We have another winner!

A reader in England knew that Peter Temple is a native of South Africa and thus wins himself a copy of The Broken Shore.

You can still win Fred Vargas' This Night's Foul Work if you tell me in which novel Vargas takes Adamsberg and his colleagues out of France and to which country she takes them. Send answers and your postal address to: detectivesbeyondborders(at)earthlink(dot)net.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Peter Temple
Australian crime fiction

Celebrate Awards Week with free books, part II: The Broken Shore

He's one of the sharpest minds, wickedest wits and most graceful prose stylists in crime fiction. He won the world's biggest crime-fiction prize last year, and he deserved it. He's Peter Temple, the prize-winning novel is The Broken Shore, and the good folks at Picador USA have now issued it in paperback.

Detectives Beyond Borders has a copy to send to the first reader who correctly answers this skill-testing question:

Temple, who has lived and worked in Australia for about thirty years but did not grow up there, once told an interviewer that:

"If you come to a new society in midlife, your perceptions are sharper. Everything in Australia was strange to me. It’s an English-speaking country but it’s quite unlike England or America. It’s a very interesting and complex society, with lots of problems, and also a very egalitarian one."

Of what country is Peter Temple a native?

If you know the answer (and you have not won a Detectives Beyond Borders competition in the past three months), send it, along with your name and postal address, to detectivesbeyondborders(at)earthlink(dot)net.
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And don't forget your chance to win a newly arrived copy of Fred Vargas' latest, This Night's Foul Work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Peter Temple
Australian crime fiction

The Broken Shore, Part II

Here are a few more things I liked:

1) The denouement is more full of incident than those of most novels. The main action has resolved itself, and then one has the delicious feeling that the wrapping up will almost become a new story in itself. Come to think of it, that's a graceful way of dealing with a problem that some readers have seen in Temple's other books: that his plots can be too complicated. Here, the twists and turns are more elaborate than ever, but also more clearly defined as sub-plots.

2) Temple has so much fun drawing his story to an end, that who can begrudge him a bit of a melodramatic groaner? Here's how one of the final chapters ends: "A stone retaining wall was leaning, blocks loose. Soon it would collapse, the worms would be revealed." Over the top? Sure. Did it make me smile? Yup. It's a small example of the author's flair for humor even in grim situations. As grim as events in his books may get, I suspect Temple does not take himself excessively seriously. And that's good.

3) And here's that foodie crack I alluded to in my first post about The Broken Shore:

"Don't care for the victuals in Noosa," Cashin said. As he said the word, he saw the strange spelling. "Listen, an ordinary old toasted cheese and tomato?"

Leon raised his right arm in a theatrical way, drew fingers across his forehead as if wiping away sweat. "I take it you don't require sheep-milk fetta with semi-dried organic tomatoes on sourdough artisan bread?"

"No."

"I suppose I can find a gassed tomato, some rat-trap cheese and a couple of slices of tissue-paper white."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Peter Temple

The Broken Shore

I'm not done with The Broken Shore yet, but I've read enough to:

1) Reinforce my opinion that Peter Temple can convey better than any other crime writer I know the sense of loss created when neighborhoods and rural areas gentrify.

2) Be reminded that no one pokes fun at pretentious foodies with as much zest as Temple does.

3) See that even more so than in his Jack Irish novels, Temple can write movingly, persuasively, with humor and without melodrama about a damaged protagonist, here Joe Cashin, a former city police officer now working in a small town. Temple gives us the details of Cashin's trauma gradually. A reader can live with him and sympathize with his pain, I think, whereas the same reader might find similar protagonists, whose pain is delivered in great heavy gobs of traumatizing angst, a bit much.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Peter Temple