Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated rated 4.0 by 367 litizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: One of his best!
Tagline: A lighthouse, a coffin, a naked man, and one new shoe. Oh, and a dog.
Once again Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland CID has been summoned from afar to investigate a difficult case, this time in Victoria at the fictional Split Point near Geelong. In a concealed cranny in the local automated lighthouse a maintenance worker accidentally found a naked dead man who had been shot dead. The first question is who is he? The second is why was he there? And third, and foremost, Who dun it? (And why?)
To find out, Bony, as he prefers to be called, takes up residence in Split Point rather as Jules Maigret would have done. He befriends locals, starting with Stug, the aging cattle dog, and a carpenter who can talk to and about wood all the day long. The dog finds the shoe where no shoe should be and Bony is on the job!
It is a superb rendering of place, and a meticulous police procedural as Bony connects the dots of both things done and said, and things not done and not said that seem odd omissions. He makes a mistake, and has to admit it, only to find it wasn’t the mistake he first thought it was.
Upfield was self-taught and a fast learner who pounded a manual typewriter in the back of a caravan that he customised himself, as he travelled around Australia, mostly in the hinterlands often in the remote outback to devise his stories.
This was number 15 in the 29 Bony mysteries that Upfield published from 1929 to 1966. He himself would have made a good character in one of his books. Inevitably, his oeuvre has been mangled — ‘theorised,’ as they say (and I cringe) — by PhDs looking for fodder. The result is unintelligible. Abandon reason all ye who enter groves academic. Oh, and he wrote another dozen books on a variety of subjects.