David Owen's Pufferfish and other long-interrupted crime-fiction series

No Weather for a Burial, David Owen's long-awaited fifth novel about Detective Inspector Franz Heineken of Tasmania, known to some as Pufferfish, is now history.

It packs a bit of mystery into its 150 or so pages, a fair piece of suspense into a climactic confrontation, and a nice twist that brings the reader back to a mystery he or she might have forgotten.

There are brief, loving descriptions of Tasmania's natural life, a longtime interest of the author, who also writes about natural history. And there is the Pufferfish prickliness, both from the man himself and from his blunt assistant, Detective Rafe Treadway:

"Jay Ho's Sandy Beach Road property ... hides behind a thick and leaning three-metre high sandstone wall, probably built by convicts in the dwindling years of transportation. But the electronic gate gives a hint of something other than wealth. Down here at forty-two degrees south very few individuals feel the need to lock themselves away from the great unwashed."

"`What a knob,' Rafe says, buttoning down his driverside window and pushing the buzzer on the intercom."

Though the settings are vastly different — one contemporary urban and rural Tasmania, the other 1960s and early '70s suburban England — readers of Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles series might enjoy Owen's gently and sometimes not so gently mocking humor.

***

David Owen went from 1997 to 2009 between the fourth and fifth Pufferfish books. Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) went twenty-three years between his sixteenth and seventeenth Parker novels. What other crime writers have gone many years between books in a series?

(Read about the 1990s Pufferfish novels here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010