Review of Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland (2010, Quercus)

Emily Tempest has been persuaded to join the Aboriginal Community Police. It wasn’t her first choice of job, but the options in a small, rough and tumble mining town in the middle of the Australian outback are limited. She thought she’d be working for Tom Gillivray, but he’s worse for wear after being attacked with a zimmerframe wielded by an elderly tear-about. Instead, in her first day at work gets off to a rocky start with the pissy, dour Bruce Cockburn, her new boss, a roadside death, and the murder of an increasingly disorientated and disillusioned geologist and prospector. Treated like a dogsbody who doesn’t belong, she finds herself bristling with indignation. And once she realises who the dead man is, having spent half her life being dragged round the mines by her white father, and who has been accused of murdering him, she can’t help but stick her nose in where it’s not wanted and do her own digging around. Cockburn sees an open and shut case; Emily sees lazy policing and a potentially innocent man heading for trial. If this is how justice works, then she figures she can use and abuse the badge until they either take it off her or she discovers the truth.

Diamond Dove, Adrian Hyland’s first Emily Tempest novel, was one of my books of 2009 (review here). It was with great anticipation then that I waited for Gunshot Road. I even pre-ordered a copy, only to be let down by the usually reliable Amazon. I eventually got my hands on a copy a couple of weeks ago and it moved straight to the top of the TBR pile. The novel, thankfully, lived up to my expectations. In Emily Tempest, Hyland has created a wonderfully engaging character; half-aboriginal, half-white, she oscillates between two worlds. Quick witted, head-strong, caring and obstinate, she ploughs her own unique path through life. In fact, the whole book is populated with well penned characters that have depth and inner life. Hyland does a great job of immersing the reader in the small, fractious communities and strained social relations of outback Australia, creating a vivid sense of place. And he has wonderful, expressive turn of phrase and lively and witty prose. The storytelling, as a whole is excellent, the plotting and narrative strong, particularly in the first half of the book. The second half does suffer a little from an attempt to build tension through a series of multiple pressure points, and increasingly shorter chapters. That said, this really is a great read and one I’ve already recommended to friends. It’s definitely going to be near the top of my best reads of 2010 and I’ll be pre-ordering the next book in the series – note to author and publisher, please get a move on!

Gunshot Blues II

I'm really unimpressed re. this bit of news.

We regret to inform you that we have been unable to obtain the following item:
   
Adrian Hyland "Gunshot Road: An Emily Tempest Mystery (Emily Tempest Mystery 2)"  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/184916214X

Our supplier has informed us that this item is no longer available. This item has now been cancelled from your order.

I pre-ordered the book and have spent the last couple of months reading rave reviews.  Very frustrating.  I guess I'll go a different route.  Grrrrr!

Saturday Snippet: Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Emily Tempest’s life is split between the aboriginal world of her long dead mother and the white world of her mining father. Neither completely out of place nor fully at home in either an aboriginal camp or a rough and tumble mining town, she spends time in both. In the following two passages, Hyland describes wonderfully the two worlds.

‘Li’l Emmy, parnparr,’ said Gladys Kneebone as we sat by the fire half an hour later. ‘Didn’t they feed you down south?’

Gladys herself was a battleship on stilts. She wasn’t much older than me, but she’d exploded in every direction. She was immensely tall, immensely fat, wearing a green dress and a coiffure that looked like it had been fashioned with a splitting axe. She thrust a pannikur of head-banging tea into my hand, fossiked through the embers with a stick and offered me a leg of … a leg of what? I wondered warily. Rabbit?

‘Good tucker that one,’ she exclaimed.

I took a look at the scorched carcass grinning up from the ashes. Jesus, a fuking cat! Been a while since I’d had one of those. What the hell, I decided, it couldn’t be any worse than some of the crap I’d endured in roadhouses on the way up here.

It wasn’t. Kind of stringy, kind of greasy, kind of …well, catish but I managed.

Many of the adults I remembered from my childhood – Stumpy Doods, Spinifes, Timothy Windmill – drifted over and had a quiet word, shook my hand or threw their wary arms around me. Cissy Whiskey slipped in through the ruck, touched my face as if it was a sacred object and gave me the long lost daughter spiel. Cissy was famous for her ash-baked damper. I must have eaten tons of the stuff, smothered in golden syrup and washed down with sweet black tea. Despite the damper, Cissy herself was as skinny as a picket, with piercing eyes and an aureole of white hair.

* * * *

He appeared to be offended by the look of alarm that shot across my face. I was, I supposed, insulting the place he’d chosen to make his home. But Bluebush! What a dump! The sort of town which it’s easier to buy a silencer that a decent coffee. When we visited town, I’d never leave my father’s side; as a little black kid, you could feel the antagonism radiating out from the whitefellers when you passed them in the street.

And what a mob they were themselves. A bigger collection of dikheads and drop-kicks you’d have to travel a long way to find; boozers, bruisers and substance abusers, rockjaw Germans and lockjaw Yorkshiremen, grease monkeys and gamblers, meatworkers, meat-heads, missionaries, maniacs, men on the run, men on the dole, men on the Witness Protection Program. Peddlers, pushers, whores and bores, deperadoes of every denomination. You name it, they were there, drawn to the town like flies to a carcass.

My review is here

Review of Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland (Text Publishing, 2006)

Emily Tempest has always felt a bit of an in-betweener, not quite in the world of her white, mining father, nor the aboriginal world of her long dead mother. Having gone for an extended walkabout through Australian cities, drifting from one unfinished course to another, and around the world, now in her mid-twenties she has returned to Central Australia and the scruffy camp of Moonlight Downs, unsure what to expect or how she’ll be received. Her mob welcome her back, but within hours her former mentor is brutally murdered and the group scatter to the winds in grief. Emily retreats to Bluebush, the nearby, rough and ready, mining town, determined to track down the killer. Only the clues point in different directions – to a loner, aboriginal who is a law unto himself, and a white, cattle farmer who has his eye on the sacred lands of the Diamond Dove. What soon becomes apparent is that finding the truth in part means finding herself.

Diamond Dove is a wonderful novel. Engagingly written, with good prose, a well crafted, multi-textured plot, and perfectly paced, Hyland transports the reader into the natural and social environment of the Australian outback, the worlds of aborigines and white settlers, and their interface. In both the bush and the town, Hyland evokes a rich sense of place conveying their respective sights, textures, sounds and smells. The characterization is excellent, with Emily Tempest particularly well drawn, with just the right amount of back story that the reader understands the context but is always kept in the present. The scenes and dialogue are well constructed, with a good blend of observations, pathos, wit, and social commentary without it ever becoming a sermon. Indeed, Diamond Dove cleverly explores race relations and social and political tensions in contemporary Australia without straying from Emily’s quest to discover who killed her friend and mentor. I’ve already started recommending it to friends.