Arthur W Upfield

Arthur William Upfield is well known as the creator of Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) who features in 29 crime detection novels, most set in the Australian outback. It is not well known that he also wrote about 250 short stories and articles, drawing on his experiences in the bush between 1911 and 1931. Up and Down Australia Again is the third published collection of Upfield's short works. Kees de Hoog has selected 34 short stories,...

Melbourne during the depression. A seedy, corrupt city. Someone has struck at the heart of Australia's soul: they have killed the horse that would have won the Melbourne Cup. For what motive? Profit, blackmail, a betting scam? Only Tom Pink, the rider of the murdered horse can find out. Tom, born into the underworld he now tries to defeat, exposes graft and blackmail that reaches to the upper echelons of Melbourne society. His life and the lives of...

Harry Tremayne, a policeman, goes to an isolated valley in the remote Murchison region of Western Australia to find his brother - who vanished a month earlier while investigating the murder of a police detective. Do the gold smugglers at Breakaway House hold the answers to the mystery? First published as a serial in the Perth Daily News in 1932, the real setting for the book is Mt Magnet, about 150k north of Perth, deep in gold country.

Somewhere within Arthur Upfield's travelling dray were the clues to uncovering three acts of murder involving the grifter, Snowy Rowles. Once Upfield had published his crime thriller, The Sands of Windee, West Australian police gave chase, starting with the esteemed author of Bony...

Arthur Upfield, creator of the Aboriginal detective 'Bony' followed his classic crime novel The Sands of Windee with this historical romance: The Crown Prince of Rolandia is visiting Australia - and two brilliant Americans, Earle Lawrence and Van Horton - abduct her on the trans-continental train on the Nullabor Plain. They hide her in caves near Eucla on the Great Australian Bight, until the search is called off and a ransom is arranged...

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...

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...

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...

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!

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....