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Post by pulphack on Sept 16, 2014 7:00:12 GMT
I picked this up a few weeks ago in a Panther edition from 1970 with a dreadful but kitsch photo cover of a naked dead woman on a morgue slab. Panther, crime, dodgy cover... worth 50p of anyone's money, really.
It is, however, better than that suggests. Which shouldn't be surprising seeing as Panther actually had a pretty good crime list at that time. Written in a first person Chandler style it subverts that by having a forty year old Scots ex-pat in Australia as the narrator/protagonist. Balding, recently arrived and ready out of a job interviewing suspects for the Sydney police as a civilian interrogator (a concept odd to British readers), Peter Fleck sets himself up as a private eye. His first case comes when fat moron Jumbo Hand hires him to find out who killed his wife. The police think it was Jumbo, but the big lug doesn't have it in him.
Fleck gradually uncovers suburban sleaze and blackmail based around a would-be writer who indulges in pornography. On the rare chance that someone else here might read this, I shall not reveal all. However, there is corruption on a small, seedy scale, a nailed-on suspect who doesn't commit the murder of which he is suspected, and two killer who both end up dead. It ends with a defeated Fleck sail for Italy having only just escaped with his life.
The Chandler hard-boiled voice is a cliche, but in these hands it subverts itself as Fleck is frankly crap as a private eye for at least half the book, then develops an ill-timed sense of justice that nearly ends his life.
Set in Australia contemporary to writing, it moves between Sydney and Brisbane, and if it isn't accurate it does at least give the ignorant (ie me - I've never been to Aus) the feel of what the landscape and society were like at that time.
According to AusLit, Clapperton was born in Edinburgh in 1934, which would make him a few years younger than his protagonist. This book appears to have been published in the US as 'You're A Long Time Dead', and he published only one other book under this name, 'Victims Unknown' in 1976. There's a great running gag (well, a couple of times, anyway) about a sleazy publisher who have their office in the same building as Fleck, named New Horizon, who have terrible books they display at the front of the building, such as 'Harem Of Horrors'.
I'm wondering in Mr Doig may know something about RC, and if this reference implies he was responsible for some such titles under house names?
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