Garry Disher "Bitter Wash Road"

With Wyatt seemingly taking time out to recuperate and plan his next job and Hal Challis and Ellen Destry on hiatus it’s good to know Garry Disher is still churning out quality fiction.

I’ve tended to stick to a series once I find one I like, and both the above mentioned are right up there with the best of them, but based on what I read here I was straight out chasing other titles.

I couldn’t find Play Abandoned in iBooks or Kindle, so it’s off to the Libraries to chase them up, but Two-way Cut has duly been downloaded and added to the Read These list. The problem, based on the Bitter Wash Road experience, is that I’m likely to sit down to it one afternoon, have it finished before I go to bed that night and be up in the morning looking for another helping of tautly written, immaculately plotted quality crime fiction.

Set in the isolated South Australian wheat belt, an hour or so north of Clare, Bitter Wash Road runs with a fairly limited focus through the eyes of Constable Paul “Hirsch” Hirschhausen, a former Adelaide detective who has been returned to the uniformed branch and exiled to a one-man police station in the middle of nowhere in the wake of a corruption scandal. He’s a city cop pushed into a country lifestyle where his colleagues have their own way of running things and regard him, thanks to his involvement n the corruption case, as a whistleblower, dog, and maggot.

As things turn out, rather than being a whistleblower committed to justice Hirsch is a decent bloke who has chosen not to do the wrong thing, been caught on the edge of the investigation, which is ongoing through the plot line and adds a further degree of tension, and is being made to pay in much the same way as he would have been if he’d turned the wrongdoers in himself.

That’s a distinction his small town colleagues aren’t inclined to make, so things work out the same regardless of whether he actually blew the whistle.

Three hours north of Adelaide, Tiverton is a town south of the Flinders Range that’s doing it tough. Forty kilometres closer to the capital, Redruth is slightly larger and boasts a three man one woman police operation with Hirsch’s boss Sergeant Kropp and his male offsiders having carved themselves a nice comfortable niche, going about what they see as their duty with the casual arrogance of people who know and get on with everyone who matters.

The rest of the population, ground down by isolation, lack of opportunity and shrinking incomes won’t get in the way,

Or rather, they won’t, if they know what’s good for them.

It’s a community of haves and have nots, and if you’re one of the latter you don’t want a ticket for speeding, driving under the influence or (believe it or not) jaywalking.

At the start of the story, Hirsch is despatched to investigate gunshots that have been heard just out of Tiverton. He finds the culprits in the shape of a couple of bored kids taking potshots at jam tins with a .22, and is then redirected to the scene of what appears to be a hit and run on a back country road.

Teenager Melia Donovan is the victim, and as far as his colleagues are concerned it’s a clear case with an obvious explanation and enough time elapsed to make it impossible to track down a culprit. Hirsch, however, digs around, comes up with question marks, but is frustrated by the way crime scenes and associated evidence have been treated.

It’s much the same story when Alison Latimer, who has recently left her abusive husband and is seeking a divorce is found dead, in a location she detested in an apparent suicide. Hirsch has his doubts, but before he can do anything the scene, and her estranged husband’s homestead are rendered useless for anything approaching accurate forensic science.

But there’s enough there to keep Hirsch sniffing away, regardless of the hostility surrounding him, and he ongoing corruption investigation, with the internal investigations crowd determined to pin something on him and any number of disgruntled colleagues who’d be only too happy to assist in the attempt.

And, in the background, there are ongoing concerns regarding the overwrought media coverage of a couple of thrill killers roaming the outback in a black Chrysler station wagon.

As the narrative unfolds what looks on the surface like an exercise in low level small town corruption turns into an investigation with implications considerably higher up the pecking order and the picture becomes increasingly disturbing as the layers are peeled back.

Disher is a class act, and his books invariably exhibit strong plot lines, a diverse cast of characters who are rarely what they seem and enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning the pages.

Which, of course, is why I finished this one so quickly, and why I was out earlier this morning looking for more.

Hirsch’s situation might not be the sort of thing that can be parlayed into a series, but there’s definite potential there. The character and Disher’s narrative approach, which limits things to what you can see through his eyes have definite possibilities.

Garry Disher "Whispering Death"

Six titles into the Challis and Destry series you sense Garry Disher has a few characters and situations at the Waterloo Police Station approaching their use by dates.

Hal Challis may have had his share of professional and personal troubles in the past, but he should be reasonably happy as he heads towards a new phase in his developing relationship with Ellen Destry, but she’s off to Europe on a study tour and will be setting up a new Sex Crimes Unit when she gets back. He’s still having issues with her daughter Larayne, and will be sort of house sitting and doing a few odd jobs around the place Ellen bought after the marriage broke up.

Scobie Sutton’s wife seems to be coming out of depression, while his daughter continues to be the apple of his eye and he’s starting to find the grim reality of police work difficult to deal with and Constable Pam Murphy has issues with anti-depressants after events in the previous episode in the series and the physical symptoms that ensue when you stop taking the things.

On top of the soap opera side of things Disher serves up an intriguing blend of plot lines that start out separately and end up intertwining neatly.

The first involves a rapist wearing a police uniform. Rogue cop or impersonator? That seems to be a fairly natural question to ask, and one that, at the same time, an investigating officer would be looking to avoid answering directly. When Challis is confronted by a journo who insists on asking it he responds with spray to about budget cutbacks in an area where the population is expanding rapidly. Predictably, this doesn’t go down well with his superiors.

The rape investigation brings a feisty sergeant from the Sex Crimes Unit into the picture. After she returns from Europe this role would be filled by Ellen Destry, but while Jeannie Schiff is on the scene she ruffles a few feathers among the male officers and lays down a possible soap opera development as far as Pam Murphy is concerned.

Matters are complicated by the fact that the rapist knows enough about forensics to make it difficult to track him down, and after the first victim is found wandering dazed and naked in a nature reserve, a second is found dead in the boot of a crashed car.

The second involves a female cat burglar who, by rights, shouldn’t enter into things at all. She lives across on the western side of Port Phillip but gets there on her way back from interstate jobs using the ferry that crosses from the Mornington Peninsula after she’s deposited the proceeds of her latest job in a safe deposit box in Challis’ base at Waterloo.

While she’s careful to avoid working in her own state, the result of careful grounding in the basics of maintaining a low profile delivered by a crooked former cop who is looking to track her down and even up a few old scores, a series of coincidences brings that policy unstuck.

You know the cat burglar will become involved in the main plot, though it’s not immediately clear how Disher’s going to do it, and he muddies the water a bit further by arranging a home invasion by the the bikies living next door to Destry's new house and having the bloke responsible for a series of bank robberies looking to be heading towards Waterloo as well.

Challis, meanwhile, has a Triumph TR4 sports car he may as well dispose of since it is finally starting to fall apart and a restored 1930s Dragon Rapide that he has worked on for a decade but since it represents a phase of his life that has come to an end it might as well go too.

Those matters come on top of the rape investigation in a station that’s stretched as far as they can go. Challis lands himself in hot water for shooting his mouth off to the local media about budget cuts.

Meanwhile a socially conscious graffiti commentator is spray painting announcements like CASHED UP BOGAN LIVES HERE and I’M COMPENSATING FOR A SMALL DICK on driveway entrances that lead to architectural monstrosities erected (and I’m using that verb deliberately) by newly arrived residents with more cash than taste and no sense of humour.

Disher weaves these different lines around each other, keeping the tension between individual characters tightly wound and bringing the lot together at the end, filling in the relevant bits of back story for readers who aren’t up to speed on the earlier episodes,  doing it concisely enough so it doesn’t become an issue for those of us who have and leaving enough space for readers to go back and explore those earlier episodes should they feel so inclined.

That’s a rather tricky juggling act, but Disher, as long term fans have come to expect, carries it off with panache, delivering a complex story that works on just about every front. He’s a class act, who consistently delivers and this is one of his best.

Garry Disher "Blood Moon"

Following almost straight on from Chain of Evidence, Blood Moon has Hal Challis back from South Australia with things following a predictable course as far as the house-sitting Ellen Destry is concerned. That course, however, while predictable, has implications for the future of both parties, and there are the predictable moving into a relationship considerations that come where one party moves into the other's pre-existing setup.

As far as the professional futures are concerned it's obvious Challis and Destry can't carry on as part of the same investigative unit, at least not while they're obviously shacked up together. One doesn't notice the same issues rearing their ugly heads in other series where you have colleagues falling into the sack together, but that's presumably because they're able to maintain a fictional independence through separate residential addresses.

That's not the sort of thing, however, that's going to go down well with Superintendent McQuarrie, Challis' boss, who he's crossed swords with in the past, and an interview with the boss early on in proceedings has McQuarrie pointing out in the old days one of you would have been posted to Outer Woop-Woop but to leave it with me and he'll presumably see what he can come up with.

If that's an unexpectedly sympathetic McQuarrie, the form reversal can largely be attributed to the discovery of Lachlan Roe, chaplain at an exclusive private school, bashed and left for dead on his front lawn. Roe has links to Opposition Leader Ollie Hindmarsh, who has been known to be extremely critical of the Victorian Police Force so it's hardly surprising that McQuarrie wants things tackled with kid gloves.

It's not as if that's the only thing the Waterloo Police have to deal with. For a start it's Schoolies' Week with the predictable law enforcement issues as hordes of school leavers move into sex, drugs and rock'n'roll party mode and numbers of older toolies turn up to take advantage of the inebriatedly vulnerable.

Among those ranks is Josh Brownlee, who's bringing his own issues to this year's Schoolies' after being a genuine participant last year, attracting the attention of Kaz Moon, surf boutique manager who's out for revenge for an alleged rape last year and has an imaginative take on the concept of extra-legal revenge.

Then there's the murder of town planning infringements officer Ludmilla Wishart, who has apparently stumbled on evidence of corruption in the approvals process in an area favoured by well-heeled people with money looking to erect substantial monuments to their own lack of taste.

Ludmilla ('Mill' to her close acquaintances) is in a position where she's likely to rub up any number of influential people the wrong way, and is married to architect Adrian, who's the sort of obsessively jealous control freak who may well have done his missus in if he thought she was wandering.

He's the sort of bloke whose microscopic attention to detail would, you'd expect, have any sensible woman terminating the relationship before it got the chance to go anywhere (he's the type to tally up the cost of hot water in showers and monitor the use of toilet paper) and while she's in receipt of advice to do just that she knows that in his own words the only way you'll leave me is in a coffin.

And, as you'd expect, within the police station relationships are reshaping and realigning. Plodding good with detail man Scobie Sutton's ultra-religious wife is veering towards the First Ascensionists, an obscure sect with connections to Lachlan Roe and Ollie Hindmarsh, Pam Murphy, freshly promoted to plainclothes work, is attracted to glamorous city boy cop Andy Cree, getting her ex-operational partner John 'Tank' Tankard's nose out of joint in the process.

As usual, Disher takes the apparently unconnected strands and ongoing issues, winds then neatly around each other and keeps enough unsuspected snippets up his sleeve to add the odd new and unexpected element to the mix as things progress through the lunar eclipse that gives the book its title.

With the latest title in the series (Whispering Death) just out there's a natural inclination to rush in and grab a copy, but there's a reluctance, at the same time, to do that right now, given the likely lead-time before a seventh title appears. I have a suspicion that short-term curiosity is going to win out.

Garry Disher "Chain of Evidence"

One of the attractions about reading a series in sequence lies in the speculation regarding future directions the interpersonal relationships between the key players is going to unfold, and having scanned the blurb on the back of the local library's copy of Blood Moon (purely to check where it fitted into the sequence, you understand) I knew that Hal Challis and Ellen Destry were due to become an item, though that hasn't quite transpired yet.

At the same time you can see Disher setting things up so they'll end up there.

Chain of Evidence opens with Challis off the scene called to his ailing father's bedside and finding some family history to keep him occupied as the inevitable decline takes its toll.

That leaves Ellen Destry in charge of the Peninsula East CIU. After the  breakup of her marriage, with the daughter away at University and Challis away there's a certain logic in having her house sit his temporarily vacant home. After all, she needs to live somewhere, and it gives her an excuse to be there when Challis gets back.

Along the way, with the daughter on site after breaking up with the boyfriend and freaking out in the pre-exam swot vac, Disher has the ex-husband arrive on the doorstep, taking daughter Larrayne out for a Thai dinner where he breaks the news that Dad's got a girlfriend.

It's a case of removing the obstacles one by one, after Challis' ex-wife's suicide in prison and the death of newspaper editor Tessa Kane at the hands of Snapshot's hitman and although those matters remain unconsummated at the end of Chain of Evidence the reader gets the feeling that it's only a matter of time before they are.

But that's very much a side issue as Challis delves into his brother-in-law's disappearance and Ellen Destry is faced with the abduction of ten-year-old Katie Blasko. Katie has, however, been known to wander, but having the benefit of inside information the reader's fully aware that there's a paedophile on the loose, and there are early clues that he's part of an organized ring.

Disher works this kind of thing well, with the reader knowing enough of what's going on to appreciate touches like Scobie Sutton's growing awareness of how close his adored daughter may have come to sharing Katie's fate while still leaving room for a sting in the tail of the tale as police corruption issues rise to the surface.

That's because we've actually got three intertwined plot lines here.

There's Challis, at Mawson's Bluff in the back blocks of South Australia with time on his hands and an unexplained family mystery. His brother-in-law, a warden with the RSPCA has disappeared in circumstances that would suggest suicide if it wasn't for the fact that his assumed widow has been receiving unexplained items through the mail.

Destry has the Blasko abduction to pursue, and is forced to do that in an environment where the operational budget is being closely monitored by  Detective Superintendent McQuarrie and the forensic work has been outsourced to a privately operated laboratory where careless procedures leads to contaminated evidence.

And there are other issues within the Waterloo police station, apart from the third element, an on-going frustration at their inability to come up with a conviction that will start to break up the malevolent influence of the Jarretts, a family of petty criminals terrorising their neighbourhood.

Throw in significant professional jealousy in an environment where the uniforms aren't impressed by the rise of the female detectives and each officer has their own personal agenda and, in most cases, some long-simmering resentment against one or more of their colleagues.

Those issues aren't helped when details of the Blasko case are leaked to a TV current affairs show, which the reader knows is due to cash-strapped Constable John Tankard's discovery that his dream car is an unroadworthy lemon that'll cost an arm and a leg to fix up and has already produced a hefty hire purchase debt.

All in all, while we're looking at a police procedural much of the difficulty in the course of the multiple investigations stems from the inability of those involved to follow the appropriate procedures in an environment where personal agendas get right in the way of team cohesion.

I finished Chain of Evidence less than twenty-four hours after Snapshot, and while I've got a couple of other volumes to knock over before I head out to chase down Blood Moon it's very high on the upcoming agenda (as is monitoring the horizon for the imminent Whispering Death).

Garry Disher "Snapshot"

Given the fact that the Inter-Library Loan turned out not being an option, and with no visit to the Gold Coast with the subsequent opportunity to check whether there's a copy in the library there, reading the Challis and Destry novels in sequence meant I was going to have to buy a copy, and a visit to Fishpond produced a US hardback copy from the Soho Crime imprint.

After The Dragon Man and Kittyhawk Down there are a couple of developing inter-personal loose ends that need tidying, and while Snapshot doesn't quite deliver Inspector Challis and Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry into a relationship you can see that's where they're going to end up eventually. Whether that'll be an on-going concern is anybody's guess.

Snapshot starts with a rather clever bit of reader manipulation, with psychological counsellor Janine McQuarrie generating a fair degree of reader sympathy as we learn that having succumbed to her husband's pressure and joined in the erotic adventures on the Mornington Peninsula swingers' circuit she's apparently found the prospect of true love elsewhere.

She's driving her seven-year-old daughter around with her on a pupil-free day as she muses on these matters, before being shot in an obvious contract hit outside a rundown weatherboard house on a quiet country road near Penzance Beach. The daughter would have died as well, but the hit man's pistol misfires.

You get an inkling that she's not quite the assassinated innocent from the fact that she has just posted off some photos from the most recent orgy to several male participants, including her husband. Police inquiries reveal she's not that popular with colleagues or clients either, so there are plenty of possible motives for the hit.

There's also an additional complication since she's the daughter-in-law of Hal Challis' boss Detective Superintendent McQuarrie, who's inclined to meddle even when he's not personally linked to a case. His son, of course, has to be a prime suspect, but he's hardly the only one, and Dad seems more interested in protecting the son than finding the killer.

The reader already knows who carried out the hit, so there's the regular challenge of spotting the way Disher's going to line things up for a solution as the hit man receives frequent instructions via text messages from an anonymous employer and goes about removing various figures around the periphery of the case whose continued existence could prove problematic.

Along the way, as things unfold there are the interpersonal dynamics that drive a good series, both inside Waterloo Police Station and among the officers' nearest and dearest.

Detective Sergeant Destry's marriage continues to disintegrate. Well-meaning Sergeant Scobie Sutton continues to extol the wonders of his ten year old daughter to an uninterested audience while his wife gets the chop from her welfare job with the notification arriving via email. Constables Pam Murphy and John Tankard still manage to only just tolerate each other as they drive a sports car around the district in a public relations exercise, rewarding courteous drivers with bags of goodies.

As has been the case through the other Disher titles I've read, the author integrates these elements seamlessly, switching perspective adroitly and sketching in any relevant details where they need to sneak in without disrupting the flow of the on-going narrative. That means you can read his work out of sequence, handy in a world where some of the earlier titles might not be that easy to track down in your local bookshop, though it also means you aren't going to get the unfolding interpersonal dynamics in quite the same way.

That's a significant consideration because it's the characters as much as the deftness with which Dis\her manipulates the elements in his plot line that are likely to bring the reader back to line up for the next one in the series. Disher's success in that regard can be gauged from the fact that within twenty-four hours of finishing Snapshot I had borrowed Chain of Evidence from the local library, knocking it over within a day, and if it's more than twenty-four hours before I'm queueing up for their copy of Blood Moon that'll only be because I've got a Shane Maloney Murray Whelan trilogy and another title I borrowed at the same time as Chain of Evidence.

Garry Disher

I guess, when you look at it, it's fairly obvious why practitioners in the realm of crime fiction tend to base their series around the notional good guys rather than their counterparts from the underworld.

For a start, there's the expectation the forces of justice are going to prevail, at least in the long run, and that means your average criminal is going to be spending his or her share of time safely behind bars, which is hardly the sort of thing you can base a lengthy series around.

Then, when you’re talking about a police procedural the cop shop setting provides the author with a set of characters to develop as the series goes on, with developing relationships, conflicting ambitions and simmering animosity in an environment that more or less equates to just add water, though when you're talking crime fiction the water's going to be something like a psychopath on the loose.

And there's the additional factor that, once you've sorted out one little mystery you can come up with another sociopath, throw him or her into the same setting and you're off again. I suspect it's a bit easier coming up with mysteries that need to be solved than it is to invent crimes that can be successfully committed with the protagonist getting away in the end.

Having run across Garry Disher's The Wyatt Butterfly and The Dragon Man in the local library, I hit The Dragon Man, coincidentally the first title in the Challis and Destry novels first, and it definitely seems like a series that's worth following. 

I spotted Blood Moon on the shelves at the library the other day, and a glance at the blurb on the back suggests that Inspector Challis and officer in charge at the local station Sergeant Ellen Destry end up getting it on together, and you can see that as a logical development of one of the subplots from The Dragon Man as Destry's marriage is subjected to the strains of personal differences, professional ambition and (I'm guessing here) teenage daughters going through a difficult phase.

Those considerations suggest it might be best to read the rest of the series (Kittyhawk Down, Snapshot, Chain of Evidence, Blood Moon and the forthcoming Whispering Death) in sequence.

The two-story The Wyatt Butterfly double-decker omnibus (a natural fit since The Fallout follows straight on from Port Vila Blues), on the other hand, comes late in an already well-established series, and one in which our protagonist is one of the bad guys.

Which explains the earlier musings on today's morning walk. 

As a professional criminal, central character Wyatt needs to get through each story without being caught, not necessarily unscathed but definitely not in the position where he's going to end up cooling his heels in the clink, and based on what was on offer here it looks like a series that's well worth tracking down, though the lack of a cop shop type framework means that reading things in the right order might not be quite so important). 

Given the concept of a professional burglar and hold-up man who operates on his own you're probably going to find each story is more or less self-contained. The standard operating procedure seems to involve having Wyatt embark on a bank robbery, jewel heist or whatever, unaware that there are other influences lurking in the woodwork surrounding his operation.

In Port Vila Blues he starts off with what seems like a straightforward burglary which yields a valuable piece of jewellery that was part of the haul from another robbery and when the corrupt police responsible for that one learn it's back in circulation it comes as no surprise to learn they want to find out what's going on.

The Fallout is exactly that. After escaping from Port Vila with a different bundle of jewellery Wyatt is inveigled into helping his nephew with an art heist while the nephew is being conned into joining a search for bullion in a sunken wreck.

Much of the attraction in both stories lies in the characters that surround Wyatt.

While his nephew is in some ways a chip off the old block, he's an interesting contrast to the cautious, business-like unemotional Wyatt, blowing the proceeds of a series of bank robberies across rural Victoria at the Crown Casino, and keeping a collection of annotated press clippings in his semi-swisho apartment.

The central baddie in Port Vila Blues, the crooked judge De Lisle, is a suitably loathsome piece of work, and the corrupt cops seem professional enough on the surface, but they have their fatal flaws while good cop Liz Redding ends up on the other side, suspended for failure to follow S.O.P.

I'll be off to the library to see about the rest of Disher's work in the two series, but while the Challis/ Destry side of the equation will involve a request for Kittyhawk Down, along with the other Wyatt stories, Kickback, Paydirt, Deathdeal, Crosskill and the eponymous Wyatt I'll probably be asking for the lot and tackling them as they turn up on Interlibrary Loan if they're not actually on the shelves in Bowen.