gullybogan

Dear Reader,

“How does a man get away with murder, George? I need a way of getting rid of a victim; a corpse. I want Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte put to the test. I want the murderer to do it, and then dispose of the body, using a means that’s both ingenious, and plausible.”

“Old time blackfellows would burn the body with a few kangaroos. The bones get mixed up, you can’t tell the difference. The fire’s gotta be hot. Mulga wood’s the best. Then your killer gathers all the bones together and grinds them into a powder in a dollypot…” – from Act 1 of 3 Acts of Murder

Arthur Upfield’s average day involved working out how to carry off the perfect murder.

Then, once he’d done that, he had to work out how to solve it, too.

He was a writer.

His detective character, half-caste D.I. Napoleon Bonaparte – Bony to his mates – combined what Upfield saw as the rational mind of the European with the deep instinctive wisdom of the Australian Aborigine. Bony used his chimeral talents to solve crimes that no-one else could begin to fathom.

We meet Upfield in 1928, at a time when swaggies and other itinerants roam the backblocks of Australia, living off their wits and whatever they could shoot or trap.

As it happened, Upfield himself meets up with a young chap called Snowy Rowles at this time. Snowy turned out to be very good at living off what he could shoot or trap.

Upfield, faced with one of his faithful camels dying, finds himself in a dither as to how to manage the problem. Snowy matter-of-factly walks up to the camel, shoots it in the head, and then cuts it up with an axe, intending to sell the meat in town, or at the blackfellows’ camp.

Emotion doesn’t really slow Snowy down much.

He’s the sort of chap to gladly take the station-owner’s daughter in the stables, but not the sort to end up tied down to anything like a commitment to the girl.

Up to this point, you could see him as a down-to-earth larrikin. The sort of knockabout lad that gave the ANZAC legend birth.

But then he realises that the car he needs to make a living off can be his, if only he can get away with the perfect murder.

The thing that tips him from knockabout larrikin to serial sociopathic murderer is Upfield’s perfect murder plotline. Then the fact that the things he needs to shoot or trap to make his living are human no longer troubles him.

This is a true story. Upfield’s plot for the perfect murder really did inspire a mate to kill a bunch of people in what became known as the Murchison Murders. 3 Acts of Murder is not a whodunit; it’s more complicated than that. It’s a look into where the author’s responsibility for an idea he unleashes ends.

After 9/11, the Amexican Homeland Security people gathered together a bunch of creative minds from Hollywood, TV, and the literary world, to try to get them to come up with all the clever other ways someone could do something else, something as stunningly simple yet effective as the plane hijacks. That way they could, you know, stop them. Homeland Security was concerned that there was an idea already out there, in some movie or book somewhere, that would be used against them.

I’ve met a number of crime writers, and they really do enjoy the puzzle. Often, it’s all about the puzzle. Upfield, who i read as a boy bogan, was borderline autistic, and his characters, while equipped with the usual detective genre quirks, were essentially cardboard cutouts, there simply to walk – albeit brilliantly – through the solving of the puzzle.

He found himself deeply confronted when one of his cutouts turned into a real person and killed other real people. He was indignant, according to 3 Acts of Murder, that anyone should blame *him* for the crimes, but, at the same time, his defensiveness was hinting that he did feel some responsibility, some complicity.

His internal conflict over the real life crimes complicated his novelist aspirations. Arguably, the media connection between Rowles’s trial and the publication of Upfield’s book that the crime was inspired by contributed to his success. His wife considered his writing nothing more than a hobby, but Upfield considered himself a major contender in his literary field. Ultimately, he did become one of the most successful crime writers of his time. Yet, if his success was based not only on his puzzle making and writing skills, but upon coming to world attention through having inspired a real life crime, how could he deal with that burden?

Can a writer claim diplomatic immunity if someone turns his or her idea into an awful reality? Is there something actually morbidly wrong with spending all your time thinking about how to kill people and get away with it?

3 Acts of Murder doesn’t give us a nicely packaged answer to this. So, in a way, it *is* a whodunit, but one of those pesky, unusual ones where there isn’t a detective explaining to a drawing-room full of suspects at the end who the real culprit was, and how he/she did it, and – most importantly – why.

If i ever write a detective novel, that’s how i want mine to be: there will be no solution, and everyone will have to face the fact that sometimes there *are* no simple explanations for why people do terrible things to each other.

Even if the terrible thing is nothing more than sharing an idea for the perfect murder.

Yours,
Gullybogan

3 Acts of Murder (working title “Blood in the Sand”) was screened on ABC1 in June 2009.
No doubt it will be available on DVD from ABC Shops either right now, or in the near future.