|
 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examination - partly because he spent all his time writing unpublished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)
|
