Review: The Bone is Pointed

 

English; Arthur W. Upfield, The Bone is Pointed, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1960

Octavo; paperback with illustrated wrappers; 240pp. Rolled; preliminaries stained by old tape; contemporary price sticker on front wrapper; title page coming loose. A fair copy.

 

“...A man of medium height and build, dressed in a light-grey tweed. His tie matched his shirt, and so did the soft felt hat now resting on the edge of the writing-table. The visitor’s face was turned downward to the busy fingers engaged in making a cigarette, and with no little astonishment the sergeant noted that the man’s hair was fine and straight and black, and that his skin was dark brown. And then he was gazing into a pair of bright-blue eyes regarding him with a smile.”

Arthur W. Upfield, Wings above the Diamantina, 1936

In the 1920s and ‘30s, English immigrant Arthur Upfield began to churn out a series of detective novels set in the Australian Outback and in the rural hinterlands of the country. This unique setting, previously unexplored as a location for this kind of writing, was an instant success and the books took off, in the US and Britain and also in Australia. In the 1960s and ‘70s, many of the books were filmed for television and these, too, had a reasonable success, although only in this country. In recent years, the books have faded into obscurity, becoming largely unknown, although their collectability is currently on the rise.

The books fell into disfavour due to the fact that they were written by a white author with outmoded views of Australia’s indigenous peoples. At the beginning of last century, the Aboriginal people were badly misunderstood and government and missionary aims were geared towards ‘civilising’ the native people of Australia, forcing them out of traditional ways and into modern, Western, lifestyles. These efforts had extremely poor results.

Strangely enough, while Upfield’s potboilers don’t conform to the current thinking about Australia’s indigenous communities, they are fairly sympathetic to the black characters that populate their pages. The white characters (who mostly commit the crimes and often treat the aborigines appallingly) tend to be fairly bland – similar to the characters from an English country-house murder dumped into a Bush setting; the “blacks”, on the other hand are finely drawn and leap vividly off the page. Upfield addresses racial inequalities in the milieu by making his erstwhile detective - “Bony” - a half-caste, thus bridging both worlds.

Raised by a strait-laced nurse at an outback station, who fondly named him after the Regency-era French emperor, his skills of observation and logical deduction were honed by both his association with his mother’s tribe and his work as a police tracker for the Brisbane police force. In the later tales he rises to the rank of Detective Inspector and receives nation-wide recognition for his skills as an investigator.

Disdaining standard procedure and protocol – “I have always declined to permit red tape to control me” – Bony thinks around obstacles both procedural and legal to ensure that his quarry is brought to justice. He affects an overly-educated verbosity to disarm the usual prejudice with which newcomers generally receive him and he cuts through class divisions by insisting that he be called “Bony” by all comers, regardless of rank. He smokes like a chimney while cogitating and often uses the time taken in questioning witnesses to roll his own cigarettes.

For some time now I had been on the lookout for this particular Bony story, when it miraculously fell into my lap at work (who says that good things don’t come to those who wait?). In the meantime, I had read a couple of the other titles and had mixed feelings about them. I have a theory that crime writers tend to posit their investigators at a certain interesting point in their lives and then – as the novels accrue – slowly allow them to grow out of the very circumstances that made them interesting in the first place. Years of reading Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels led me to this theory, and I think it holds true with Bony. Initially, Bony has to work hard to convince his white superiors of his abilities; later on, he rises in rank, gets married, has kids and is so thoroughly recognised as a kind of ‘Down-Under Sherlock Holmes’ that he can do no wrong. Thus the interesting tensions of his world that made him worth reading fall away to a comfortable blandness. The novels I’ve read so far are mostly – including this one – set in the mid-term of his career where an easy balance in his circumstances holds sway

The attraction to this story is that it directly invokes (and most likely became the primary source for) the Aboriginal magical tradition of “pointing the bone”. This is a traditional curse wherein a malefactor is punished through the medium of a bone being pointed deliberately at him by a witch doctor, or elder, thus informing him that he was about to die a slow and agonising death. Upfield reveals the entire process in the chapter where Bony has this curse inflicted upon him through a misunderstanding and it is wonderfully detailed and thorough. That being said, I wonder how much of the procedure was researched and how much he invented? Given that he credits the indigenous Australians with telepathy, I suspect some creativity is at work here, although it reads as informed creativity.

The story revolves around a missing stockman who disappears while investigating the water levels in a swampy paddock adjacent to a rival sheep station. Bony is sent in after five months have elapsed to solve the mystery of the disappearance. The owners of the rival station are good friends and benefactors to the local aboriginal tribe and the missing stockman has a history of cruelty and abuse against the indigenes: the blame for his removal threatens to upset the delicate balance of their tribal existence. Thrown into the mix is a pair of secret lovers, an illegitimate offspring and a plague of rabbits. Once Bony gets cursed by Wandin the witch-doctor, his battle to survive and solve the mystery becomes a critical fight and a gruelling push to the finish.

There are problems with the writing. Upfield is often a little too keen to orientate us vis-a-vis the map at the start of the book and he tends to take little diversions into less-than-relevant material, such as the extended descriptions of the plague rabbits getting caught in the fences at the end of the story; this descriptive section is no doubt an interesting piece of reportage – probably something that Upfield saw in his travels – but it serves little purpose in the narrative, especially since the tale is pretty much finished at this point. As well, Bony is a problematic character who has always struck me as being a little fey: his manner of speech and his tangled interior analysis of his half-breed status doesn’t always ring true. Like Margary Allingham’s Campion, or Dorothy L. Sayers’ Peter Wimsey, he starts his existence somewhat arch and uncomfortable – not quite worn in; unlike those characters, he never seems to get comfortable in his skin.

These novels are a little difficult to read as they are bogged down with the stereotyping and sensibilities of a bygone age, much as Agatha Christie’s novels sometimes tread a fine line when it comes to discussing Jewish characters. Still, Upfield’s “blacks” are often the most engaging and pro-active characters in the narratives, despite being treated with a tinge of disdain. Readers should tread warily when dipping into these sources – although their observations of the Australian Outback and life there in the ‘20s and ‘30s are wonderfully sketched and worthy of investigation – and should try to see them as the artefacts of a past age that they are.

Three tentacled horrors.