Black Tide by Peter Temple
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012 (First published 1999) ISBN 9781921961571
Those infrequent readers of this blog will know that I recently read the first Jack Irish book - Bad Debts - after watching the television movies derived from the book series. Black Tide is the second book in the series, and is yet another hard-boiled romp through Melbourne and Regional Victoria, with international conspiracies, hit-men and horse racing, and a bit of cabinet making and football thrown in for light relief.
Black Tide revolves around a huge multi-national money laundering ring. Jack Irish gets drawn into the mystery when he agrees to help one of his father's ex-team-mates from Fitzroy to try and track down his wayward son, who has absconded with $65,000. Along the way, he has a fling with a photographer, makes some great furniture under the scornful eye of his mentor Charlie Taub, and gets involved with his horse-racing friends Cam Delray and the irrepressible Harry Strang in a very complex multi-layered scam to fix a horse race at Moonee Valley.
As in Bad Debts, Black Tide evokes an inner city Melbourne that used to exist before every warehouse was filled with apartments and every pub became artisinal. Temple almost (but slightly annoyingly not quite) nails the atmosphere of 90s Melbourne, and weaves an acceptable complex and tension-filled web around Irish - what starts as a simple missing-persons job becomes something much more dangerous for him and his friends.
As I was reading this book, I did muse on how much life has changed in the twenty years since it was written - this book is very male, down to the sex-scenes, and certainly not PC, although I gather that is a good reflection of Temple himself from what I've heard. As crime writing goes, Jack Irish is a good character, and Black Tide a good story.
Temple I think must have been a bit of a glass-half-empty person, as his descriptions of people and places are always bleak. Melbourne is always dark, dingy and wet, Ballarat and Port Fairy windy and cold, and Tasmania menacing. It is only in Charlie Taub's cabinet-making workshop that the reader gets a sense of peace and serenity. While this is fine for this style of book, the sense of the pointlessness of life and the bleakness of the lived experience of the vast majority of people is a little depressing. At times Temple's writing can seem almost a parody of itself, and the genre.
That stated, if you like crime fiction, especially with a home-grown taste, I can highly recommend Black Tide.
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