The Broken Shore
by Peter Temple
Text Publishing, August 2005
320 pages
Joe Cashin, homicide cop, wants a quiet life with his dogs in the coastal town of Port Munro. He is still recovering after being run over by convicted killer Rai Sarris. Cashin’s family have lived in Port Munro for generations. And when he encounters an itinerant swaggie named Rebb it seems he might have found someone to help him restore the house Tommy Cashin built a hundred years earlier.
Then the call comes in from nearby Cromarty. An old man named Charles Burgoyne has been bashed and left for dead. His watch is missing, and everything seems to point to three boys from the Daunt, the notorious Aboriginal community.
But when the local police decide to intercept the boys things go terribly wrong. Two of them are shot dead and the third suicides shortly after. It seems like it’s case closed, but Cashin knows something is not quite right. And it seems the only person who can help him get the information he needs is Helen Castleman, a feisty lawyer from his past.
Peter Temple has built a reputation as one of Australia’s finest crime writers, with his unerring gift for combining compassionate, thrilling plots with phenomenal casts of evocatively drawn characters. The Broken Shore is his greatest book yet; a work as moving as it is gripping and one that defies the boundaries of the genre. This is a wonderful novel about family, about black-white relations, about the need to live honorably and decently in a world where so much is rotten.
Peter Temple has won the prestigious Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction four times. His eight novels include: Bad Debts (NA–MacAdam Cage; Netherlands–de Boekerij), Black Tide (NA–MacAdam Cage; Netherlands–de Boekerij), and In the Evil Day (published as Identity Theory in the US by MacAdam Cage).
Peter Temple is perhaps best known for his Jack Irish series which includes the novels BAD DEBTS, BLACK TIDE, DEAD POINT and WHITE DOG. He has also written three stand-alone novels AN IRON ROSE. SHOOTING STAR and IN THE EVIL DAY.
THE BROKEN SHORE is also a stand-alone novel, an utterly compelling book set in a haunting coastal landscape. It is about homecoming, about loss and recovery, about understanding roots, about the dry humour of country people. It tells the story of a cop sent back to the town where he was born and, in the context of an unputdownable plot, introduces an extraordinary cast of characters. We hope this novel will enthrall you as it does us.
Peter Temple’s IN THE EVIL DAY was published in the US by MacAdam/Cage in 2004 under the title IDENTITY THEORY. MacAdam/Cage is about to publish Temple’s first two Jack Irish novels BAD DEBTS and BLACK TIDE.
About the author:
Born in South Africa, Peter Temple moved to Australia in 1980. He has worked extensively as a journalist and editor, for newspapers and magazines in several countries. He has also taught journalism, editing and media studies at a number of universities.
Temple is the author of seven crime novels, four of which feature the protagonist Jack Irish. These include: Bad Debts, Black TideDead Pointand White Dog. Temple’s stand-alone thrillers, which are not part of the Jack Irish series, are An Iron Rose, Shooting Star and In the Evil Day.
Temple has been the winner of four Ned Kelly Awards (Australia’s equivalent of the Edgars): Bad Debts (Best First Crime Novel, 1996), Shooting Star (Best Crime Novel, 1999), Dead Point (Best Crime Novel, 2000) and White Dog (Best Crime Novel, 2003). He lives in Victoria.
Reviews:
- The Big Book Club
Selected Titles
Joe Cashin was different once. He moved more quickly then, he was less thoughtful, less easily spooked. But there are consequences when you’ve come so close to dying. For Cashin, they include a posting away from the world of murderers, of Homicide, to the quiet place on the coast where he grew up. Here all he has to do is play the country cop and walk the dogs. And sometimes think about how he was before.
Then prominent local Charles Bourgoyne is bashed and everything seems to point to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community; everyone seems to want it to. But Cashin is unconvinced. And as tragedy unfolds relentlessly into tragedy, he finds himself holding onto something that might be better-let go.
Peter Temple’s gift for compelling plots and evocative, compassionately drawn characters has earnt him a reputation as the grand master of Australian crime writing.
The Broken Shore is Temple ’s finest book yet; a novel about a place, about family, about politics and power, and the need to live decently in a world where so much is rotten. It is a work as moving as it is gripping, and one that defies the boundaries of genre.
http://www.bigbookclub.plain.net.au/tbbc/books.html
- The Age
Reviewer Sue Turnbull
August 13, 2005
If you only read one crime novel this year, read The Broken Shore. It’s not just a good yarn - there are plenty of those - what Peter Temple achieves here is much, much more, capturing a specifically Australian perspective in prose as spare as it is precise. This book is the best yet from a writer who has already won a well-deserved reputation as one of our finest crime writers.
Joe Cashin is a former homicide detective, still recovering from severe injuries incurred in a botched Melbourne stake-out. Sent home to run the small police station in Port Monro on the Victorian coast, Cashin’s routine day on the beat might include a vandalised park bench, a neighbourhood tree dispute and a woman with a black eye who wants her husband warned.
Until, that is, wealthy local benefactor Charles Burgoyne is found dead by the housekeeper on the hearth-rug of his impressive homestead, his expensive watch missing
When the unlikeable Senior Detective Hopgood from the nearby big town throws suspicion on the local Aboriginal community, racial tensions smoulder. After two Aboriginal boys are killed in yet another botched stake-out, the conflagration gets a grip.
Federal government and local politicians are concerned, and Cashin’s old boss, Villani, wants him in charge of the investigation. Cashin knows the Aboriginal people; they went to school together and are related through Cashin’s mother, the once wayward Sybil, who has remarried, gone to uni and acquired a vocabulary that enables her to accuse her policeman son of being complicit in the "manufacture of deviance".
Amused, Cashin is hardly put out. What he really wants to know is why Sybil still hasn’t told him the truth about his father’s death. Cashin can’t leave the past behind, reliving it in the flashbacks that haunt him.
A contradictory character, Cashin is a mixture of kindness, irascibility and laconic calm, which makes him the master of the one-line comeback. Usually associated with the macho hard-boiled hero, here it is used to comic effect. Elegiac though the overall tone may be, there are comic turns too. Be prepared to laugh.
We first meet Cashin walking his dogs, two unlikely giant poodles who pointlessly chase rabbits and plodge in the creek ("poodles are paddlers," Temple tells us, and I believe him). Indeed, all the animals in this book are wonderfully realised, from the "sliding-jawed" cows in the field with their "soft eyes", to the two small white dogs Cashin sees in passing while sitting outside the Arts Centre in Melbourne. Perched on the shoulders of a unicyclist, "the dogs had the resigned air of passengers on a long-distance bus".
Good at detail, Temple is also adept at constructing the bigger picture. Take the nearby town of Kenmare, where lives Cashin’s Aboriginal cousin Bern. Bern is a creative entrepreneur whose dubious business practices are a constant source of amusement, even as the fate of his family gives cause for concern. In Kenmare, the dairy farms have all been subdivided into three-acre blocks on which sit Hardiplank houses with humungous metal sheds out back. In front sit the Mack and Kenworth rigs owned by the truckies who bought when the land was cheap and who now work all hours to keep up with the rising freight and mortgage costs.
Although Kenmare may be a fiction, I know this place. The Broken Shore is replete with such moments of recognition when Temple puts into words some aspect of experience (often quintessentially Australian) that makes you catch your breath it’s so perfectly realised.
The main themes in this book are big issues such as police corruption, Aboriginal politics and the over-development of the coastal regions. There are others, but to name them would be to give away an important plot move.
What brings Temple’s world so vividly alive is the accumulation of detail in the evocation of the complex social networks through which the character of Cashin moves.
Take the itinerant swaggie, Rebb, one of the finest cameos in the book. Called upon to investigate a trespass, Cashin discovers Rebb sleeping in an outhouse, offering him first a lift out of town and then a job.
Men of few words, Cashin and Rebb reveal themselves and their relationship through their actions, looking out for each other, taking care of the dogs, and rebuilding Cashin’s ruined house blown up by his great-grandfather’s brother in a fit of depression that Cashin fears is genetic. Temple sometimes makes me think I understand men.
In then end, it’s all about family: the one you’re born with and the one you make. But most of all it’s about the writing, and in that regard The Broken Shore might just be a great Australian novel, irrespective of genre. Read it for what Temple does with words.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/reviews/the-broken-shore/2005/08/12/1123353484543.html?oneclick=true