The Daily Telegraph

Peter Temple

South African-born crime novelist admired for capturing Australia’s rigid code of masculinit­y

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PETER TEMPLE, who has died aged 71, was widely regarded as Australia’s finest crime novelist. The South African-born Temple did not set foot in Australia until he was in his thirties, but the outsider’s perspectiv­e he brought to bear in his mystery novels was admired by many native readers for its accuracy.

He wrote especially well about the rigid code of masculinit­y to which Australian men adhere, and his dialogue captured the way they speak – or, more accurately, do not speak.

“When I arrived in Australia I knew one person and he took me to a pub on my first or second day in Sydney. I really couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he recalled. “I’d never heard people speak like this. Australian speech is heavily truncated. People will speak to each other in near-grunts.”

When showing his characters in conversati­on, therefore, Temple’s pages often contained more blank space than words. He had a particular gift for conveying the poetic economy with which Australian­s insult each other, to hilarious effect. His descriptiv­e prose was equally curt and elliptical, rather in the manner of James Ellroy, with an overlay of arresting imagery that recalled Raymond Chandler.

A typical example is the descriptio­n of the “late-morning throng” on a street in Melbourne (where Temple settled) in White Dog (2003): “Young and youngish people mostly, modish, long-haired, hairless, the odd balding man with a small tuft sticking out of the back of his head like a vestige of tail, people in Melbourne black, people in Gold Coast white, people in saris, sarongs, the odd suit, the odd second-hand pink tracksuit, many naked midriffs, some not much wider than a greyhound’s, some not much narrower than a 44-gallon drum but the colour of lard.”

This was one of four novels to feature Jack Irish, a lawyer who suffered a breakdown after his wife was murdered by a deranged client and has reinvented himself as a private eye and fixer; he shares his creator’s passion for dogs, Aussie Rules football, racing and furniture-making.

In 2005 Temple published a more ambitious novel, The Broken Shore, which featured a Melbourne policeman who is sent to recuperate in a small town on the south Australian coast after being injured and tries to prevent the murder of a local worthy being pinned on three Aboriginal teenagers. The novel was much praised – and criticised by some – for its portrayal of the racism that bedevils some small communitie­s in Australia. In Britain it became the first book by an Australian to win the Crime Writers’ Associatio­n’s Gold Dagger.

The Broken Shore was also shortliste­d for the Miles Franklin award, the Australian equivalent of the Booker Prize. “Lots of people were quite offended by the idea that someone from a ‘genre’ should get on the list,” Temple said later. “I hope that I can write a book that can win the bloody Miles Franklin award and would shove it up them.”

He achieved this ambition with Truth (2009), a sequel to The Broken Shore set against the backdrop of the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria.

Peter Temple was born in South Africa on March 10 1946. His parents were Afrikaners, his father (who claimed kinship with Archbishop Temple) also having English ancestry and his mother Irish.

After National Service, Peter became a journalist. He came to feel “a profound distaste for the white regime” and decided to emigrate, but no country was prepared to admit white South Africans unless they were political refugees. Eventually he got a job on a magazine in Hamburg, having falsely claimed that he could speak German, and made a success of it.

In 1980 he and his wife emigrated to Australia, where he became a lecturer in journalism at RMIT University in Melbourne. It was there that he encountere­d Professor Jack Clancy, a former footballer and dispenser of staffroom bonhomie whose company inspired the character of Jack Irish.

He resigned to become a freelance editor and try his hand at achieving his long-held ambition of publishing a novel: the first Jack Irish book, Bad Debts, appeared in 1996. Among his other novels were An Iron Rose (1998), Shooting Star (1999) and In the Evil Day (2002), an internatio­nal thriller in which he wrote about South Africa for the first time.

Temple, a man of acerbic wit and prodigious general knowledge, was a fierce perfection­ist. Although he claimed to write 365 days a year, his published output was fairly small and there was nothing after 2009.

Peter Temple is survived by his wife Anita (née Rose-innes) and their son.

Peter Temple, born March 10 1946, died March 8 2018

 ??  ?? Temple on a visit to London, July 2007
Temple on a visit to London, July 2007
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