Retribution

Richard Anderson (Scribe Publications) $40 Reviewed by Ken Strongman

Retribution is Richard Anderson’s second crime novel. By day, he is a farmer in New South Wales – possibly the one and only crime-writing farmer. It should be said that this book is fluently written around a story that is set squarely in the world that Anderson knows so well.

The (slightly anti-) hero is Graeme Sweetapple, which is a wonderful name for the protagonist of a bucolic crime novel. He is not making farming ends meet and so tries to join them by rustling cattle.

On the way through the night with a truckload of bellowing animals, he fetches up at a road accident and becomes embroiled with a young woman who happens to be bringing some explosives back from a mine protest. Astutely judging the cattle to be stolen, she blackmails Sweetapple into looking after the explosives. After the blackmail, there follows the theft of a very expensive horse (named Retribution) on behalf of the uncomfortably rich and powerful owners of a string of horses for which Sweetapple helps to care.

Then there is dastardly behaviour towards the horse and Sweetapple’s own way of seeking retribution for this.

His simultaneous weakness and strength is that he is essentially a kind man who loves horses.

Sweetapple’s love interest – of sorts – is in the form of Carson, a younger woman who kicks around with a group of other young people, none of whom is particularly congenial. But they are of some help to Sweetapple in his plans to try to put right the wrongs that have been done to the horse.

If you like the idea of a crime novel set in farming country, you might well enjoy this book. For me, it was a little slow-moving. There again, farming country is a bit slowmoving, so perhaps the author has it right. However, there is a sense in which the plot is not quite complex enough for the length of the book. Things move a little slowly for comfort and there seem to be too many words per page.

But crime fiction takes many forms, any and all of them intriguing. Richard Anderson is a good writer and a good observer of human behaviour.

And the idea of a series of pastoral crime novels is at least marginally beguiling. There just needs, in my view, to be a little more zest, a touch more oomph both to the writing and to Sweetapple, if he is to appear again in another pastoral romp.

One might forget the book but never the name of its hero.