What are your favorite political pot shots in crime fiction?

Here are three selections from crime novels I've read in the past few months or am reading now:

"She kept saying things like `the continuance of this program is a litmus test of our national decency' or, worse still, last week's corker, `without initiatives such as this one, we may as well be Republicans.'"

"Extramarital affairs were bad enough in the Democratic heartland, but porking a conservative was unforgiveable."

"Fooling around might be forgivable. Kinky is a matter of taste. But doing it with a member of the Republican Party was beyond the pale."

Rather characteristic of what pundits like to call the poverty of American political discourse, is it not — the narrowing of discussion to insults flung back and forth between members of two, and only two, irreconcilable political parties? Except that the examples are from Australian novels, and I've substituted Democrat for Labor and Republican for Liberal, switches that are least roughly accurate ideologically.

The novels in questions are, respectively, Dead Set by Kel Robertson, Crook as Rookwood by Chris Nyst, and The Big Ask by Shane Maloney. The latter two ought to make you laugh at loud amid the suspense, and the first shows similar potential. (If you like an occasional laugh with your fictional violence, in other words, try Australian crime fiction. Humor, if not always as bawdy as these examples, abounds.)

And now, the questions for readers: You've seen what Shane Maloney and Chris Nyst can do. Now, what are your favorite and funniest political wisecracks? If they're from crime fiction, so much the better!

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Shane Maloney
Chris Nyst
Murray Whelan
Australian crime fiction
comic crime fiction

Language beyond and within borders

I posted a comment on Oz Mystery Readers about the colorful language in Chris Nyst's Crook as Rookwood, and a reader offered this touching reply:

"Thank you, Peter. Sometimes it takes someone not born in Australia to point out just how colourful the Australian vernacular can be. I did read all of those and took them as a matter of course."

Here are some examples of that vernacular, explanations courtesy of Peter Macinnis of Oz Mystery Readers:

" ... his minders became very particular about who got within cooee of their boss." (Cooee is a call, originally used by Aborigines -- it sounds like that, but the call is strung out, and the end rises in tone. ... A good cooee! can carry for 3 km, and people would use cooee calls to get together, or to indicate that they were inbound. So "within cooee" can mean you are still two miles off.)

"She was the one who'd tipped the bucket of prawn-heads all over his career in the police in the first place." (When you leave a hated place of work or residence, a couple of prawn heads inserted into the tubular steel leg of a desk can wreak havoc for weeks. Smart people put their prawn heads in the freezer until garbage night.)

"All I know is, three weeks ago you're throwing sheep stations at me to find this old guy" (A sheep station is a large farm with lots of, umm, sheep. The "station" was originally the central point on a large and unfenced run in a time when people just went out and grabbed some land. ... Think ranch, and you won't be far off.)

The frequent reference to deals and a political party's record keeping as shonky. (Shonky means what it sounds like: dodgy, bent, crooked, not to be trusted.)

Not only are such expressions beguiling, but they are reminders that English is quite probably the richest language in the world because so many people from so many places speak it and have spoken it. (See this post for beguiling words from an Indian crime novel written in English, but make sure you're over eighteen.)

So read Christ Nyst. And be careful where you put your prawn heads.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Chris Nyst
Australian crime fiction

You slept with a WHAT???

If Shane Maloney and Chris Nyst ever get together for a drink, the two entertaining Australian crime novelists may find they share certain views on politico-sexual morality.

Here's a worried political fixer in Nyst's Crook as Rookwood:

"Sharpey's missus Lainie was certain to go totally ballistic if that young bloke from the Age published the breaking story that the newly appointed Foreign Affairs Minister Gary Sharpe had been bunning the ex-Victorian National Party leader Frances Hutton. ... Extramarital affairs were bad enough in the Labor heartland, but porking a conservative was unforgiveable."

And here's Murray Whelan in Maloney's The Big Ask, upon catching his boss in bed with a ... well, let Whelan tell the story:

"(H)is behaviour was even more scandalous than alleged in the shit-letter. Fooling around might be forgivable. Kinky is a matter of taste. But doing it with a member of the Liberal Party was beyond the pale."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Shane Maloney
Chris Nyst
Murray Whelan
Australian crime fiction
comic crime fiction

Crook as Rookwood

The Oz mystery readers group (free sign-up) is discussing Crook as Rookwood by Chris Nyst, a co-winner with Peter Temple's The Broken Shore of the 2006 Ned Kelly Award as best crime novel.

2006 was obviously a hell of a year for crime novels in Australia, at least at the top of the list. I praise The Broken Shore to the skies, and so far I've enjoyed the very different Crook as Rookwood as well. A hundred pages in, Nyst shows great flair for mixing humor and menace, for plunging headfirst into the dirtiest of politics, and for incisive courtroom drama. That a lot of flair for just 100 pages, but Nyst also tells a story quickly, beginning scenes in mid-conversation, wasting few words, jumping from an event to its consequences years later.

Nyst comes by his courtroom knowledge firsthand. He's a high-profile criminal lawyer in Australia, and a number of the Oz mystery readers think the novel's gadfly lawyer, Eddie Moran, is a version of Nyst. And the title? Turn to page 30: "In these parts, it things weren't good, they weren't bad, they were `crook', and if things were really crook then they were `crook as Rookwood', because Rookwood was where the cemetery was, and simple working folk knew well enough that when you got as crook as you could be you ended up in Rookwood."

Nyst has a nice ear for the cadences of speech, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Chris Nyst
Australian crime fiction