Pip Fioretti writes a kind of genre blending crime novel with Bone Lands, which combines everything that we love about Outback Noir – the big skies and harsh, dry landscapes, the Aussie battlers who live there – with a hardboiled policeman and puts it all in the historical setting of 1911. And as a character, mounted trooper Senior Constable Gus Hawkins has a lot going for him. He’s complex in that he’s well-educated and sounds it, with several tours in the Boer War behind him which have left him with both mental and physical scars. He’s smart and resourceful, but that old PTSD means he drinks too much and gets into fights.
But then, everyone here seems to get into fights, well, just about. It’s a hardscrabble existence out in the back-blocks of New South Wales. Hawkins’ little town of Calpa is a ‘blink and you miss it’ kind of place, with a pub, a post-office, the police station and not a lot else. It’s a one-man station, with tasks often concerned with managing unrest – there’s not a lot to do in Calpa but drink your wages away – local admin like gun permits and the like. But riding home from monitoring behaviour at a dance honouring the King’s coronation, Hawkins comes across a serious crime – three young members of the same family brutally murdered.
The Kirkbride family are well-off landowners, running a huge sheep station, and not well liked in this haves and have-nots kind of place. With the endless work required to make money from wool, they have a huge labour force of hardened men of the land. Life is cheap and violence comes easy. But when the violence is against their own, the grim landowner and patriarch Robert Kirkbride is oddly reluctant to have Hawkins nosing around too much, preferring to believe in the ‘robbery gone wrong’ theory. It doesn’t help that Gus has had a romantic connection with the remaining daughter, Flora.
It was a six-hour ride upriver to Bourke. In summer it was a bastard of a ride, one I preferred to do at night if I had a choice. The thing to do was carry a tin of Josephson’s Australian Ointment. Buckskin breeches were made so you didn’t chafe, but six or more hours in the saddle on a hot day and everything chafed, from balls to brain. The glare was blinding but our official hat was a jaunty pillbox affair, which would be just the thing for a Parisian gendarme but was ridiculous out here. I shoved it in a saddlebag and wore a cabbage-tree hat like every other man in the bush.
The sun was on its way across a vast blue sky, a westerly wind blowing. I noticed a shape ahead in the distance, moving slowly. Dancer stopped at the sight of it. He didn’t like things that moved, nor did he like things that didn’t move. So there we were, his ears pricked forward, completely still, every muscle tensed and ready to flee.
‘How’d you get into the police force, mate?’ I said, stroking his neck. ‘Bribed someone, eh?’
But Gus is determined to find out what happened. These were his friends and he wants to bring some closure for Flora, too, who has become unhinged by the deaths of her siblings. It doesn’t help when two detectives arrive from Sydney with their own way of doing things, but none of the nous for dealing with the locality or shifty farm labourers. If conflict is the linch pin of a good story, then this one has it in spades. You can’t help but feel for Gus, even if he is, quite often, his own worst enemy.
Other characters are interesting too, particularly in relation to Gus. His initial dislike of Trooper Lonergan, a somewhat wet behind the ears type, sent from Bourke to manage the station while Gus looks after the detectives, mellows into friendship. Other characters are lightly drawn but the author captures their essentials in a way that makes them immediate. The few female characters – this really is a man’s world – have to manage as best they can, and we can’t help but sympathise over how they’re treated. The plot steams along towards some surprising revelations to make for a very satisfying mystery.
Bone Lands is atmospheric and absorbing, with sentences that are nicely honed and laced with wit, making Gus Hawkins good company. It’s a great start to a series – there’s already a second book (Skull River) with another due out next year, which is good news. Bone Lands is a five-star read from me.
Judith McKinnon 