Arthur W. Upfield

• Born: September 1, 1888
• Birthplace: Gosport, Hampshire, England
• Died: February 13, 1964
• Place of death: Bowral, New South Wales, Australia

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Principal Series: Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte, 1929-1966

Contribution

Arthur W. Upfield’s originality comes mainly from two sources. One is his firsthand acquaintance with the whole of the Australian landscape, not only the towns, lakes, deserts, and mountains but also the infinite variety of fauna and flora that populate the continent. His readers can draw a map of Australia and place a particular crime. Upfield had Ernest Hemingway’s eye for detail and could bring alive the smallest incident peculiar to a certain area. Second is his vivid, totally believable characterization of Napoleon Bonaparte, who appears in most of his more than thirty novels. Bony can assume various characters, from swagman to deep-sea fisherman, depending on the place, to “get his man.” He also understands the different cultures in Australia and can mediate between them to restore order. Critics see the Americans James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville as models for Upfield’s humanism, symbolism, and rhetorical skills.

Biography

Arthur William Upfield was born on September 1, 1888, in Gosport, England, to James Oliver Upfield and Annie Barmore Upfield, who ran a drapery business. The eldest of five sons, he was reared largely by his grandmother and her two sisters. Suffering from bronchitis, he was often confined to bed, where he learned to read voraciously, and at sixteen he had written the first of three novels.

Upfield’s father wanted his son to be a real estate surveyor, but when Arthur failed the test, he sent the boy to Australia. Though he started working on a farm, and then as a hotel cook, Upfield finally achieved his dream as a boundary rider along the fences of a huge sheep farm in Momba, Victoria, an experience that gave him firsthand knowledge of Australia’s bush country and its abundant wildlife.

Overcome by loneliness, the young man returned by bike with his dog to New South Wales, where he exchanged his bike for a boat to pursue an idyllic existence on the Darling River. His traveling, as well as his experiences as a cattle drover, rabbit trapper, and horse trainer, enabled him to meet many of the strange characters he would describe in his novels.

In 1915, Upfield was married to a nurse, Anne Douglas, and had a son, Arthur Douglas, though his marriage soon failed. He joined the Australian Imperial Force in 1924, serving for five years in Gallipoli, the Egyptian desert, and France. Again he returned to Australia to trap and mine, concluding, “my life was influenced by sheep, cattle, riding camels, war, women, gold, opals, delirium tremens, and, fortunately, Mary.”

Mary and Angus owned a sheep farm, and virtually became Upfield’s parents. They encouraged him to write what eventually became his first “Bony” novel, The Barrakee Mystery (1929). Most important, however, was Leon Wood, a trapper who, according to Upfield, “taught me to read the Book of the Bush. He revealed the eternal war within himself, as an example to me.”

Apart from his novels, Upfield wrote articles on the topography and history of Australia, publishing some before World War I in the London Daily Mail. In the 1920’s he also wrote stories for Novel Magazine and various articles for Wide World Magazine. He was elected justice of the peace in 1935, and in 1948 headed a party of experts on a six-thousand-mile expedition to northern and western Australia for the Australian Geographic Society.

Upfield died in Bowral, New South Wales, on February 13, 1964, at the age of seventy-five. Between 1929 and his death in 1964 he completed more than thirty novels. J. L. Price and Dorothy Strange completed and revised his final work, The Lake Frome Monster (1966).

Analysis

As an adolescent living with his grandmother in England, Arthur W. Upfield, under the name “Arker-William” Upfield, wrote several lengthy manuscripts—his unpublished Yellow Peril series. After his father sent him to Australia, he wandered the continent for twenty years doing odd jobs before attempting his first serious novel, The Barrakee Mystery, at the instigation of friends. The book lacked focus, however, so Upfield attempted a straight thriller, The House of Cain (1928), but his characters were still flat and the theme melodramatic. Then, while working as a cook at Wheeler’s Well in New South Wales, Upfield stopped to talk to Leon Wood, a tracker with whom he had spent five months patrolling hundreds of miles of fence as a boundary rider. This incident enabled Upfield to give focus and direction to his life as a crime and mystery writer.

The Barrakee Mystery

Wood’s father was white and his mother Aborigine. Intelligent and widely read, he gave Upfield a copy of a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. Using Leon as a model, Upfield then created the main protagonist for most of his thirty-odd novels, Detective Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte of the Queensland Police. Upfield then rewrote The Barrakee Mystery around Bony, and his career as a mystery writer began. Bony would be his detective hero, and the Australian landscape he knew so well would constitute the background for his entire fictional world.

Upfield, who claimed Hemingway as his favorite author, was fascinated by everything he saw, and he saw the whole of Australia. In Bony and the White Savage (1961) and The Widows of Broome (1950), he wrote about western Australia; he wrote about an area near the Northern Territory in The Will of the Tribe (1962), Queensland in The Bone Is Pointed (1938), and many sites in and around New South Wales, including the ocean off the southeastern coast in The Mystery of Swordfish Reef (1939). Upfield’s style reflects Hemingway’s simple vocabulary and sense of the concrete world. Of Upfield Betty Donaldson says, “When he describes a forest fire we can feel the heat, hear the crackle of the flames and sense the terror and desperation of the fleeing animals.”

Though he works within the conventions of the classical detective story, which require certain presuppositions about society, law, and morality that are distinctively English, Upfield introduces a certain originality into the genre by examining the relationship between different cultures. In Australia these are the modern, urban culture of the coastal regions, the white culture of the Outback (diverse in national backgrounds), and the ancient Aboriginal culture in various stages of assimilation into the dominant white culture.

In Upfield’s novels, Detective Napoleon Bonaparte mediates the interaction of these cultures. Himself a half-caste, he is able to represent the customs, beliefs, and powers of Aboriginal culture. Yet as the agent of a national police authority, Bony also represents the thrust of modernization with its centralized authority, bureaucratic administration, and hierarchy of educated expertise. He uses his Aboriginal intuition and civilized authority to penetrate the truth of crime and restore the harmony of society disrupted by violence.

As a detective writer, Upfield is less a social novelist than one rooted in nature, and critics compare his literary skills to those of Cooper and Melville because the natural world, so vast and powerful, must somehow be transcended or overcome. Like Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Bony represents the best in the primitive and civilized worlds, but unlike Cooper’s mythic hero, Bony is real, down-to-earth, as arrogant as he is sensitive to others. Upfield lacks the full epic range of Melville, but he approaches such a scope through his use of the Australian terrain, and, like Ishmael, Bony is a humanist in his knowledge of and respect for all peoples. Upfield’s rhetorical skills are not unlike Melville’s in Moby Dick (1851), for his taste for similes and extended metaphors gives his work unmistakable intensity and depth. Like Melville, Upfield is also a symbolist, applying symbolism to both the civilized world, through the airplane in Bushranger of the Skies (1940), and the natural landscape, in novels such as The Beach of Atonement (1930), Death of a Lake (1954), and The Mountains Have a Secret (1948).

Bony Buys a Woman

Among Upfield’s novels, one of the most successful is Bony Buys a Woman (1957), set in the very heart of Australia near Lake Eyre, sixty miles wide and one hundred miles long. The book centers on the murder of a white woman, Mrs. Bell, and the abduction of her daughter Linda, who is taken to the center of the dried-up lake by Ole Fren Yorky. It begins:

The day was the 7th of February, and it was just another day to Linda Bell. Of course, the sun was blazing hot at six in the morning, another morning when the wind sprang up long before six and was a half-gale when the sun rose. It sang when crossing the sandy ground, roared farewell as it sped through the line of pine trees guarding the Mount Eden homestead from the sprawling giant called Lake Eyre.

Here the writing, with the introduction of a child and the music of the wind near a small city in the outback, is (like Hemingway’s) simple and direct. Yet through personification and metaphor—the wind “sprang up” and “roared” as the trees guard the supposedly paradisaical town from a “sprawling giant”—the author also hints at the terror to come. Before long Upfield will bring that dead lake alive, personifying local windstorms, called “willi-willies,” as a way of populating this desert area; then he makes the area the center of the action symbolic of the tenuous condition of humankind.

Yorky, who retreats with Linda to an island in the middle of dried-up Lake Eyre, called “The Sea That Was,” is unaware that he has been framed and remains loyal to the murderer. The Aborigines under King Canute will not pursue Yorky because of their loyalty to him, a “white blackfeller,” and their regard for the child. Bony in detective-like fashion examines all the clues (such as artificial footprints) and asks pertinent questions to determine that Yorky is not guilty, but his true genius comes from his ability to represent the white notion of justice while relating to all races, thus penetrating the complex of loyalities that shield the murderer. Old King Canute, with his childlike dialogue, attitude, and storytelling, is an interesting parallel to the young Linda Bell, whose presence pervades the novel. Bony, himself part Aborigine, identifies with Canute as Natty Bumppo does with the Indians in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales; he speaks Canute’s simple language, negotiating forty plugs of tobacco for Yorky’s daughter as his gift to her lover, Charlie. She, in turn, helps Bony communicate with Yorky on the island. Then the ground begins to move under their feet, and they are “pinned like specimens” by the real murderer about to erase all the evidence of his guilt.

In the tradition of Melville, Upfield is able to turn that ground into a metaphor for life itself, and the lake bottom takes on the significance of Melville’s sea. Says Yorky:

Yair, that’s it. I’ve never seen it before, but the abos have a name for it. It’s a low sort of swell and the sun’s glinting on it along one slope, like a water wave. Old Canute told me about it. The water keeps pushing into the mud, and instead of running over the top of the mud, it comes up from under.

With crows and swooping eagles overhead, the whole situation resembles a Greek play— Euripides torn by the Furies, but Bony, never losing control, maintains his identity with others as well as his individual optimism:

You and I are merely animated shells crammed with fears, inhibitions, humility and pride. What white people might name courage is in us instinctive revolt against the abyss for ever opening at our feet. We must not fail. We dare not think of failure. So we must go on, even if we have to travel right across this abominable lake.

Here Upfield gives the terrain semiepic scope, while Bony, again instinctively in tune with the environment and the Aboriginal temperament, uses his modern psychological skills and characteristic determination to move forward.

The lake, therefore, is central to the drama, and takes on moral and mythical significance integrated with the movement of the story. It is a landscape, however, that is always related to the ingenuity of the central character—a character who never acts alone. Presently, Charlie (who made dolls for Linda) appears to help Bony “bonk” the murderer, much as Yorky’s daughter helped him relate to Yorky; the marriage of these two “abos” signals the restoration of order in the end. Thus Bony, loving yet firm, understanding yet decisive, is able to mediate between the races, expose the criminal, and restore the fragile fabric of society threatened by the murder. Indeed, through this half-caste detective, Upfield balances the old with the young, the primitive with the modern, and communal living with individual action in a moving and convincing story of the Australian Outback—far removed from civilization, but somehow symbolic of life in the twentieth century.

Principal Series Character:

• Detective Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte of the Queensland Police is half white and half Aborigine. Bony has a master’s degree from Brisbane University; he combines Western intelligence with an Aboriginal instinct. Married to a half-caste, Marie, he has three sons. Handsome and a fine dresser, he can assume various identities to solve a mystery. Bony is respectful of the police, as he is of his suspects. He is characteristically patient, working at a snail’s pace to unravel the most difficult of crimes.

Bibliography

Asdell, Philip T. A Provisional Descriptive Bibliography of First Editions of the Works of Arthur W. Upfield. Frederick, Md.: P. T. Asdell, 1984. Attempts to list all first editions of Upfield’s work in the United States, England, and Australia.

Browne, Ray B. “The Frontier Heroism of Arthur W. Upfield.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 7 (Spring/Summer, 1986): 127-145. Detailed article focused on the setting (both social and geographic) of Upfield’s mysteries.

Browne, Ray B. The Spirit of Australia: The Crime Fiction of Arthur W. Upfield. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Reads Upfield’s fiction as distinctively Australian and expressive of the essential spirit of the author’s adopted nation.

Donaldson, Betty. “Arthur William Upfield: September 1, 1888-February 13, 1964.” The Armchair Detective 8, no. 1 (November, 1974): 1-11. Memorial tribute to Upfield and evaluation of his work.

Hausladen, Gary. Places for Dead Bodies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. This study of the settings of mystery and detective novels includes a section on the Australian Outback of Upfield.

Hawke, Jessica. Follow My Dust! A Biography of Arthur Upfield. London: Heinemann, 1957. Hawke’s biography begins with an introduction written from the point of view of Inspector Bonaparte.

Knight, Stephen. Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction. Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1997. Study of the dominant themes and concerns distinctive to the crime fiction of Australia. Sheds light on Upfield’s work. Bibliographic references and index.

Nile, Richard. The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002. Discussion of prevalent features of Australian writing and the cultural and geographic influences on the continent’s literary history. Provides background for understanding Upfield’s work.