The brush-off
By Shane Maloney
Text Publishing, 1996. 314 pp., $14.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Shane Maloney, novelist and humorist for the Australian left magazine Arena, is not Raymond Chandler, ace writer of classic private detective novels, but Maloney is a Chandlerite. They both use the crime novel to take a stand on the side of justice and the common person and against the corruptions of wealth and power. And both deliver more snappy one-liners than a giggle of stand-up comics can manage on an average Saturday night across the pubs and clubs of Australia.
In Maloney's latest novel, it is 1989 and Murray Whelan, ALP policy adviser, is assisting the Victorian minister for ethnic affairs in his function "to spread a microscopically thin layer of largesse over every ethnic community in the state" — cynicism towards the words and actions of elites is a clear sign of Chandlerist tendencies.
After a cabinet reshuffle, the minister finds himself in the arts portfolio, and Whelan finds himself in the middle of crooked millionaire ALP businessmen, forgery rackets, shonky financial scams with union funds, naked bodies, dead bodies and the whole catastrophe of a money-mad, corrupt society.
The untangling of the plot does resolve itself with the greedy, the shysters, the frauds losing but, as for Chandler, the plot is not the main game. For Maloney, the thriller novel is a vehicle for social and political critique of the rich and corrupt. Some are in the ALP — Whelan's opposite number in another ministry is an opportunistic schemer — "he approached politics as though its exclusive purpose was to provide a career structure for otherwise unemployable graduates of Monash University".
Surveying Melbourne's cultural precinct (the ballet, opera, theatre and other high arts), Whelan muses on the class-based commodification of culture — how "the blue-collar Labor constituencies to the north and west of the city paid [through their taxes] for the Liberal voters of the leafy eastern suburbs to have their self-esteem massaged". He immediately corrects himself that this is not the proper attitude — "think centre of excellence ... think vibrant treasure house of national identity".
The pretentious art set is raked with populist wit — a postmodern artwork, to Whelan's eye, is "either a visual discourse on the nature of post-industrial society or the wiring diagram for a juice extractor".
Whelan, like Chandler's famous shamus detective hero, Philip Marlowe, is one of us, sharing our income worries and excluded from circles with more cash and social prestige. Concerning a $600,000 picture being bought with public money by his minister (which later turns out to be a "referential image at the cutting edge of post-modernist discourse" — a fake in other words), Whelan dryly comments that "the last picture I bought was on the lid of a box of shortbread. Five dollars fifty and I got to eat the biscuits."
At times, Maloney tries too hard — "my breath came in short pants, dressed for the weather" — and sometimes he heists an authentic Chandlerism — "her legs were bare and went all the way to the floor" — but mostly his verbal fireworks sparkle, and there is some inspired comic writing involving an octopus costume, a papier-mache whale and stilts.
Played for more laughs, and without the same brooding menace of Chandler, Maloney's novel is worth a more than respectable rating of three and a half Chandlers.