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DEATH OF A LAKE

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An Inspector Bonaparte Mystery # 18 featuring Bony, the first Aboriginal detective. Eight hundred kilometres from the sea, Lake Otway is dying. Heat, drought, and thirst-crazed animals take their toll. When Ray Gillen, lucky lottery winner, went for a swim one night and never came back, some thought it was an accident, or was it murder? As the water level drops, five men and two women wait beside the shrinking lake – for the body, the money, or neither. And watching it all, Bony…    Death of a Lake is as intense and unremitting story as Upfield ever wrote. It should be, for it is very close to Upfield’s personality… being the real Albermarle Station where Upfield was first hired as a cook in the 1920s and where he began his writing career… In a hut at Wheeler’s Well Upfield was inspired to write his Bony after a visit by Upfield’s friend tracker Leon Wood. 

Arthur Upfield was born in Gosport in 1890 and arrived in Australia in 1911, working near Broken Hill as a rouseabout and cook. He enlisted in 1914 and was allotted to Light Horse Brigade train and served from Gallipoli to Beersheba, at the same time as Ion Idriess. He began writing while in the outback, and created the first Aboriginal detective, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte – or Bony – based on the Aboriginal tracker Leon Wood. The first Bony appeared in The Barrakee Mystery in 1929, and he became an international celebrity in 1932 when his book The Sands of Windee was the model for the murderer Snowy Rowles (see Upfield's Murchison Murders) 29 Bonys were published, also in France and Germany. 26 episodes were made for TV in the early 1970s, and will soon appear again on your screen. “In the mystique of the bush, Upfield saw elements of epic power in Australian life. In contrast, his rather dry style and meticulous plotting seem distinctly smaller in scale. But that is part of Upfield's impact, creating a worm's eye view of awesome natural grandeur, a sense of human inadequacy in a dominating continent.”

* Long out of print classic crime novel.
* Reviews and co-operation with audio publisher Bolinda.

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