Into this eminent and crowded field steps Christopher Kremmer, in his maiden fictional race, being best known to date for his non-fiction, such as the engaging Inhaling the Mahatma (2006). Kremmer combines a journalist’s research skills with a passion for the ponies. A biographical note concludes: ‘His father was a jockey.’ More fully, the Acknowledgments at the book’s end inform us: ‘The greatest debt is the one owed to my father. Without his knowledge, patience, memory, support, humour and ear for a good yarn, this story would never have been written.’ Speaking as one who has read The Chase twice (let’s not go into that), I am of the opinion that Christopher Kremmer should be confident that his father would be proud of him.

Set between 1949 and 1954, and thus climaxing with the young Queen Elizabeth’s presence at a Sydney race meeting, The Chase concerns racing, dopes, and doping, and developments in equine forensic drugs analysis. Its principal characters are jockey Frank Littell, Jockey Club steward and man-about-town Howard Carter, and chemist Jean Campbell, the ‘female Sherlock Holmes’, who, after serving a term with the Jockey Club in Sydney with mixed success, is headhunted by the New York Racing Association.

While the other two are necessary for the development and resolution of the plot, Jean Campbell is the outstandingly interesting figure. Not only because she lives at Rose Bay, she recalls more than one of Christina Stead’s strong but thwarted young women, an urgent spirit oppressed by a conservative patriarchy. In his Acknowledgements, Kremmer notes:

During the research I encountered the story of Jean Annie Kimble, born in Sydney in 1916, who established the Australian Jockey Club’s laboratory at Randwick in 1947, the same year that my father became a stable hand there. Miss Kimble resigned her position after much controversy over drug testing in March 1955. In 1975, Miss Kimble was honoured for her services to chemistry with the award of the Order of the British Empire. She died in 1988. While the author has borrowed freely from the details of Miss Kimble’s life, the character of Jean Campbell, which her life inspired, is fictional.

Then the penny dropped. The combination of Jean Campbell’s character and Christopher Kremmer’s scrupulous noting of his research recalled nothing so much as Frank Moorhouse’s  great character, his ardent spirit, Edith Campbell Berry, heroine of his trilogy of which Grand Days and Dark Palace have appeared, and the final volume of which, Cold Light, is to be published later this year. It is as if male authors of the last twenty years are unconsciously compensating for the oversights of their fathers and grandfathers. It is worthy of note that Jean Campbell and Edith Campbell Berry have in common, among other things, their closeness to silk: Jean to the colours of jockeys, Edith to her lover Ambrose’s secret undergarments.

Jean and Howard discuss science and modernity. She says ‘So you’re a modernist.’
‘You might say that. And I’m sure that you, as a scientist, feel the same impatience with backwardness and conservatism?’
She looked for the answer in her sherry. ‘I don’t know if a scientist’s pursuit of  knowledge is exactly the same as a reformer’s quest for social improvement. I mean, splitting the atom was a brilliant achievement. But if you asked people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima whether it amounted to progress, I’m not sure they’d agree.’

Perhaps these reflections make the novel sound less muscular, less visceral than it is. The account of the gelding of a refractory stallion is about as visceral as you can get. The love interest does climax in sex, in the laboratory, which Jean sees, post-coitally, as a betrayal of the ‘purity’ of that site. The races, the use of the whip, the physical violence between jockeys, falls, and deaths, all testify to the brutality of the sport. The world of the gentleman’s club is no less brutal. The Chase is every bit a Sydney novel, ‘the delirium of Sydney’ is celebrated, a city where ‘the sky was full of delicious imprecision’. Kremmer’s novel might find its place in a new edition of Delia Falconer’s wonderful Sydney. Nothing could be more different in tone and mood from Peter Temple’s Melbourne. Cartoonist Emile Mercier presents Jean with a signed and dedicated caricature of herself achieving a positive swab result. It bears his characteristic caption: ‘Whacko!’ The same might be said in celebration of Christopher Kremmer’s delightful novel.