His latest books are crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford. The first, A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) was a Sunday Times crime book of the month, and so was the second, The Broken Afternoon. The third, Lost and Never Found, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.
He has pursued a parallel career as a publisher. From 2012 to 2018 he was Managing Director of the children’s publisher, David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, whose book of essays Daemon Voices (2016), he edited.
Arriving on the scene late (he was fifty when his first book was published), Peter Temple was instantly a writer of thoroughly expert literary thrillers, stylish, intelligent, humorous and dark. Words were important to him, his sprightly, stylish prose reminiscent of Chandler, but funnier (‘Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish’). The real world was important too; a former journalist, he knew how things work – newspapers, information-gathering agencies, politics – and also how the past lives in the present: ‘the past had suckers, it attached itself to everything.’ His characters, like those of Dickens, are vivid animations, distinguished by the marks of their individuality; his speciality was in damaged men. Scene-setting is always vivid and deeply felt, in particular of Temple’s adored-abhorred Melbourne, with its industrial lots, big-business office complexes, weatherboard slums and gated mansions. And all these literary virtues combine in his two last, loosely connected novels, The Broken Shore (2005) and Truth (2009), which outgrew his chosen genre.
The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.
Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.
Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?
Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.
It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.
The Broken Shore won the CWA Gold Dagger but is altogether meatier and more highly wrought than the average crime novel, a study in evil, a hard look at Australia and a moving portrait of a damaged, somehow-surviving man.
Melbourne detective Joe Cashin has been shunted to undemanding duties in remote Cromarty, his hometown, as he convalesces from a near-fatal attack which killed his partner. He would like to be free to pursue the Quixotic renovation of his old family farm, to walk his dogs, to reflect on what Cromarty has become – a coastal town half dead industry, half new holiday homes – but the local ‘squire’, last bastion of Cromarty’s former industrial wealth, is found murdered in his mansion, apparently killed for his watch, which, a few days later, a couple of Aboriginal kids are caught trying to sell. It seems a straightforward case. It isn’t.
Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger. Australia itself is a broken shore, a blasted heath of ruins, a desolate place for desolate characters. Damage has been done by the violence of hardscrabble poverty, privileged wealth and deep-rooted racism. Where is the soul of Australia now? In Cashin? In Dove, Cashin’s down-trodden Aboriginal partner? Or in Dave the Swaggie, a ‘ghost’, an ‘alien’ (‘did Dave ever have an earthly identity?). Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?
Truth is as rich, grim and sprawling as Dostoevsky, taking in multitudes, a swarming cast of characters, murder, politics, money and horror. It all happens around Stephen Villani, Head of Homicide in Melbourne, that ‘ghostly’ city of foul deeds. After a cameo role in The Broken Shore, Villani here takes centre stage, conducting investigations into two separate murders, separating acrimoniously from his wife, having a lust-charged affair with an eye-catching television journalist, trying to find his runaway daughter, worrying that a certain event in his past is going to return to destroy him. He flirts recklessly with danger, not only in his violent encounters on the street but in the swanky living rooms of politicians courting him for higher office, and in his childhood home in the hills, where his ex-combat father is refusing to evacuate in the face of rapidly spreading fires.
It is, among other things, a novel of memories, Villani conjuring up a city built of his own experiences, reflecting on what it has all meant, struggling to recall things buried too deep, things that lie ‘just beyond the breakers, in the deep water, in the dark, slippery, moving kelp of the mind.’ His project is to understand – or at least to get into view the unintelligible: ‘There was a meaning here. There was something speaking to them and they did not know the language.’ Temple’s own language is extraordinary: demotic, urgent, elusive, it demands concentration and delivers constant shocks of the new. He avoids explanation like the plague. He loves to ramify, can’t resist an extra layer, a wounding complication. Huge numbers of people appear and disappear, many of them suspect, and the investigation leads not towards their crimes but into their lives. It progresses crabwise, slow and opaque. In retrospect the solutions are simple, we have simply been hustled past them onto other fascinating things. It is an extraordinary achievement.
The Broken Shore and Truth are published by Riverrun.
See also Linda Newbery's review of Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman
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