In 2009 Duffy published The Tower, the first title in a proposed series of crime novels featuring the Sydney homicide detective Nicholas Troy. (No wooden horses where none intended, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett.) As the cover blurb for The Tower breathlessly puts it: ‘Forced to defend himself with actions he would never have considered before, Troy confronts a moral abyss.’ Let it be insisted that, between the covers, Duffy writes much better than that. But let us not forget that authors often compose their own blurbs. It’s all a matter of genre. The Simple Death, the second volume in the series, transports Troy from the world of corporate and political malfeasance in The Tower to a nexus of voluntary euthanasia, priestly paedophilia, and malpractice in oncology wards. Like the best crime fiction and Dickens’s novels, and unlike many episodes of CSI, the several plots interconnect.

Duffy has said of his series: ‘I’m hoping The Tower will be the first in a series of crime novels about Sydney. For me the city is a splendid place in which to set such a series, because of the important role crime and corruption have played since white settlement began in 1788. Sydney is not uniquely criminal, but its crime does have certain distinguishing characteristics. The one most often pointed out by visitors and foreign observers is the brazen nature of our attitude towards the crime and corruption in our midst. ‘“It’s almost as though you feel affectionate about it,” an American journalist once remarked to me.’ Thus Nicholas Troy realises in The Simple Death that ‘morality and the law might not always follow the same path. And that there is no such thing as a simple death.’

Some believe that complex pleasures are the most satisfying. The detailed plots of both The Tower and The Simple Death are assuredly satisfying, and the volumes that contain them substantial. It is to be hoped that Mr Duffy is not exhausting his series just as it has begun. Consider the fine example of Peter Corris, who learned, and taught his readers, a long time ago that brevity is the soul of crime fiction, and that one ought to conserve one’s resources. The same might be said of Evan Hunter, of James Lee Burke, of Mickey Spillane – though not of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Australian Book Review, in a covering note to contributors, reminds fiction reviewers: ‘In reviewing a novel, ABR has a responsibility to respect the author’s intentions and not to divulge too much information about the plot – especially the dénouement.’ Well, the responsible reviewer has a responsibility to respect the editor’s injunctions, but it is particularly difficult, and particularly important, with respect to crime fiction, detective fiction, police procedural fiction, call it what you will. For crime fiction is essentially plot-driven. That is why the genre is sometimes called ‘whodunits’. Of course, some highfalutin authors ring changes on this, and concern themselves with ‘How?’ rather than ‘Who?’, even with ‘Why?’; but none of this diminishes the centrality of plot in the satisfactions of crime fiction. Nor does it diminish the relevance of Edmund Wilson’s cantankerous query: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’

A distinguished author of crime fiction makes us care, often by concentrating as much on character and locale as on plot. This is surely true of James Lee Burke, who got back to the top of his considerable form with Tin Roof Blowdown in 2007 after being enraged by the inadequacy of the Bush federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Plot, character, and urgent social concern came together to produce heightened fiction.Peter Temple’s major novel Truth (2009) shares these characteristics. It is, of course, not only in crime fiction that plot is central. For Aristotle, it was the essence of drama. Though the importance of plot might be emphasised in a more down-to-earth, Australian manner, with C.B. Fry’s observation, apropos rugby union, that ‘the game is so full of plot-interest and drama’.

But the dominance of plot can be limiting. When reading The Simple Death, with its emphasis for the sake of plot on oncology wards and the terrible things that happen therein, and on voluntary euthanasia, it is impossible to feel for the characters while being directed by the plot. As Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost, ‘the lack of human interest is everywhere apparent’. If one contrasts Mr Duffy’s The Simple Death with Lorrie Moore’s 1998 story ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’ (in her Collected Stories) one may, perhaps, perceive the gap between genre fiction and literature. Now, there is an old-fashioned, élitist distinction. At least I didn’t give away the dénouement.

CONTENTS: MARCH 2011