Detectives Beyond Borders makes the news in Australia

I've never been to Tasmania, but I made it into this week's Saturday Mercury newspaper of Hobart, capital of that hospitable Australian island. 

The occasion is a profile of David Owen, a Tasmania-based crime writer whose novels featuring Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken I have enjoyed for years.  The writer, Sally Glaetzer, overstates my radio experience, but she does a hell of a job with the article, very much better than what newspapers generally do when they deign to notice crime writers. I thought I knew Owen and his work fairly well, but Glaetzer's piece told me things I had not known before, about his political activity in South Africa, for instance.

Here's the article. Here's my review of Owen's most recent novel, 13-Point Plan for a Perfect Murder.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Pufferfish: Return of the world's prickliest detective

David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken, the prickly detective inspector in Hobart, capital of the Australian state of Tasmania, is back, his prickliness mellowed into wry, sardonic observation and acceptance that just rarely flare into open rebellion. In compensation, 13-Point Plan for a Perfect Murder is a terrific mystery and a tragedy and a comedy at the same time, with amusing and affecting allusions and references to George Eliot thrown in.

As always, the wit is here. as in the description of a polo club as

"a strange but beguiling rather than tacky mixture of showy wealth and understated environmentally conscious good taste."

or

"Another little session of silence, which seems to bemuse Brody Hearn somewhat. It;s calling thinking, son."

As a bonus, the novel answers my one complaint about Devil Taker (1997), the fourth Pufferfish novel and the last before the character returned in 2009. Owen is also a naturalist who has written several book on endangered species in Tasmania, where he lives, and I thought Devil Taker let that interest crowd out the crime.

13-Point-Plan, by contrast, introduces interesting information about the animal and plant life of Tasmania unobtrusively and always in ways relevant to the plot. Readers might be amused that his description of Tasmanian devils, related in an utterly straightforward way, is very close to the fictional Tasmanian devil that many of us know.

====================

I've liked Pufferfish for years, since I read the character's explanation of the moniker thus: "The nickname's Pufferfish. A prickly, toxic bastard, ability to inflate and even explode when severely provoked." Read my previous Detective Beyond Borders posts about Pufferfish (click the link, and scroll down.)

And should you happen to be near Hobart this Thursday, July 21, visit Fullers Bookshop for the novel's launch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Grab bag: Pufferfish, TV, good writing

Another reason to like David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken:

"`So, Rafe,' Walter says when we're all seated. `Do you want to talk to the Bellyard affair?'

"And that's another thing that gets my goat, Walter's shameless use of corporate speak. I hope he asks me to talk to Rory Stillrock, because I'll reply I can't, the poor bastard's dead."

That's an amusing line with a righteous target. I should add, too, that while crime fiction offers plenty of acerbic protagonists and plenty of introspective protagonists and quite a number of funny protagonists, Pufferfish is among the few who are all three. The Pufferfish novels are: Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995), The Devil Taker (1997), No Weather For a Burial (2010), and the new How the Dead See.

*

In one episode of The Thick of It, a civil servant catches a government minister in a lie, the minister tries to deflect the accusation, and the following exchange ensues:

"Are you inferring that I—"

"Implying."

Misuse of infer for imply has long been a common mistake, and correcting it can get a copy editor in trouble. I loved the exchange.

*

As good as the actors are on The Thick of It, the show has me thinking about writing.

Discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders and on Adrian McKinty's blog, which introduced me to show, has elicited comparisons with celebrated television comedies of recent years, including Seinfeld.

What made Seinfeld the show that it was? Look at the post-Seinfeld television careers of some of that show's principals. Jason Alexander, who played George, and Michael Richards, who played Kramer, each starred in a show shunned by viewers and panned by critics as among the worst ever. Series co-creator Larry David, on the other hand, went on to make the excellent Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Conclusion? Writing matters. Maybe that's why another Seinfeld cast member, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. chose a show with a distinguished writing team behind it for her latest TV series: Veep, created by Armando Iannucci, who also created The Thick of It.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The return of the return of Pufferfish

David Owen is back with a sixth novel about Tasmanian Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, known to readers as:

"The nickname's Pufferfish. A prickly, toxic bastard, ability to inflate and even explode when severly provoked."

This one comes with a big, fat review blurb from me; click here then scroll down for my previous posts about Owen and his prickly protagonist. Click here for  Crime Factory: Issue Ten, which includes an interview with David Owen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

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

No Weather for a Burial: The Return of Pufferfish

The crime-fiction hero who proves that his species can live alone, chafe at one's bosses, be haunted by dark memories and deprived of a wife (or fiancée), and still be in full, brimming psychological health, is back.

He's David Owen's Franz Heineken, known to some as Pufferfish, scourge of Tasmania's criminals and back in a new book after four of the more entertaining crime novels of the 1990s.

A declaration that "There's nothing like a bit of long service leave to put the pips back in a Detective Inspector's core" opens both the new book, No Weather for a Burial, and Heineken's meditation on why he has not retired after a long vacation (three months for Heineken, since 1997 and the previous Pufferfish book for Owen).

The answer, he tells us, lies in the nickname Pufferfish,

"which they gave me soon after I cut my teeth as a dour young migrant from Rotterdam, an unhurried outsider of few words, hard to get to know, prickly, feeder off detritus in murky shallows, ability to inflate and even explode under severe provocation. Not the best CV if you want to get along with your new vrienden of the Tasmanian Police Force, but effective attributes for the job at hand. Outthinking crims. Outwaiting them. Being a dirty bastard when necessary. Being a cop."

That's a damn sight better than looking in the mirror when he gets up in the morning and describing what he sees, and I'm looking forward to more amused irony in the pages that follow.

***

Read my discussions of the first four Pufferfish novels: Pig's Head, A Second Hand, X and Y and The Devil Taker.

No Weather for a Burial is published by Forty Degrees South Publishing in Tasmania. I'm unsure if the first four books are in print, but you might find copies on ABE, the Book Depository or BuyAustralianBooks.com. The effort will be worthwhile.

An omnibus of the first four books is expected in 2012, according to this article, which also includes surprising thoughts from Peter Temple about prizes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The return of Pufferfish

Pufferfish is coming back in a new book, and I couldn't be happier, because that means a return of one of the more entertaining and original crime-fiction protagonists of the 1990s.

David Owen's prickly Tasmanian police inspector, Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken, previously appeared in four novels:
Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995) and The Devil Taker (1997). The new book, to be published in December, is called No Weather for a Burial.

Here's a bit of what I wrote about Pufferfish back in the early days of Detectives Beyond Borders. It should give you an idea of why I'm glad the series will resume:

"I want to be Inspector Franz Heineken of the Tasmania Police Force, protagonist of David Owen's 1990s series and proud bearer of the nickname Pufferfish (`An ugly, poisonous scavenger known to bloat in times of distress,' according to one description). OK, I want to be everything but the `ugly' part.

"Pufferfish knows his boss is an oily, backstabbing careerist. Pufferfish recognizes that colleagues are vindictive and possibly bent. In X and Y, the third of the four books in the series, Pufferfish has been shot at and set up to take the fall for a drug bust gone wrong. But he's not bitter, and he's not haunted. John Rebus and Matt Scudder would sidle away from this guy at a bar. He's too psychologically healthy.

"And that's what makes him such a standout protagonist. He works in a nest of vipers, but he's an amiable zoo guide, telling the reader about the snakes' habits, rather than worrying all the time about being swallowed up by them. His attitude of amusement leavens the contempt and anger enough to set him apart from the legions of police-procedural protagonists in similar situations. At the same time, he can survive very well among the reptiles, and he's not afraid to tell his boss where to get off, only in language a good deal coarser than that."

Here's a link to my previous posts (scroll down) about the series. Here's the entry on Owen at the Australian Crime Fiction Database, including reviews of the first four books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009