Books

Go to the archives

Peter Temple: Identity Theory

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Apr 01, 2023
Category: Fiction

Johannesburg, 2 PM on a weekday. Here is Niemand, no first name. He’s working out. Inside. “Outdoors had become trouble, like being attacked by three men, one with a nail-studded piece of wood.” Niemand is no victim: “The trouble had cut both ways: several of his attackers he had kissed off quickly.”

Niemand, we are told, “didn’t get any pleasure in killing.” Which hasn’t stopped him — Peter Temple takes a page to recount three killings on his scorecard. You’ll have no problem agreeing with Niemand’s actions.

Now we’re on page three. An aging Mercedes — actually, a new one, hidden under an old, rusting, dented body — picks Niemand up. We meet Mkane, his partner. They’re on personal protection work today, collecting a woman at a shopping center and making sure she gets safely home.

She does. Niemand and Mkane check the house out. Thoroughly: “There was one vehicle in the garage, a black Jeep four-wheel-drive. A camera at floor level showed no one hiding beneath it.” Rather extreme precautions, you think. What kind of world is this that requires “every cupboard, every wardrobe” to be checked?

The woman drinks champagne. Niemand “holstered his pistol, didn’t feel relaxed.” Her husband arrives, scorning Niemand’s black partner. Niemand looked up, “saw something on the ceiling behind him, something at the edge of his vision, a dark line not there before….The man in the ceiling pushed open the inspection hatch…”

Carnage. Out of nowhere. With hot blood and screaming and guns that don’t work and then do, and bodies, bodies everywhere. In the silence that follows, Niemand inspects the husband’s briefcase: envelopes, papers, a video cassette. The phone rings. He answers. The papers? The tape? Yes, Niemand has them. Will he bring them out? Yes, but how much? “Twenty thousand. And expenses.” And he’s off to London….

And so ends chapter one. Take a breath. Your first in a while. Turn the page.

Now you’re in…Hamburg. In the office of W&K. Once it was a publisher. Its current business is information — “looking for people, checking on people.” In the modern way: six computer terminals, a state-of-the-art mainframe. Very amoral. Find an address, turn it over. A couple is reconciled. Or maybe the husband, upset by the way she drained the bank account before fleeing to France, kills her. It’s all the same to W&K.

A former journalist works here; eventually, you know that whatever is on the cassette will come to involve him. “Eventually” is a long time coming. Temple writes real characters, and they have their stories, their frustrating days, their troubled nights. Plot points drop like Hansel’s bread crumbs in the forest. But what’s the rush? Every paragraph has a jolt of pleasure. [To buy the book on Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

A man remembers his wife: “…the day Lana drove the Mustang under a car transporter on Highway 401 outside Raeford, North Carolina, 1:45 in the afternoon. She was alone, leaving a motel, lots of drink taken.”

A description of Hamburg: “The sky was an army blanket, dirty grey.”

The sudden menace on a phone: “Sonny, deal with me or deal with the devil. There’s much worse coming up behind me. I’m the good cop. You want to walk away from this fucken Waco you created, get the fuck out. And wherever you go, get on your knees every morning noon and fucken night and pray the Lord to take away the mark on your fucken forehead.”

Repartee, this time about a courier: “They say Ollie North used him” gets, as a riposte, “You wouldn’t want that to be the high point of your career.”

Notice I’m not telling you the plot — I’m no spoiler. But you get the mood of this piece. You and I, we walk down the street not especially worried about the people coming our way. In this book, paranoia rules. Anyone coming toward you could have been hired to kill you. Which makes every moment distressingly intense.

Who was Peter Temple? Born in South Africa. Moved to Australia. Edited a magazine. At 50, wrote his first novel, The Broken Shore. Wrote four about a detective named Jack Irish. Won four Ned Kelly Awards in Australia, more than any other author. Won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, for Truth, a crime novel — which defies all logic, because crime novels don’t win literary awards. And died, in 2018.

Peter and I never met, but we were friends. Pen pals at first, then I sucked it up and sent him my work. He praised it or slagged it — his reactions were never predictable. I wrote a memorial piece, quoting our exchanges and reprinting a remembrance from his publisher, and I like to think Peter would have bestowed light praise on it, along with a reminder to cut soft emotions from my prose and to stop stealing his style.

As the President of his North American Fan Club, I should commend Truth to you. It’s his last, best book, but it’s so Aussie that it has a glossary — maybe “Identity Theory” should be your first Peter Temple novel.  Whichever one you choose, it won’t be your last. Peter Temple was that good.