An AUTHOR BITES THE DUST

Rating:
Summary: Skewers priests of high literature
Review: A good read about N. Bonaparte. It harks back to Swordfish Reef.

Somewhat typical and formulaic, except that it skewers the custodians who foster and exalt serious literature, protecting it against practitioners of what is deprecated as merely commercial fiction.

Did Mr. Upfield feel some animosity toward his artistic "betters"?

Rating:
Summary: An Author Bites the Dust
Review: As always with Upfield, when he takes his main character out of the bush (e.g., Swordfish Reef), things do deteriorate. Still, because the literary establishments of Melbourne and Sydney disliked anyone who wrote for money, the book, a thinly disguised assault based on two real members of Melbourne's intellectual elite, the result is a wonderful blast at intellectual pretensions anywhere. As such it is as much document as novel. Still, it is a good read, but nowhere near the best of his books (he considered Drought his best)

Rating:
Summary: An Author Bites the Dust
Review: As always with Upfield, when he takes his main character out of the bush (e.g., Swordfish Reef), things do deteriorate. Still, because the literary establishments of Melbourne and Sydney disliked anyone who wrote for money, the book, a thinly disguised assault based on two real members of Melbourne's intellectual elite, the result is a wonderful blast at intellectual pretensions anywhere. As such it is as much document as novel. Still, it is a good read, but nowhere near the best of his books (he considered Drought his best)