for tea, which occasions the ritualistic grizzles about the GOVERNMENT, but nary a mention of the war itself, still less of its toll on the village – yet local men must have been in the army in Singapore, New Guinea, or Egypt.
Most of all it offers a window on haute literature versus commercial fiction as the acolytes circle each other. Bony finds a cicerone to this new world in a commercial author, one Clarence Bagshott (aka Arthur Upfield) who explains to him that writers may be either storytellers or wordsmiths or both. (It takes pages and pages to make this simple point, I am afraid.) The best writers are both. A story teller may be a good writer but not always, though a wordsmith with nothing to say does not make the cut.
Commercial fiction places a premium on storytelling because that is what buyers want to read.* (Amen, to that Brother Arthur!) Litterateurs write only words. [Snort!] They turn inward and haughtily disdain commercial fiction as beneath their rarefied vocabulary. Does this explain Dan Brown’s success?
Upfield must have had a lot of fun characterising these wordsmiths from their frilly clothes, poncy hairstyles, sneering lips, pinched features, skimpy moustaches, watery eyes, reedy voices, skinny arms, and ridiculous names. There is not a manly man among them, to be sure, and the ladies fair little better but he spends fewer words deprecating them.
By convulsions many, the plot involves a commercial writer, I. R. Watts, whom Bony tracks down. Watts is pseudonym and neither the publisher nor Australia Post is very cooperative in penetrating the disguise. However, Bony has his ways, he asked the Tax Office which happily reveals all. Yep. Damn GOVERNMENT!
Spoiler ahead.
Here is where it gets complicated and interesting. Yes, of course, this storyteller of commercial fiction is the pseudonym of one of the very same literary snobs, but which one and why?
Turns out Janet Blake is I. R. Watts, whose commercial success might rival that of Upfield himself. She is a story teller par excellence. Having read one of the Watts books while on the trail, Bony attests to that with the assurance and confidence of a man who has read little. Here is where the flour is stirred in to thicken the plot, for she has long kept this secret pseudonym from her husband Mervyn Blake who is so self-centred he did not notice either her industry nor the income that resulted from it. I can believe that when I reflect on some of the cases of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) with whom I have worked. This disorder is a pattern of self-centred, arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. [Fill in the blank for the names of those near by. Continue on a separate page.]
Her earnings as I. R. Watts maintained their lives while he scorned all others in his literary criticism. The commercially successful novels of Watts would have been beneath his contempt. His own career as a novelist has ended and in truth it never quite started it seems, since his early novels were rejected by British and even, shock, Australian publishers until Janet Blake made suggestions, changes, and so on, and when they were then emended and published she allowed him full credit. Rather than embracing that productive partnership, Mervyn (because of his narcissism) rejected her further contributions, and though he wrote many other novels, none were published. Into that lacunae grew his bile and his criticism of others. Sounds like a good case for tenure.
In short, she did him in, though quite why I never did get, apart from the fact that he was an insufferable dolt, but then look around, no shortage of those, and few of them are murdered. The how is made of hardened air inside pingpong balls.
Thanks to the scavenging of Mr Pickwick, Bony works it all out and arrives at the herring de jour.
You say ‘Boney’ and I say ‘Bony,’ because Upfield wrote it as ‘Bony.’ When some of the stories were filmed for television it the 1970s the name was changed to ‘Boney’ for reasons only known to those who made the change. That in turn has influenced some of the re-issues of the books. The stupid lead the blind as usual. That television series is discussed in connection with comments on another Upfield title to be found elsewhere on this blog.
Upfield published at least thirty-seven Bony titles; he addition he published two dozen short stories, and a great deal of non-fiction in newspaper articles about the outback, aboriginals, and life in the scrub. He served in the Australian Army in World War I and upon return to Australia lived as a jackaroo for years. He was an active member of the Australian Geographical Society and participated in many of its expeditions.
* To Bagshott’s literary dichotomy I would add a third category today: Prize fiction. The books that are entered for literary prizes today are not written for readers of either stories or words. They are written to arrest the attention of the overwhelmed and jaded hacks who serve as jurors on selection panels for literary prizes who must pick winners out of the hundreds of titles submitted. The weird, the strange, the incomprehensible, the attenuated, the dead boring, the unreliable narrators, the omission of punctuation, these are all devices to make a book standout of a pile of ninety volumes on the desk. I have spoken! Did I say ninety, one such hack has since told me that he had one hundred-and-fifty the last time he did one of these duties.