Top-notch crime with plenty to say

by

CRIME FICTION
A Testament of Character
By Sulari Gentill
Pantera Press, $29.99

The Shifting Landscape
By Katherine Kovacic
Echo, $29.99

When the going gets tough, there’s nothing quite like curling up on the couch with an intelligent, amusing and well-crafted crime novel. Such is A Testament of Character, Sulari Gentill’s 10th in a series set in the 1930s featuring wealthy artist Rowland Sinclair and his Australian entourage of mismatched companions.

Also fitting the bill, The Shifting Landscape, the third in Katherine Kovacic’s well-received series about contemporary art dealer Alex Clayton. Both authors deliver the perfect crime novel for a dark day, while also engaging in some telling social critique.

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Sulari Gentill weaves the politics of the time and real people and places into her novels.

We are reunited with Rowland Sinclair in Singapore, where he is staying at the Raffles Hotel in the company of Milton Isaacs, his flamboyant friend with a penchant for quoting other people’s poetry, and the brawny Clyde Watson Jones, who invariably provides the muscle when needed.

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Also part of this "tight, loyal set who lived and created and played together", is Miss Edna Higgins, "the beautiful, uninhibited sculptress" who has long been Rowland’s muse and the source of the unrequited sexual tension that is a necessary component of series fiction.

The death that sets the plot in motion is that of Rowland’s "distinctly odd Francophile" fellow student at Oxford, Daniel Cartwright, who has been murdered in his home town of Boston after appointing Rowland the sole executor of his will. Complicating matters is the revelation that Daniel has left the considerable Cartwright family fortune to the unknown Otis Norcross. His grasping brothers and grieving sister are appalled.

The fact that Daniel was gay, and that his family want the will overturned on the basis of his
"degeneracy", provides an opportunity for Gentill to rehearse some of the more egregious crimes that have been committed against human beings on the basis of their sexuality. While A Testament of Character may be firmly anchored in the past, Rowland and his entourage thankfully exhibit the tolerance of more enlightened times.

Much of the pleasure in Gentill’s crime fiction derives from how the politics of the era, real people and places are woven into the weft of the narrative. Arriving in Boston, Rowland and his crew are booked into a large suite at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Check online, it’s still there, although the presidential suite is now likely to cost you $9000 a night and sadly the carousel bar at which Rowland’s party sits has long gone.

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On the hunt for the missing Norcross, the amateur investigators relocate to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville. Here they encounter F. Scott Fitzgerald, long past his prime and exhibiting all the signs of the advanced alcoholism that will kill him. The Grove Park Inn is also still in existence, leading to the possibility that a reader might feel inclined to follow in the fictional Sinclair’s footsteps for an encounter with one of the last-known locations of the great American author. The crime-tourism possibilities are mind-boggling.

Kovacic also plays fast and loose with fact and fiction. Invited to assess the art collection of the wealthy Macmillan family at Kinloch, a vast property south of Hamilton in Victoria’s western district, Alex encounters a wealth of artistic riches and the inevitable murder. There’s a slightly damaged painting by Hugh Ramsay in a shed, but it’s a painting of the homestead by Eugene von Guerard, "one of the most significant artists in colonial Australia", mounted over the marble fireplace in formal sitting room that stops Alex in her tracks. And it is here Kovacic also gets political.

On the left of the frame are three Indigenous people, a man, woman and child accompanied by a lean dog. They are carefully positioned looking back at the grand house and garden that marks the site of their dispossession. Later, Alex will explore the property in the company of the Indigenous farm manager, Harry, who points out the remnants of the "world’s oldest aquaculture system" where the Gunditjmara people managed and harvested eels for more than 6000 years.

In her author’s note, Kovacic confesses to the fiction that is Kinloch and the von Guerard painting, but encourages her readers to seek out and visit the Budj Bim National Park and to discover for themselves the extraordinary landscape and Indigenous heritage of Victoria’s Western district. The dispossession is real.

Meanwhile, back at the fictional Kinloch, the family patriarch is found dead at the foot of a spiral staircase (did he fall or was he pushed?), and the von Guerard goes missing. Alex, accompanied by her well-mannered Irish wolf hound, Hogarth, and her art conservator best friend, John, are once again caught up in solving a crime that has art at its heart.

And yes, there’s unresolved sexual tension here too. Will John or won’t he leave his manipulative wife for Alex, the woman he really loves? Next instalment please.