Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery
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The Barrakee Mystery
The Lure of the Bush
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 1 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Why was King Henry, an aboriginal from Western Australia, killed in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? Who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent?
This first story of Inspector Bonaparte takes him to the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well - mixed blood and divided loyalties.
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(21)
The Sands of Windee
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 2 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? When Bony noticed something odd in the background of a police photograph, he begins to piece together the secrets of the sands of Windee. Here is the original background to the infamous Snowy Rowles murder trial.
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(19)
Wings Above the Diamantina
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 3 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
The discovery of a stolen red monoplane on the dry, flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things for different folks. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill meant renewed purpose in life. For Dr. Knowles, brilliant physician and town drunk, it meant the revival of a romantic dream. For some it meant a murder plan gone awry, and for Bonaparte, it meant one of the toughest cases of his career.
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(15)
Mr Jelly's Business
Murder Down Under
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 4 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Murder down under. The car lies wrecked and abandoned near the world's longest fence, the "rabbit-proof fence" in the wheat belt of Western Australia. There is no sign of its owner. Has George Loftus simply decamped, for reasons of his own? Or was it murder? Bonaparte suspects the worst and is determined to find the body, and the murderer.
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Winds of Evil
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 5 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
When Bonaparte sets out to investigate two bizarre murders near the dusty little outback town of Carie, all the odds are against him. The crimes were committed a year before, the scent cold, and any clues that may have survived have been confused by a ham-fisted city policeman. As Bony follows the trail he is first threatened and then attacked by the mysterious murderer. It's a case that will tax his ingenuity to the limit... if he lives to see it through.
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The Bone is Pointed
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 6 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Jeffrey Anderson was a big man with a foul temper - a sadist and an ugly drunk. When his horse The Black Emperor, an animal as mean as its owner, came home riderless, no one cared. And no one cared when no trace of the man could be found. But five months later, Detective-Inspector Bonaparte is called in - and he is determined to solve the mystery. With his usual tenacity he takes up the cold trail. What happened to Anderson, to his hat, to his stockwhip, to his horse's neck-rope? Bony must rely on his eyes and his wits to help him find the answers, for the local inhabitants, both black and white, are keeping their own secrets.
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The Mystery of Swordfish Reef
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 7 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
An intriguing case for Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte begins on a calm October day in an Australian seaside near Bermagui. Three men set out to sea for a day's fishing... and do not return. Despite intensive searches, no trace of the men or their boat is found, until, weeks later, a passing trawler hauls in a gruesome catch - the head of one of the missing fishermen. It is quite clear that its owner was murdered with a pistol shot. But by whom, and why, is for Bony to find out.
A thriller with a new kind of thrill. - Sheffield Morning Telegraph
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Bushranger of the Skies
No Footprints in the Bush
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 8 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
An extraordinary case for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte opens when a police car is bombed from the air on a lonely outback road by a mysterious pilot who plans to conquer a nation. The trail through the land of burning waters tests Bony's endurance to the limit and takes the detective as close to death as he has ever been. Welcome to Central Australia!
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Death of a Swagman
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 9 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
A cypher that looked like a child's game of noughts-and-crosses; a strip of hessian bag; the rhythmic clanging sound of the turning windmill suddenly breaking the silence of the night; the minister who seemed out of place as a churchman: these were some of the more puzzling aspects of the case of the murdered swagman noticed by the keen eyes of Robert Burns, alias Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, alias "Bony".
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The Devil's Steps
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 10 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
On special assignment with Military Intelligence, Detective-Inspector Bonaparte leaves his familiar Australian outback environment for Melbourne and a nearby mountain resort. Although out of his element with city people, Bony displays his characteristic skills to interpret some puzzling clues in the search for a wily killer...
The complex half-caste Bony is, I think, my favourite fictional detective of the past twenty years. - Anthony Boucher, The New York Times
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An Author Bites the Dust
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 11 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
A cat... a ping-pong ball... a drunken gardener... With these slight clues to go on Detective-Inspector Bonaparte investigates the mysterious death of famous author, Mervyn Blake, who dies an agonising death late one night in his writing room.
But how did he die? No one knows. No one that is until Bony's acute observation of human nature uncovers the murderer - and the method used to kill Blake. One of the few Bonaparte mysteries not set in the outback, reveals Upfield at his best and most ingenious.
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The Mountains Have a Secret
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 12 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
In the Grampian Mountains, two girl hitch-hikers have disappeared without trace, and the policeman sent to investigate has been murdered. Bonaparte visits the lonely hotel where the girls were last seen, and meets up with the suave proprietor, his strangely terrified father, an ex-US paratrooper with a penchant for knife-throwing, and a talking parrot...
All in all, this is a high suspense drama, and a fine Upfield story. - From The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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The Widows of Broome
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 13 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Broome is a little sun-drenched town on the barren north-west coast of Australia, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business, where all the little bungalows might be glass for all the secrets they hide. How then had the murderer of Broome's two most attractive widows got away without leaving a single clue? Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte investigates, with his usual calm precision - but the murderer strikes again, and Bony realizes he is dealing with a madman - that time is running out...
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The Bachelors of Broken Hill
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 14 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
When two elderly bachelors were poisoned with cyanide, a strange woman was on the scene each time - but now she has disappeared, leaving no trace. Tracking her down in a town of twenty-eight thousand people is a job to tax even Detective Inspector Bonaparte's powers. He will need the unorthodox assistance of burglar Jimmy the Screwsman and a lightning-sketch artist, as well as all the deductive and tracking skills at his command, as he trails a killer no-one has seen...
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The New Shoe
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 15 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
The nude body of a man is discovered entombed in the walls of Split Point Lighthouse on the south-east coast of Australia. Inspector Bonaparte wonders why a coffin is moved at night, who was the girl struggling with Dick Lake on the cliff tops, and what caused the Bully Buccaneers to deal in death. An ordinary policeman could afford to fail, but Bony, never
The story takes place at Split Point, 80 miles between Anglesea and Lorne.
The story is enlivened - and made more stark by contrast -by a series of Dickensian characters who are unexcelled in Upfield and perhaps elsewhere as well. Despite the solemnity of the occasion for the visit, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing..
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Venom House
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 16 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of Venom House - perhaps because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, its treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aboriginals slaughtered by the Answerth ancestors. Whatever the reason, most people are content to give Venom House and its occupants a wide berth... until a couple of corpses turn up in the lake...
The strength of Upfield's accomplishment in this book is so overwhelming it makes the reader cower. The characters are well-developed, the conversation vernacular for the Australian outback, and the development compelling. The story is the nearest Upfield comes to a story that would have made Edgar Allen Poe envious, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing... The whole book is first-class Upfield and first-class crime fiction. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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Murder Must Wait
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 17 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
In the little town of Mitford, New South Wales, four babies have been stolen - all boys, all under three months old, and all apparently neglected by their mothers. The local police have given up and the trail is cold. Then a fifth child vanishes, and the mother is found dead next to the empty cot. Inspector Bonaparte is called in, first to find the missing children, and only then to solve the murder...
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Death of a Lake
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 18 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Eight hundred kilometres from the sea, Lake Otway is dying. Heat, drought, and thirst-crazed animals take their toll. When Ray Gillen, lucky lottery winner, went for a swim one night and never came back, some thought it was an accident, or was it murder? As the water level drops, five men and two women wait beside the shrinking lake - for the body, the money, or neither. And watching it all, Bony...
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Cake in the Hat Box
Sinister Stones
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 19 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Sinister stones... On a lonely dirt road in Western Australia a police jeep is found. In it is Constable Stenhouse - shot dead. His Aboriginal tracker has disappeared. Enter Inspector Bonaparte, who soon realizes that he is not alone in his search for the criminal. The local Aboriginal tribe is seeking vengeance too...
Fascinating in its treatment of outback life, and reveals clearly the weakness Bony has for young women and for people in the cattle stations who have been abused by life and events. All in all, it is a creditable production. - From The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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The Battling Prophet
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 20 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is on leave, staying with an old friend near Adelaide. Ben Wickham, a meteorologist whose uncannily accurate weather forecasts had helped farmers all over Australia, lived nearby. Ben died after a three-week drinking binge and a doctor certified death as due to delirium tremens -but Bony's host insists that whatever Ben died of it wasn't alcohol. This is an unusual crime story for Upfield, but, revealing the vast range of his interests, it is one of the better ones. Constable Alice McGorr returns and is at her strongest and most profane best. She is extraordinary, and should be appreciated as one of his major creations. -from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
Bony - a unique figure among top-flight detectives – BBC.
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Man of Two Tribes
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 21 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Myra Thomas, apparently dressed only in nightgown and slippers, has walked off the train somewhere along the 650 kilometres of track that crosses the Nullarbor Plain. With two camels and a dog, Bony begins to search the desert in search of her. He finds more than he bargins for - only to find a group of people imprisoned in the extensive limestone caves beneath the desert plain...
This is surely one of the two or three strangest of Upfield's novels. It is an eerie mixture of Aboriginal folk customs and white man's greed and lust for revenge. Something of a study of abnormal psychology, it nevertheless turns on people's very natural and nasty feelings... This book is a splendid combination of plot, setting and development. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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Bony Buys a Woman
The Bushman Who Came Back
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 22 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Deep in Australia's outback, a woman has been murdered, her daughter vanished. Ole Fren Yorky, a crazy wanderer, is known to have been in the area, and his footprints have been identified near the body. When he too disappears, even the Aboriginal trackers are baffled. Bony's approach changes everything...
It becomes one of Bony's great adventures... He pictures the merits of Aboriginal society. And he uses weather - in this case the threatening rising of the lake - to picture man's heroic stature. The setting, the events, the pace of telling the story, the style of telling it - all combine to make this a tight, effective crime novel. - From The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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Bony and the Mouse
Journey to the Hangman
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 23 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Three times a killer has struck in Daybreak, a one-pub town in Western Australia. Why should so many people suspect the strange 'bad boy' Tony Carr? Why were the local Aboriginal tribe far away from town at the time of the murders? Inspector Bonaparte finds this small community very tight, till the arrival of a job-seeking bloke by the name of Nat Bonnar...
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Bony and the Black Virgin
The Torn Branch
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 24 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
When Inspector Bonaparte is called to the drought-stricken outback sheep station he finds that two men have been savagely beaten to death. Clues are scarce in this sun-baked, sand-blown country, but Bony's understanding of the bush and the people who live there, both black and white, leads him inexorably towards the killer. When Upfield gets down to the point of interracial sexual relations, he in effect is writing on one of the topics closest to his heart. Here his picture is unusually poignant. Caught in the iron grip of separation from his kind, of loneliness, of sexual attraction, Eric Downer is a victim of life. From The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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Bony and the Kelly Gang
Valley of Smugglers
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 25 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
Tucked away in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales is Cork Valley, inhabited by hard-drinking Irishmen. Here an Excise Officer looking for illicit whiskey 'stills' has been murdered, and it's Bony's job to find the killer. Disguised as a horse-thief, the Aboriginal detective hitch-hikes into the valley to meet a lawless lot...
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Bony and the White Savage
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 26 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
By a lonely roadside in the south-west corner of Western Australia, old-time Karl Mueller is roused from his drink-sodden sleep by approaching footsteps and the sound of whistling. What he sees on waking (or thinks he sees) is enough to make him stiffen with fear, and more than enough to worry the police into calling for Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.
The disturber of Mueller's rest is Marvin Rhudder - once an outstanding theological student, now a convicted rapist and basher, a bloody savage whose recapture will put all of Bony's sleuthing and tracking skills to the test.
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The Will of the Tribe
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 27 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
It is in a harsh and eerie landscape - the crater formed by the meteor they called "The Stranger" - that another stranger is found... dead. In an area where the presence of every outsider is announced by the bush telegraph, how had this man passed unreported? Who was he? How had he died? No tracks around the crater and no stranger in town. It soon becomes obvious to Bony that both the locals and the Aboriginals are guarding a secret - until the will of the Tribe breaks their silence...
This is undoubtedly Upfield's strongest book, for a number of reasons: 1) Bony is at his best in his detective work; 2) Upfield is at his best in studying the social and cultural situations of the white and the Aboriginals; 3) though the physical setting is less intense than in some other works, it is strong here; 4) Upfield's symbolism - especially in the use of the metaphor of clothes vs nakedness - is extraordinarily complex. There is no doubt that this particular book is a masterpiece in every way. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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Madman's Bend
The Body at Madman's Bend
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 28 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
If any man was ever born to be murdered, it was William Lush, a hated drunk who disappeared after beating his wife to death. Plenty of men had the opportunity to murder Lush, some the means, none the motive. Jill Madden, his pretty step-daughter, had all three. When Lush disappears, Inspector Bonaparte must look for a body, and the murderer, before the Darling River rises to flood level..
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The Lake Frome Monster
by Arthur W. Upfield
Part 29 of the Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte Mystery series
When Eric Maidstone was found dead near Bore Ten, just west of the Dingo-proof Fence, the first thought of those who discovered his body was that he might have been attacked by the rogue camel known as The Lake Frome Monster. But camels don't carry guns.. and Maidstone had a bullet-hole in his chest which put the Monster in the clear. So who killed young Maidstone? Bony, disguised as a worker on the Fence, intends to find out. There are sand storms galore, there are mad camels, there is personal and professional deprivation, there are rabbits by the millions. In this typical Upfield country there is the boredom of loneliness, there is the sheer weight of the Australian outback; it is vintage Upfield..from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.
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