Sad news today. He was an excellent writer. Australians are great at claiming others as their own, but Peter Temple claimed us, and caught us so well in his writing. He had a great way with wounded characters, and not only was there toughness and grit, there was also a lot of gentleness in his writing. I enjoyed his work very much.
I was saving Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series of Belfast noir novels for a longer post. However. Fighting sleep. Must do something. Just spent 31 hours airport to airport Sydney to Amsterdam. Had #4 in the series, Gun Street Girl with me. The only complaint was that I finished it before Hong Kong. There’s a bunch of reasons I love these books – the setting, the music, the flawed detective hero, the history, the 80s, the multiple references to Philip K Dick. But all that is to be said right this moment is that I had an aisle seat, my wife and I had 4 seats to share, my kids were happy nearby, and I just sat there reading and eating with nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, enjoying crime and the suffering of (fictional) others in Troubles era Belfast. Bliss. Quick, go buy them now. Enjoy! Right now, just trying to stay awake until I can allow myself to collapse.
