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Winner of the Ned Kelly Prize for Crime Fiction A Reader's Introduction to The Brush-Off Murray Whelan, the hero of Stiff, Shane Maloney's acclaimed debut novel, Nice Try, The Big Ask, and Something Fishy is at his richly futile best in this romantic comedy and drop-dead thriller. The Brush-Off begins, amid uncertain circumstances, on the 'last Friday in January 1989, the stinking hot end of an overheated decade'. In the sweltering heat Murray fears he is about to be fired from his job as ministerial adviser to the mercurial Angelo Agnelli MP. But he is also looking forward to a rare access visit from his ten-year-old son Red. Murray doesn't know that by the time the weekend is over he'll have more than a new job and new respect for his son. He'll have found himself drinking chardonnay in the small hours of the morning with Salina Fleet, and thinking about kissing her apricot lips. In the dead of night he'll have seen a body fished out of the ornamental moat outside the art gallery. He'll have met Brian Eastlake, the self-made millionaire and art patron, whose driver, Spider Webb, scares Murray more than he can admit. As he navigates his way through high art and low blows, Murray will be brushed-off and put upon. And the strangest thing is, by the time the weekend is over, Murray Whelan will be in love.
'A brilliant debut…' John Clarke Single father and true believer Murray Whelan thinks the life of a political minder is complicated enough with a femocrat ex and bad blood at the Trades Hall. But throw in a snap-frozen Turk, drugs under the mattress, fascist funeral rites, the tattooed vote and a killer car, and Murray finds things spinning out of control. That's when the red-hot Ayisha knocks on his door.
'The best Maloney yet.' Australian Four a.m.and the smart money's home in bed. More importantly
for Murray Whelan, his son Red isn't. He's gone missing, on the
run somewhere in Sydney. So what's Murray doing in a greasy spoon
at the fruit and veg markets, nursing his facial bruising and
talking to Donny Maitland about a grass-roots takeover of the
truckies' union?
'Shane Maloney writes like an angel, always in control of his
plot and pace. Not that many readers will notice this: they'll
be too busy laughing.' Ian Rankin. An Interview with Shane Maloney Murray is an unlikely hero for a thriller, an accidental hero, a contradictory figure. In many ways he is an ordinary bloke but there is something about him that sets him apart. He works in the theatre of politics, yet he has a contempt for sham and pretence. He likes women but doesn't have much luck with them. He is a devoted father who can't quite get it right. As the offsider to a politician, he has no business playing detective at all. But his good intentions and his loyalties are constantly getting him into hot water. He is compelled into danger by curiosity and a dogged sense of honour. And while he is wise enough in the ways of the world to be sceptical about appearances, he is never truly a cynic. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, he cannot completely conceal the heart he wears on his sleeve. Melbourne is Murray's beat. The dense networks of the city are encoded in him. Its geography, its climate, its tribes, its loyalties, its enmities-none of these are alien to him. In Melbourne, nobody is more than two phone calls away from anyone else. And Murray spends a lot of time on the phone. You write crime thrillers but your hero isn't a private eye, and the police don't play a major role. Traditional crime novels are either private eye 'whodunits' or police procedurals. In either case, they are often highly artificial constructions with convoluted plots and unrealistic settings that owe very little to the essentially haphazard nature of much real crime. The pace, the energy and the social observation of good crime fiction are what interest me, not all those 'lone wolf' private eyes and hard-bitten homicide dicks. Frankly, I am more interested in the comic possibilities of the genre than with reworking its standard conventions. The social comedy of your books is distinctive. How does it work? The world is a funny place. Even in a comedy you can get killed. I use crime as a pretext for delving into the social environment, describing it, commenting on it. Murray's job requires him to move freely from one extreme of society to another-from the corridors of power to the ethnic enclaves, from esoteric art galleries to the back rooms of the Trades Hall. Murray takes us into those places and gives us a running commentary on what he encounters there. A jaundiced view perhaps, but never entirely inaccurate. He can see the absurdity of the world and at the same time fully engage with it. His humour helps him protect himself from the world's extremes while also embracing its foibles.
Praise for Shane Maloney 'The Brush-Off brilliantly mixes the comic and the tragic: this amusing thriller has you laughing at the moments where a gasp may be more appropriate…Maloney's novel is far from your typical murder mystery.' Rolling Stone 'The Brush-Off has especially succulent portraits of instantly recognisable types who scarcely ever get a guernsey in our fiction: a silvery and urbane senior arts bureaucrat, a Jewish culture-vulture millionaire, an old gay art dealer. Much of the quiet comedy in this book is very urbane and it has a sophistication, a sense of bigger and converging worlds, which not much serious Australian fiction can match.' Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald About Shane Maloney |
Also
by Shane Maloney
MURRAY
WHELAN'S THIRD ADVENTURE
MURRAY
WHELAN'S FOURTH ADVENTURE
MURRAY
WHELAN'S FIFTH ADVENTURE