Shane Maloney Book Page

Murray Whelan

Melbourne's weather teeters forever on the brink of imminence. If it is warm, a cool change is expected. A day of rain bisects a month of shine. Spring vanishes for weeks on end. Summer arrives unseasonably early, inexplicably late, not at all. Winter is wet but not cold, cold but not wet.

Yesterday's skyscrapers were today's holes in the ground. Tomorrow's landmarks had lakes in their foyers and computer-monitored pollen filters and the city council was putting little lights in the trees so we'd think it was Christmas all year round.

Murray Whelan, like the Australian Labor Party next to his son "loves the working man best." He watches the back of Charlene Wills, Victoria Minister for Industry in his job as electorate officer. He helps juggle government funding, favour-sharing and his open office doors could easily be surmounted by a sign "Axes ground here".

When it came to complex, bitter and intractable conflict, the Labor Party more than met my needs.

Beginning in 1990s Melbourne , Victoria the first book, Stiff uses the 'working class' vernacular heavily. Sadly there is no dictionary in the back to help those not up in dialect. While it is amusing and in character for one toiling in Labor Party near-obscurity in the traditional strongholds of Melbourne to use this language, it makes the text of Stiff inaccessible to the great majority of English-speakers. In this author Shane Maloney has done himself a disservice, however later titles have much less of the vernacular and are therefore more accessible.

For most people, a person "getting on the blower" will seem exceptionally odd, but for locals of a certain age and experience this means making a telephone call.

The Whelan books are procedurals -- they are step-by-step investigations in which the amateur crime investigator (by profession a political investigator) narrates his home life (as a money-poor single father) and work life as well as his investigation.

Australia having strict gun laws, the stories are short on gun battles and car chases and heavy on rough language and knocking the powers-that-be.

Like most crime stories, the environment (background and setting) plays a large role in the tale. The Melbourne location and working-class characters are very specific, which adds to the interest and makes the language less accessible to 'outsiders' in the readership.

Murray moves on to become an ministerial adviser, and then a Member of Parliament (M.P.) himself as the series progresses, but he remains a working-stiff's polly (politician).

Not fast-paced enough to be breath-batedly compelling, this series, its period setting and characters contrast against those of Jazz Age Phryne Fisher the series of another local writer Kerry Greenwood .

Stiff (1994), Shane Maloney	Stiff (1994) Don't you just hate it when somebody tries to kill you and you don't know who or why? It's not easy being a political back-watcher. When The Sun runs a story about possible political unrest rising from the death of a Turkish meatpacker, Murray Whelan is called in to investigate and write the bureaucratese report that will quiet the hearts of the politically nervous.
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