Arthur Upfield Biography and List of Works

English-Australian mystery writer. Upfield's famous hero is 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 in the field of criminal science, who has an M.A. degree from Brisbane University. In his work Bony frequently faces race prejudices but overcomes them with his wit and smile. Bony is fully aware of his talents and solves crimes confidently through patience.

"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)

Arthur William Upfield was born in Gosport, Hampshire the son of a prosperous draper. 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to a firm of estate agents, but he failed the qualifying examination - partly because he spent all his time writing unpublished manuscripts. His father sent him to Australia in 1911, so he would be less likely to bring disgrace to the family and would have a new opportunity to seek his fortune. Upfield was fascinated by the wildness and freedom of the country. During the next ten years he travelled widely, working in odd jobs, such as a cook, a miner, cowhand, and a boundary rider for sheep stations. He learned of the Aboriginals, their culture, and this period gave him much of the material that he would later use in his fiction.

With the outbreak of World War I, Upfield joined the Australian Imperial Force. He fought at Gallipoli and in Egypt and France. In 1915 he married Ann Douglas, a nurse, and returned after the war to England, where he worked as a private secretary to an army officer. When his marriage failed Upfield sailed back to Australia in 1921. He continued his wandering and worked as an itinerant trapper and miner. In his youth Upfield had composed Sexton Blakeish thrillers and in the late 1920s he started to plan a career in literature. He took a job as cook at the isolated Wheeler's Well in New South Wales and spent his spare time writing. "Mary was a genuine colonial pioneer, the wife of a man who owned 60,000 acres and 10,000 sheep, etc. She drilled it into me that I was going nowhere of importance very fast, that I was industriously building a mountain of regrets, and that my salvation might lie in the exercise of the only talent she could observe" Upfield 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. In the bush Upfield made the acquaintance of Leon Wood, a half-caste Aborigine, a tracker employed by the Queensland Police. 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 is found as a two-week-old infant beside his dead mother and is brought to a mission school. There he is named after the subject of a book he was attempting to eat. 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 that take him all over Australia.

"It was one of Bony's axioms that Time is the investigator's greatest ally."
(from The New Shoe)

Bony appears in 29 novels. 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, and 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 murderers.

Upfield's mysteries attracted readers in England and America, but he was never admitted to the Australian literary establishment. Upfield's sympathetic characterization of the world of Aborigines and skilful depiction of the natural environment, bush fires, drought, sudden rains and dry lakes, provides his novel with a special quality which separates them from the usual style of hardboiled crime fiction. In later years, Upfield became prominent in the Australian Geological Society and in 1948 led a major expedition to northern and western parts of the country.

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 of the author entitled Follow My Dust! in 1957.

For further reading: World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996, vol. 4); A Checklist of Arthur Upfield by Christopher P. Stephens (1992); The Spirit of Australia Ray B. Browne (1988); Follow by Dust! By Jessica Hawke (1957)

The House of Cain, (1926)