Crime novels: Consolation, Sticks and Stones and Doom Creek

Seeing the worst in humanity day after day makes even the most honourable police officer vulnerable to becoming jaded.

Journalist Katherine Firkin (ex Herald Sun and Channel 10, now working for CBS in New York) has written a crime novel set in Melbourne. Picture: Nicki Connolly

Along with titles naming conditions such as trust and peace, perhaps longingly or ironically, antipodean crime fiction is offering the honest male cop as protagonist. This character shines in remote postings and small policing units, where he attends to everyday citizens’ concerns, improvising as necessary to reach sustainable and fair outcomes.

Sometimes the honest cop is as judgy or grumpy as he is good, but he’s able to admit mistakes and improve on his attitudes, even in the face of undeserved hostility from officers called in for important investigations.

While usually of mainstream white descent, he is willing to learn from and co-operate with diverse communities. He’s disturbed by the social impacts of illiberal cults. And he cannot avoid noticing local environmental damage.

Good Cop No.1 in today’s line-up is Sergeant Nick Chester, the creation of author Alan Carter, who has divided his time between Australia and New Zealand since immigrating from England.

The character was introduced to readers in Marlborough Man, which won the 2018 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, and he’s now back in Doom Creek. Nick is a man who is maturing into acknowledged goodness but is not giving up on his principled irascibility.

This makes for spiky exchanges. Add harmful intruders impinging on a tough local population of pakeha and Maori strong on weapons, hunting and self-reliance, combine with lots of outdoors physical activity across short time frames in the magnificent but unstable setting of New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds region, and you have a compelling package suited to a television series.

Doom Creek, by Alan Carter

In Marlborough Man, Nick was introduced as a former undercover officer who had facilitated bashings and worse and was now living under threat. “Try being nice,” he was cautioned. It wasn’t until late in the serial murders case dominating the book that Nick began to be called a good man, and then with qualifications.

A man of ideals, chiefly political and ecological, Nick continues to be disappointed by human conduct, and this shapes his policing in Doom Creek. Valuing regulatory protections, he is obstinate about compliance with rules and “can’t stand to see people getting away with not doing the right thing”.

Doom Creek begins with Nick “obsessing again”, in the words of his patient wife Vanessa, about local logging and dredging for gold. By midmorning he has been assaulted by a belligerent American in the bakery and we’re under way with one of this novel’s chief concerns: the admission to NZ of a masculinist, cashed-up “Doomsday sect” with far-right views on civil liberties, welfare and people of colour.

Constable Latifa Rapata, Nick’s smart young partner, sees these Americans as colonisers, a fresh invasion of rich white men. Nick argues with their leader, who invokes the old-fashioned notion of decency, calling New Zealand a “dumb, cute, decent little country”, its people dulled by “decent complacency”. Decency isn’t a failing, Nick responds.

Meantime, Nick’s most pressing criminal challenges are scattered homicides. A mutilated body has been discovered in the supermarket cool room. The upper half of a long-hidden body is uncovered when an earthquake triggers a landslip. And there’s reason to reinvestigate killings with links to a religious community. Oh, and he rescues Latifa from dying by garrotting after an attacker leaves her snared to a tree.

No.2 in the Good Cop line-up is Garry Disher’s Constable Paul “Hirsch” Hirschhausen, who occupies a solo posting in a country town in South Australia.

If you didn’t know Hirsch to be a laconically humane policeman from the evidence of the first two novels in this series (Bitter Wash Road and Peace), you’ll know it after reading the opening chapters of Consolation because Disher tells you so.

Consolation, by Garry Fisher

Hirsch is not so much a law enforcer as a mediator, protector, diplomat, and even a pro bono handyman. The people of his district are finely individualised by Disher.

The measured prose of the Hirsch novels reflects their protagonist’s character. Hirsch’s use of the f-word is increasing, however. It’s arguable this makes him a more relatable protagonist.

Two connected lines of inquiry weave through Consolation to the final sentence. One features a stock and station agent, Adrian Quinlan, whose liquidity problems, a consequence of fraudulent development deals, are causing grief throughout the district. The second features demoralised farmer Leon Ayliffe who, owed money by Quinlan, has erupted, shooting an environmental protection officer and fleeing, his teenage son with him.

Experienced in hunting and survival skills, the Ayliffes have reportedly adopted conspiracy theories and “gone all doomsday prepper”. They raid properties for fuel and replacement vehicles, with Hirsch fearing what may follow because they are vengeful.

This current of concealed menace has its counterpart in Hirsch’s perception of the land as “uncertain”. As he observed in Peace, it’s country where a murder might pass unnoticed and undetected.

In his personal life, Hirsch finds his relationship with local teacher Wendy strained by his need to keep at bay a vivid woman admirer-turned-stalker. And a case of a neglected, abused girl is emotionally taxing.

Good Cop No.3 is Detective Senior Constable Emmett Corban of the Victoria Police.

With journalist and debut novelist Katherine Firkin coming from and writing about a younger generation than Carter and Disher do, words such as “decent” and “honourable” don’t figure in the vocabulary of Sticks and Stones. And with Emmett not one for abstractions, and his past apparently clean of stuff-ups and traumas, his character must be deduced from his current behaviour and demonstrated willingness to improve.

Firkin’s Missing Persons Unit is a small and non-prestigious outfit subject to departmental sledging and funding cuts. As its head, Emmett must make more judgment calls than most police do.

Sticks and Stones, by Katherine Firkin

When we first meet Emmett, he’s jaded and trying to push back against the cynicism that comes with knowing that many of the people reportedly missing don’t want to be found (absconding spouses, for instance).

Emmett is unenthused when a limping, whiny man he finds distasteful reports his middle-aged sister missing. The second case that comes in – a wife who failed to collect her children from an activities program and cannot be found – is of more interest to Emmett because he has a wife and young son.

When it is the body of the missing sister that is found first, her chest marked with incisions in a geometrical shape, Emmett is remorseful that he underestimated the genuine and serious nature of the brother’s report.

Discovering more about the suffering the brother has carried since childhood, he feels compassion too. Did he do enough, he asks himself, with this becoming a refrain as more women are reported missing and a second, similarly marked body is found.

Much of the action is in Melbourne’s inner northwestern suburbs, where areas degraded by infrastructure development and littering are obvious grounds for environmental concern.

Firkin’s narrative is told in various voices. To readers who find this off-putting at first, I’d say persevere. This is the text equivalent of those screen entertainments that switch between points of view and locations, requiring the viewer to grasp who’s who and how they connect.

Emmett has the legs for further investigations and more personal growth, as does his wife, Cindy, and I hope we’ll meet them again.

Doom Creek by Alan Carter (Fremantle Press, 299pp, $32.99), Consolation by Garry Disher (Text Publishing, 393pp, $32.99) and Sticks and Stones by Katherine Firkin (Bantam, 400pp, $32.99). Robyn Walton is a writer and critic.