Showing results by author "Arthur Upfield" in All Categories

Tucked away in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales is Cork Valley, inhabited by hard-drinking Irishmen. Here an Excise Officer looking for illicit whiskey 'stills' has been murdered, and it's Bony's job to find the killer. Disguised as a horse thief, the Aboriginal detective hitchhikes into the valley to meet a lawless lot....

This is the 22nd instalment in Mr. Upfield’s detective series featuring the Australian Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Deep in Australia's outback, a woman has been murdered, her daughter vanished. Yorky, one of the locals and a crazy wanderer, is known to have been in the area, and his footprints have been identified near the body. When he too disappears, even the Aboriginal trackers are baffled. Bony's approach changes everything....

The aborigines, who knew how many eagles flew over their inland desert, must have known who put the dead white man into Lucifer's Couch. But no one in Hall's Creek, white or black, reported seeing the stranger - and there were no tracks around the meteor crater. Was the murder done by whites or blacks or by both in collusion? Bony listened to the ancient tribal legends and found truth nobody wanted to believe.

An Inspector Bonaparte Mystery. The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of "Venom House". Perhaps that's because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, its treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aborigines slaughtered by Answerth ancestors. Or perhaps it's just because the Answerth household is such a strange one.

What is the Lake Frome Monster? Why are the Aborigines so terrified of it? And what dreadful part did it really play in the sudden death of a former roving reporter? When Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is called in, everything goes against him. There is even a vicious attempt on his life....

Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is called to the drought-stricken outback for this, his latest case. At a desolate sheep station, two men have been savagely beaten to death, and it's Bony's job to make an arrest. This isn't an easy case, since clues are scarce in this sun-baked, sand-blown country, but Bony's understanding of the bush and the people who live there – both black and white – leads him inexorably to the killer.

A first-rate thriller about an American millionaire who owns the House of Cain, a haven for murderers wanted by the law. Austilene Thorpe is accused of murder but then disappears from gaol. Her fiance, Martin Sherwood, goes blind from shock. His famous adventuring brother Monty learns that Austilene is in a refuge for murderers in the far north-east corner of South Australia, and together the Sherwoods set out to find her and bring her back to Melbourne....

During a state visit to Australia in 1928, Her Royal Highness Princess Natalie, heiress to the throne of Rolandia, is abducted from the transcontinental train at Cook on the Nullarbor Plain by a gang led by two brilliant Americans, Earle Lawrence and Van Horton. They hide her in caves near Eucla on the Great Australian Bight, until the search is called off and a ransom is arranged....

Melbourne during the Depression. A seedy, corrupt city. Someone has struck at the heart of Australia's soul: they have killed the horse that would have won the Melbourne Cup. For what motive? Profit, blackmail, a betting scam? Only Tom Pink, the rider of the murdered horse can find out.

The incomparable Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is back - and now he must solve one of his most baffling cases. When Bony sets out to investigate two bizarre murders at Wirragatta Station, deep in the Australian Outback, all the odds are against him. The crimes were committed a year before, the scent is now cold, and any surviving clues have been confused by a bumbling policeman. As Bony gets closer to the trail, the mysterious murderer sets out to stop him. Can Bony stop the killer first?

By a lonely roadside in the south-west corner of Western Australia, old-timer Karl Mueller is roused from his drink-sodden sleep by approaching footsteps and the sound of whistling. What he sees on waking (or he thinks he sees) is enough to make him stiffen with fear, and more than enought to worry the police into calling for Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.

The original 1941 radio dramatization of Inspector Bonaparte Mystery—featuring Bony, the first Aboriginal detective. The discovery of a stolen red monoplane on the dry flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things for different folks. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill passenger meant renewed purpose in life. For Dr. Knowles, brilliant physician and town drunk, it meant the revival of a romantic dream. For some it meant a murder plan gone awry, and for Bonaparte, it meant one of the toughest cases of his career.

A powerful story of Australia's great sheep farms from one of our greatest writers. Gripped by Drought is a story of a man's battle not only with the elements of nature which threatened the ruin of his huge Australian sheep-farm, but also with a loveless and unhappy marriage. For Frank Mayne, master of well-nigh a million-acre sheep station, life assumed its most dreary aspect. No rain for his farm, a wife who involved him in an orgy of spending and entertainment and with disaster just round the corner, there seemed little prospect of happiness.