Black Tide (Book Review)
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010
The thriller is a particularly impressive genre to make a dent into somebody’s psyche. The first (but hopefully not the last) novel that I’ll ever read by Peter Temple, Black Tide is the fourth in the Jack Irish series set in a seedy but well populated Melbourne landscape. However, I won’t give away the plot by filling in names to the inner clique of faces that come to life at the hands of Temple. Good novels need to be read with a blank agenda and caressed into life through the evolution of story… rather than spoiled in the tradition of the Hollywood trailer where every move and busted elbow gets pre-paraded before the ticket stub has even been printed.
I’ll admit that the first 30 pages were hard to read. But not because they were badly written. They were hard to read because Temple’s style has the fresh rawness of plain-speak that drips thick description in bucketloads… he builds and moulds believable characters and conversation through a mechanism that I found myself watching in awe as a writer while I walked in awe as a reader. So yes, I can see why Temple is a five-time winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction.
Temple’s style is a mix of that old Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer embraced with a genuinely intimate splash of the back streets of Melbourne culture that almost makes me want to follow the footsteps of the adventure through the actual streets in the story. It has that hammering momentum of crime fiction without the feeling of inevitability you come to expect in the genre by writers who often seem to feel it’s about playing it safe. I had the sense characters were the raw stuff of real life.
So while those first 30 pages took some adjustment there were vast rewards for not putting down this novel. The first is that I’ve discovered a new must-read Australian author. The second is the discovery of a fiction author prepared to use prolonged thick description rather than shining a large torch at a precarious landscape – Temple brings you into the grit of everyday life.
Peter Temple is an authentic Australian author with international talent. Black Tide was one of those novels that made me disappointed at the end to have to put it down. Enjoy.
