An evening of Shane Maloney.

 Summary

We decided that tonight, we would do something different. We decided that instead of everyone reading the same book and commenting on it, each of us would read a book by the same author and comment on it and, in the process, perhaps a composite picture of that author's work would emerge. Our chosen author was Shane Maloney, who writes detective stories set against a background of life in and around the contemporary Australian Labour Party. Their main character is Murray Whelan, whose career within the Party progresses with each book until he is elected an MP.

 

Since the Library had several copies of several of Maloney's books, I read three:

·       Something Fishy (2002) Text Publishing.

Murray Whelan MP is on the trail of the man who killed his lover and their unborn child when he comes across a major abalone poaching operation while on holiday with his son, Red.

·       The Brush-Off (1996) Text Publishing.

No sooner has Whelan become political 'assistant' to new Arts Minister Angelo Agnelli, than he is enmeshed in major art fraud, embezzlement and murder.

·       Stiff (1994) Text Publishing.

Murray Whelan is the political 'minder' of Industry Minister Charlene Wills and runs her electorate office. Asked to investigate an 'accidental' death at a local meatworks, Whelan uncovers a lucrative fraud … and is nearly killed.

 

My comments

At first, I enjoyed reading these books. Maloney has a dry, laconic sense of humour and within each complex, yet action-filled story he gives just enough description of life in the modern Labour Party to make you wonder - 'Is it really like this?'

 

As I read each one, however, I noticed three shared weaknesses:

1. Whelan remains virtually unchanged through the series. This is understandable - Whelan is a very popular character, so why risk changing it? The consistency of other popular fictional detectives - Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot - reinforces this view. Personally, however, I like characters to change and age - e.g. Ruth Rendell's Wexford, P. D. James's Dalgleish, Colin Dexter's Morse.

2. Female characters are defined primarily - sometimes completely - by their sexuality. For Whelan, women are either sexually attractive or he works with them despite the fact that they're sexually unattractive in his eyes. Thus:

	Sexually attractive	Sexually unattractive but …
Something Fishy	Lyndal Luscombe; Barbara Prentice
The Brush-Off	Salina Fleet; Fiona Lambert; Claire Sutton	Bernice Kaufman
Stiff	Ayisha Celik	Trish, Charlene Wills, Bernice Kaufman

3. 'Action' scenes seem included as part of the formula yet end up as 'filling' - although they're tailor-made for a television adaptation!. E.g. in Something Fishy, his time in the sea lasts 20 pages; in Stiff, the attack by rhe blue Falcon lasts 16 pages.