Books

Go to the archives

Peter Temple: Truth

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jun 18, 2020
Category: Fiction

Laurie doesn’t see him, so Steve Villani is able to study his wife as she walks toward him.

Jeans, black leather jacket, thinner, different haircut, a more confident stride.

He hasn’t planned it, but he can’t help himself. “You’re having an affair.”

She says this isn’t the place to talk. He won’t let it go.

“Fuck meeting with the boyfriend, is that it?”

“I’m not having an affair,” she says. “I’m in love with someone, I’ll move out today.”

Looking for great fiction-writing? Friends, that is it: not a word wasted, every beat true, drama at the red line, a surprise that packs a wallop.

What more do you want? Whatever your fantasy about a book, Peter Temple probably satisfies it in “Truth.” Peter Temple? Only one of the world’s better novelists. But unknown to most American readers largely because he lived in Australia.

Temple is under-appreciated here for another reason: His books are thrillers with violent crimes as the problem to be solved and cops as the characters who must solve them. In our country, that’s the province of genre specialists like Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson — writers who favor simple plots, cardboard dialogue and lots of white space on the page. Temple, in comparison, is Dostoevsky. [To buy the hardcover from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

The comparison is not casual. Temple’s characters are complex, his plots complicated, his world smudged if not outright dirty — that is, his books are entirely credible. In this one, a young prostitute is found murdered in a super-luxury high rise that boasts the ultimate in technology — though on the night of the murder, none of it works. In Temple’s books, high and low always meet. Not only might the murder be connected to the torture and execution of three thugs, but Steve Villani, chief of the Homicide squad in Melbourne, must deal with citizens of every caste.

He’s having an affair, for instance, with a successful TV newscaster. He’s invited to a party given by a gazillionaire, where he recognizes “a millionaire property owner, an actor whose career was dead, a famous footballer you could rent by the hour, two cocaine-addicted television personalities, a sallow man who owned racehorses and many jockeys.” And, when it’s time to be a tough cop, he can go there.

If the plot has more layers than a Goldman Sachs bond deal, it’s fun to try and figure out what’s coming. (Good luck.) What’s simple — and simply delightful — is Temple’s dialogue, which verges on shorthand.

Here he is, giving a deputy his marching orders for the daily media update on the prostitute’s murder:

“Take the media gig this afternoon?”
“Well, yes, certainly. Yes.”
“Give them the waffle. Can’t name Ribarics. On the torture, it’s out there, so the line is horrific and so on. We’re shocked. Scumbags’ inhumanity to other filth. With me?”
“Urge people to come forward?”
“Mate, absolutely. In large numbers.”

And here, in a scene so emotionally rewarding you’ll want to give Villani a fist-pump, is the Homicide chief grilling a high government official who just happened to have been the young prostitute’s final client:

“Are we done?” said Koenig. “I’m a busy man.”
“Not done, no, not at all,” said Villani. “But we can conduct this interview in other circumstances.”
“Is that, we can do this here or we can do it at the station? Jesus, what a cliché.”
“That’s what we deal in,” said Villani.
“I’m a minister of the crown, you grasped that, detective?”
“I’m an inspector. From Homicide. Didn’t I say that?”

Fun, but never charming. This is, after all, Homicide, “where animals hated you, dreamed of revenge, would kill your family.” It’s a job that eats you, “your family got the tooth-scarred bone.” A job where crimes are sometimes solved by looking at footage taken by a security camera at night and noticing the reflection of a car’s license plate on a window, and sometimes solved in nastier ways.

You want validation? Try this: In 2010, “Truth” won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Australia. Funded by the author of “My Brilliant Career,” it’s awarded to “the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.” To quote the judges: “‘Truth’ disorients the reader with multiple plots and elliptical exchanges: blank spaces occupy almost as much room on the page as the print. In this way Temple takes a popular genre and transforms it into a radical literary experiment in realism and fiction. There is minimal exposition of plot and character; rather the narrative is embedded in voice and dialogue rich with colloquialisms and police lingo, heard in grabs from radio, in cars, on mobile phones, and in conversations across always crowded rooms. We learn to trust the accumulation of fragments and scenes. Few contemporary fiction writers grasp the speech and silences of the Australian vernacular as effectively as Temple.”

You want a mindless beach read? Skip this. You want to be bitch-slapped into full attention by a master? Come ahead.

To read about Peter Temple’s “Identity Theory” on HeadButler.com, click here.

To read about Peter Temple’s “The Broken Shore” on HeadButler.com, click here.

EXCERPT FROM “TRUTH”

On the Westgate Bridge, behind them a flat in Altona, a dead woman, a girl really, dirty hair, dyed red, pale roots, she was stabbed too many times to count, stomach, chest, back, face. The child, male, two or three years old, his head was kicked. Blood everywhere. On the nylon carpet, it lay in pools, a chain of tacky black ponds.

Villani looked at the city towers, wobbling, unstable in the sulphurous haze. He shouldn’t have come. There was no need. “This airconditioner’s fucked,” he said. “Second one this week.”

“Never go over here without thinking,” said Birkerts.

“What?”

“My grandad. On it.”

One spring morning in 1970, the bridge’s half-built steel frame stood in the air, it crawled with men, unmarried men, men with wives, men with wives and children, men with children they did not know, men with nothing but the job and the hard, hard hangover and then Span 10–11 failed.

One hundred and twelve metres of newly raised steel and concrete, two thousand tons.

Men and machines, tools, lunchboxes, toilets, whole sheds—even, someone said, a small black dog, barking—all fell down the sky. In moments, thirty-five men were dead or dying, bodies broken, sunk in the foul grey crusted sludge of the Yarra’s bank. Diesel fuel lay everywhere. A fire broke out and, slowly, a filthy plume rose to mark the scene.

“Dead?” said Villani.

“No, taking a shit, rode the dunny all the way down.”

“Certainly passed on that shit-riding talent,” said Villani, thinking about Singleton, who couldn’t keep his hands off the job, either, couldn’t stay in the office. It was not something to admire in the head of Homicide.

On the down ramp, Birkerts’s phone rang, it was on speaker.

Finucane’s deep voice:

“Boss. Boss, Altona, we’re at the husband’s brother’s place in Maidstone. He’s here, the hubby, in the garage. Hosepipe. Well, not a hosepipe, black plastic thing, y’know, like a pool hose?”

“Excellent work,” said Birkerts. “Could’ve been in Alice Springs by now. Tennant Creek.”

Finucane coughed. “So, yeah, maybe the scientists can come on here, boss. Plus the truck.”

“Sort that out, Fin. Might be pizza, though.”

“I’ll tell the wife hold the T-bones.”

Birkerts ended the call.

“Closed this Altona thing in an hour,” he said. “That’s pretty neat for the clearance.”

Villani heard Singo: Fuck the clearance rate. Worry about doing the job properly.