It’s hard to picture Murray Whelan looking like anyone other than his creator: a big, shambling bear of a man in a baggy suit, prowling among the catacombs of Trades Hall, propped up at the bar of the John Curtin Hotel, or perhaps doing a power breakfast in Brunswick Street. He is invariably schmoozing and dispensing witty bon mots as he casts a lustful eye over the passing parade of gorgeous young things, wondering forlornly what it would be like to actually have sex with one of them. The flag of Murray’s manhood has not, apparently, been unfurled for a long age. It seems he has never recovered from his failed first marriage, the fallout from which still plagues him. His ex­wife Wendy, who has ascended the greasy corporate pole, now lives in Sydney with her new husband, a rich lawyer. Bristling with hauteur and monied superstructure, she never passes up a chance to put Murray in his place – at the bottom of the pile. Worse, he is being denied access to his son Red, who, horror of horrors, now plays rugby (union, naturally) instead of real football. In fact, one of the more touching moments in Nice Try occurs late in the piece, when Murray does wangle some quality time with Red. Together they play a game of make-believe football on the sacred turf of the MCG, passing an invisible ball to each other and booting it through the big sticks. It’s a brief interlude that serves as both a belated bonding exercise and a swansong, as Red recedes further and further from his father’s world. ‘Loser’, Red jokingly tells him, and in reality he’s not far off the mark.

In The Brush-Off, Murray was in Ethnic Affairs, battling Greeks; in Nice Try, he finds himself in Water, most of it hot. The year is 1992, when Melbourne was making its bid for the 1996 Olympics. Murray is given the unenviable task of sitting on wily Aboriginal activist Ambrose Buchanan during a visit from the Evaluation Commission. As a politician might put it, a big tick in the race relations department is the name of the game. Inevitably, money has to be thrown at the problem, a large amount of it in the form of an Aboriginal Institute of Sport, and Murray’s brief is to stitch up the deal with the cynical and prickly Koori agitator. His hands are barely on the controls when a young Koori sportsman is beaten to death, and that is just the start of Murray’s woes.

The prospect of romance looms large in Murray Whelan’s fecund imaginings: in the first instance with spunky aerobics instructor Holly Deloite, she of the curvaceous form cling­wrapped in a shimmering leotard. Unfortunately, Holly is (almost) young enough to be his daughter. She is also linked to a steroid-pumped weightlifter with bad acne and an anger management problem, and somehow you just know Murray is going to be the object of that anger. A safer option is the exotic Dr Phillipa Verstak (no relation to Miss Australia, 1961), who is supposedly helping him kick the smoking habit. She is evasive, possibly out of his league, but a career in politics has taught Murray the value of persistence, if nothing else.

The aforementioned crazed gymhead, one Steve Radeski, appears to be a wild card in the plot, but Maloney cunningly contrives a way of linking him to the main thread, stretching back to the so-called ‘friendly’ Melbourne games of 1956, when many athletes from Eastern Bloc countries stayed behind as refugees. When another Labor staffer dies violently in mystifying circumstances, Radeski is the prime suspect, and Murray is in strife up to his eyebrows. His fee is rapidly shaping up as the toughest five grand he’ll ever earn, as he desperately fends off police, angry Kooris and his political masters. Nice Try gets a big tick: it is an incisively observed, funny and often hairy ride through Melbourne’s recent past, and the climactic sequence – a tumultuous gala dinner attended by all the main players – is hilariously anarchic. With this book, Maloney confirms his rank as the comic thriller exponent nonpareil.