By Jason Steger
There's a last treat looming for fans of Peter Temple who still lament the death last year of Australia's greatest writer of literature clothed in some of the conventions of crime fiction. In October, Text will bring out The Red Hand, a collection of his writing that includes 20,000 words of what would have been Temple's fifth Jack Irish novel. "I read it with a broken heart," says Temple's long-time publisher, Michael Heyward. "It's as good as anything he wrote. It's funny, incredibly composed – he was at the peak of his powers. The final line where this finishes makes you laugh out loud." The Red Hand will also feature a detective story, Missing Cuffley, that appeared in The Age and Herald in 2003 and a selection of reviews Temple wrote for this paper "in which he unloads on various crime writers". There will be a couple of longer stories and the original screenplay of Valentine's Day, his TV film about a man mistaken as a footballer who ends up coaching a small town's team. And there are the appendices Temple wrote for the US editions of The Broken Shore and his Miles Franklin-winning novel, Truth, in which he explained various Australian terms for American readers. Defining sanger, he wrote: "Sandwiches. Someone who fancied a chicken sausage sandwich could ask for a chook snag sanger." And trackies: "Tracksuits, two-piece garments once worn only by people engaged in athletic pursuits, now worn by people who wish they had."
Auf wiedersehen, Bernie
Text is releasing The Red Hand by Peter Temple, a collection of writing that includes 20,000 words of what would have been the fifth Jack Irish novel. Credit: Wade Laube
There's a final book by another great crime writer, Philip Kerr, out this month. Metropolis is the last adventure of Bernie Gunther, Kerr's Nazi-era detective about whom he wrote 14 novels. Kerr died in March last year. His wife, Jane Thynne, also a novelist, recently wrote an item on the official Kerr website in which she told of his diagnosis with incurable cancer in July 2017. He was hoping to survive another five years but got only eight months. He wrote Metropolis "against this desperately dark background", Thynne said, writing every day, every weekend, even in the chemotherapy suite. She explained Kerr loved his character because "he was tickled by the idea of a detective solving everyday crimes against the background of the greatest crime of the century". I interviewed him when he came to Adelaide Writers Week in 2010 – he was published by Quercus, as was Peter Temple in Britain, and they were both at a small Adelaide dinner hosted by then Quercus boss Sydney-born Mark Smith – and he told me he saw Gunther as a "projection in order to explore moral, ethical and philosophical choices". Kerr, who was in 1995 the winner of The Literary Review's Bad Sex award – he used the word gnomon as a synonym for a penis – was a big reader, but when I asked his favourite line in literature, he came up a gem from P.G. Wodehouse: "The seriousness of the hangover was underlined when the cat stamped into the room." If you haven't read any of Kerr's 30+ books you have a treat in store.
Something to Bray about
Only last month, Readings in Melbourne turned 50. This month it's the turn of Sydney's Brays Books that has reached its half century. Philip Bray opened the business on April 9, 1969 at 268 Darling Street, Balmain, where it remains to this day. There can't be many – if any – bookshops that have remained in the same spot under the same management for 50 years. Bray says it's "somewhat surreal" to think about it and he puts it down to giving good service. In the past 50 years, Bray says the shop has negotiated four official recessions and "the one that wasn't official, the GFC", which came at much the same time as the boom in online book selling and ebooks. He has also seen a significant increase in the number of Australian books being published and a significant growth in the number of women in senior jobs in publishing. There was a time when Bray considered going back to pharmacy, the business he began his career in, because the publishing industry was so inefficient. "In pharmacy, if you ordered something it was delivered that afternoon. Books sometimes took weeks. But things have improved." Nevertheless, supply remains an issue and Bray thinks the major publishers' warehouses will have to start working on Saturdays to ensure swifter delivery. After 50 years, Bray thinks this month is also the right time to sell his business – but Brays Books will live on.
The popular Emu
Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu was published by Broome-based Magabala Books in 2014. It "turns the accepted notion of the Aborigines as a hunter-gatherer people completely on its head ... (Pascoe) creates a picture of pre-colonised Australia as a land of cultivated farming areas" as our review said at the time. Remarkably, the book, which won the NSW Premier's award for non-fiction in 2016 and has been recreated on stage by Bangarra Dance Company, is still selling like hotcakes. Last week it was number two in the Nielsen BookScan non-fiction charts, and in the first three months of this year, Readings in Melbourne has sold more than 1000 copies. In the same period last year, the total was 191 copies. The book was published last year by Scribe in Britain and Magabala also brought out a new, cheaper edition last June, 35,000 copies of which had been sold by year's end. An edition for younger readers will be released in June. The not-for-profit publisher says Pascoe's book has been a huge fillip to its revenue and wider publishing program.