On voting day I took the Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller's window. It was good to see Peter Temple's The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. ¹ A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that's not why it's so popular here. The book sets out to display, often brutally, just what Robert Hughes's 'fatal shore' has become: a terrain beset by identity dilemmas and querulous uncertainty. Who dunnit? Well, everybody, in one way or another. Temple's Joe Cashin fights his way through gangsters and bent cops to reveal Melbourne as the capital of paedophilia, as well as of southern hemisphere organised crime. Down these mean tourist routes a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The battered policeman from Port Monro (a fictive place somewhere down Great Ocean Road) finds himself searching for an answer far beyond his culprit - and so do the readers, presumably.

LRB 13 December 2007 | PDF Download