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Arthur Upfield (1890*-1964) |
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English-Australian mystery writer, who roamed in his youth the
sub-continent working as a boundary-rider, cattle-drower,
rabbit-trapper and station-manager. Arthur Upfield's famous hero is the
Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (or 'Bony', as he is known in the books
familiarly), the son of an unknown white man and an aborigine mother.
Bony is a gentleman and genius of criminal science, who has an M.A.
degree from Brisbane University. During his investigations Bony
frequently faces race prejudices but wins them with his wit and smile.
Bony is fully aware of his talents and solves crimes confidently
through patience. "'Every successful investigator owes much to Lady Luck,' he told Irwin. 'No investigator ever begins to be successful unless driven by curiosity. Luck, curiosity, plus a little inductive reasoning into the behavior of foxes and eagles, will raise any police recruit to the top of his department.'" (from Cake in the Hat Box, 1954) William Arthur Upfield was born in Gosport, Hampshire, the son of James Oliver Upfield, a prosperous draper, and Annie Upfield, née Barmore, a shop assistant. Very soon in his early years, Upfield's first names were reversed, and he became known as Arthur William. From the age of six or seven, he lived with his grandparents for a period, and then returned to his parents' home. On leaving school at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a firm of estate agents, but he failed the qualifying examination – partly because he spent all his time with writing unpublished novels, Sexton Blakeish thrillers. However, at school he had had problems with spelling and he failed in English. Around the age of eighteen, he joined as a part-time trooper the Hampshire Carabineers Yeomanry. Upfiled's
father sent him to Australia in 1911, so he would be
less likely to bring disgrace to the family and he would have a new
opportunity to seek his fortune. Upon arriving to his new country,
Upfield was fascinated by the freedom and wilderness of the Australian
landscape. During the following years he lived a nomadic bushman's
lifestyle, working in odd jobs, such as a cook in a hotel, boundary
rider
for sheep stations, and cowhand, among other things. He learned of the
Aboriginals, their culture, and this period gave him much of the
material that he would later use in his fiction. Rumors, that at some
point of his life he had an Aboriginal wife and childred, have never
been confirmed. In Follow My Dust! (1957) he said: "In all human
history no people are closer to the Christian ideals than the
Australian aborigine, and next to him is the white man who is captured
by the aborigines' Spirit of the inland. Give an aborigine a pair of
trousers, and another is wearing them the next day. Give him a hunk of
meat, and he shares it all round. The white man is hungry, hand him a
meal." With the outbreak of World War I, Upfield joined the
Australian Imperial Force. He fought at Gallipoli, but he was not on the beach the first landing day. His
second youngest brother Nelson was killed on the Somme. In
1915 Upfield married in Anne Douglass, a nurse, whom he had met
in a hospital near Alexandria while recovering from gastritis. At the
beginning of 1916, he was sent off to England and then to France.
Upfield's miliary career was interrupted by frequent illnesses. After the war Upfield returned to England, where he worked as a private secretary to an army officer. However, adjusting to normal life was not easy for him. "With the ever-growing clarity I came to see that neither my wife nor I would be happy in England, no matter what height I reacher," he later said. Upfield sailed back to Australia in 1921. He continued his wandering and worked as an itinerant trapper, miner, whatever there was to be had, realizing eventually that "the life road I was now traveling wasn't going to make me upward into the light of prosperity and happiness and contentment." In the late 1920s Upfield started again to plan career in literature. He took a job as a cook at the isolated Wheeler's Well in New South Wales and spent his spare time in writing. He produced four novels, among them The House of Cain (1928), in which a hideout for murderers is run by an evil millionaire murderer. His serious novels did not sell well, but with Bony Bonaparte and The Barakee Mystery (1929) Upfield finally gained success. "A mystery story whose plot is original yet entirely probable, whose setting is unusual, and whose characters are neither puppets nor monsters, deserves recognition," said a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement. Noteworthy, Upfield's "half-caste" detective made his appearance when Aborigines were treated as something less than human. Upfield had made in the bush the acquaintance of Leon Wood, a half-caste Aborigine, a tracker employed by the Queensland Police. "He was the son of a station owner, and had received a high school education. Like all his type, the bush had drawn him back and claimed him." Upfied decided that he would change the white detective in The Barrakee Mystery to his friend and Wood became the model for his detective hero, Inspector Napoleon (Boney) Bonaparte. Bony was found beneath a sandalwood tree when he was two-week-old infant, beside his dead mother, and brought to a mission school. There he was named after the subject of a book he was attempting to eat. After reveiving a Master of Arts at the University in Brisbane, Bony joined the Queenland police service. His wife, the grey-eyed Marie, is also half-caste; they have three sons, Charles, Bob, and Ed. Bony has initiation marks on his back and chest, made with a sharp flint. He uses the skills of both his cultures, Aboriginal instincts and Western intelligence, and he likes tough cases which take him all over Australia. Bony was in 29 novels. J.B. Priestley wrote of Upfield: "If
you like detective stories that are something more than puzzles, that
have solid characters and backgrounds, that avoid familiar patterns of
crime and detection, then Mr Upfield is your man." In The New Shoe
(1952) an old craftsman makes a red-gum casket, which nearly becomes
Bony's coffin. The Man of Two Tribes (1956) is a story of
survival in the desolate Nullarbor Plains. In Murder Down Under (1937)
Bony is on holiday in western Australia and meets the bizarre Mr.
Jelly, an amateur criminologist who collects portraits of murders. The
critic H.R.F. Keating included in 1987 Upfield's The Sands of Windee
(1931) among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. In
the story about a "perfect murder" Upfield invented a method to destroy
carefully all evidence of the crime. His "Windee method" was used in a
true-life crime, the Snowy Rowles murder case, in which one of his
friend was killed. Like in the fictional story, a murder was concealed
by the mixing of human and kangaroo ashes. It was assumed that the
perpetrator had heard Upfield discussing the plot of the novel with his
companions at Dromedary camel station in 1929. Rowles used the wrong kind of solder; he was arrested and hanged. In Cake in the Hat Box (1954) Bony is caught between two systems of justice. Constable Stenhouse is found dead in his police jeep on a lonely dirt road. Bony soon realizes that he is not the only person searching for the feller who shot Stenhouse. Jacky Musgrave, the police tracker, is supposedly killed and the local aborigine tribe wants vengeance too. Bony tells Constable Irwin about aborigines: "They are loyal to white men living for a long time in their own locality, and suspicious of all others. It takes years of association and study to reach even the middle of the bridge spanning the gulf between them and us. Be patient. A thousand years are as nothing in this timeless land, and when the last aboriginal sinks down to die, despite the veneer imposed on him by our civilization, he will be the same man as were his forebears ten thousand years ago." By modern standards, some of the content of the books would not be considered politically correct – Upfield refers to Aborigines as "Abos" which was acceptable in Australia in the 1960s but is not acceptable today. "It was one of Bony's axioms that Time is the investigator's greatest ally." – "Bony felt the satin smoothness of wood, was reminded of the red sand of inland, the real heart of Australia which fools continue to claim dead." (from The New Shoe, 1952) According
to the journalist and Upfield's serials agent Pamela
Ruskin, the author was a tough, irascible, wiry man, with slate-colored
eyes and "a thin trap of a mouth and ears like jug handles." He wrote
normally for five hours every day, typing with two fingers, smoking
while writing, and ignoring spelling in the first draft. Before a
complete re-writing, the manuscript was put in a drawer for a month. It
took about seven months to
complete a book. Known for his wry sense of humor, Upfield once
quipped: "I never use bad language. I only use Australian words!" In the early 1930s, Upfield ran with his wife a guest house in Kalamunda; novels had not brought them a fortune. He was then employed by the Melbourne afternoon paper, the Herald. After the outbreak of WW II, he volunteered for the Australian Imperial Forces, receiving an appointment as a military censor at the headquarters. During the war such Bone novels as Murder Down Under (Doubleday, 1943), Wings Above the Claypan (Doubleday, 1943), No Footprints in the Bush (Doubleday, 1944) were brought out in the United States, where Upfield was introduced as "Australia's leading mystery story writer." Many servicemen stationed in Australia took Upfield's books home with them. Because the term "bushranger" (=an outlaw living in the bush) was considered unfamiliar to American readers, Bushranger of the Skies became No Footprints in the Bush and for similar reasons Wings Above the Diamantina (refers to Diamantina River region) was retitled as Wings Above the Clay Pan. "Doubleday have a habit of calling my books what they like," Upfield complained. "Bony" books also had a loyal following in Germany; all were translated into German. Two "Bony" mysteries has been translated into Finnish, Wings above the Diamantina (Bony ja punainen lentokone, 1969) and Bony Buys a Woman (Bony ostaa naisen, 1971). They appeared in Otava's Crime Club paperback series, which featured writers such as James M. Cain, José Giovanni, Gavin Lyall, and Peter O'Donnell. Winds of Evil (Doubleday, 1944) was placed by the mystery writer Craig Rice (pseudonym of Georgianna Ann Randolph) at the head of her ten "whodunits" of the year. The Doubleday Crime Club editions were not paperbacks, but well-designed hardbacks. Upfield's sympathetic characterization of the world of Aborigines and skillful depiction of the natural environment, bush fires, drought, sudden rains and dry lakes, gave his works special quality which separated them from the usual style of hardboiled crime fiction. Although Upfield's mysteries attracted readers in England and the USA and received good reviews, he was never wholeheartedly admitted to the Australian literary establishment. In later years, Upfield became prominent in the Australian Geological Society. He led a major expedition in 1948 to northern and western parts of the country. The party included Michael Sharland, journalist, Ray Bean, photographer, Harry Tate, motor mechanic, George King, cook, and J.K. Ewers, author and columnist, whom Upfield had known since the 1930s. Arthur Upfield died in Bowral on February 13, 1964. The last Bony novel, The Lake Frome Monster (1966), was completed by J.L. Price and Dorothy Stange. Upfield's long-time companion, Jessica Hawke, published a biography in collaboration with author entitled Follow My Dust! It draws from a work he wrote in the 1930s, The Tale of a Pommy, but he not get it published. Upfield lived with Hawke at Airey's Inlet, Victoria, and at Bermagui and Bowral, New South Wales, from the late 1940s. *According to Upfield’s birth certificate, he was born on 1 September, 1890, not in 1888 as usually stated. Upfield himself once claimed that the certificate burned in a campfire in Queensland. For further reading: 'Arthur Upfield,' in The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler (2018); 'Making a meal of it: food as a symbol of degrees of fiction in the novels of Arthur Upfield' by Rachel Franks and Alistair Rolls, in Blood on the Table: Essays on Food in International Crime Fiction, edited by Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (2018); Investigating Arthur Upfield: a Centenary Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Kees de Hoog and Carol Hetherington (2012); Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte: His Life and Times by Michael Duke (2010); Arthur W. Upfield: The Life and Times of Bony's Man by A.J. Milnor (2008); Arthur William Upfield: A Biography by Travis B. Lindsey (Diss. Murdoch U., 2005); 'Upfield, Arthur William,' in World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 4. ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Murder on the Rabbit Proof Fence: The Strange Case of Arthur Upfield and Snowy Rowles by Terry Walker (1993); A Checklist of Arthur Upfield by Christopher P. Stephens (1992); The Spirit of Australia: The Crime Fiction of Arthur W. Upfield by Ray B. Browne (1988); 'The Sands of Windee by Arthur W. Upfield (1931),' in Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating (1987); Follow My Dust! by Jessica Hawke (1957) - Films: 3 Acts of Murder (2009), TV movie, dir. Rowan Woods, teleplay Ian David, starring Robert Menzies (as Arthur Upfield), Luke Ford (as Snowy Rowles), Bille Brown, Anni Finsterer, Nicholas Hope. - In Search of Bony (2007), prod. Two Heads Media, dir. by Lisa Matthews, written by Caroline Baum, Lisa Matthews, with Aaron Pedersen (as Bony). - Boney (1972–1973), TV series of 26 episodes, prod. Portman Productions, Scottish Television Enterprises, starring James Laurenson (as Detective Inspector Bonaparte), Kate Fitzpatrick and David Gulpilil Selected works:
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