In the Evil Day

There are a lot of people trying their hand at writing these techno thrillers where you can track down anyone anywhere in the world by just using a computer, hacking into various systems etc. The few I've read were cheezy. Not so with Identity Theory. Peter Temple's Identity Theory reminded me of John Le Carre's work in that it's characters are low-key, diligently working under the radar towards figuring the puzzle...towards the end game. Multinational. Anyway I loved it. I also loved Temple's The Broken Shore, Bad Debts, and Black Tide. And will be reading Shooting Star ('99), Dead Point (2000), and White Dog ('03) in the near future. Also Truth (2008, forthcoming). Peter Temple has become one of my favorite authors. Robert Wilson is another. David Honeybone, the editor of Crime Factory magazine who also runs the Crime Writers' Association of Australia, sums up the plot better than I could ever. "Con Niemand is an ex-mercenary, a South African trained in the art of killing. He earns a living by doing security, running protection for wealthy South Africans who find themselves in a country gripped by lawlessness, still searching for stability post-apartheid. The sole survivor of a job gone wrong, Niemand comes into possession of a video showing American soldiers in an African village, a charnel landscape, where they are calmly dispatching survivors. Survivors of what, though? Niemand hasn't much time to contemplate that question before he's contacted by the tape's owners in London, and with dollar signs in his eyes he boards the next flight out of South Africa to return their property. But such is the importance of this tape that he unwittingly becomes the target of a deadly manhunt. Switch to Hamburg, Germany, and meet John Anselm, a journalist piecing his life back together after being kidnapped in Beirut. His brain a shattered switchboard of half-memories, courtesy of a rifle butt to the skull from a captor, Anselm controls panic attacks by drinking. He earns a living through a shady but sophisticated electronic-surveillance agency whose clients require information on everything from errant wives to industrial espionage. Unaware of Niemand's situation and that they share dangerous knowledge, Anselm is employed to track the ex-mercenary's movements, until a series of violent events lead their paths to cross, just as the threat of an exhumed American foreign policy secret raises the stakes for all concerned." Highly recommended!

This is the same book as "In the Evil Day " by Peter Temple, nevertheless it's a brillant book with a Le Carré feeling to it. And when it comes to action scenes he's as good as Lee Child! Well, what about it - Carré/Child in a very complicated but also rewarding thriller. His other books are as good. Pity when they have different titels for differnt countries. Can confuse you, n'est pas?

Fans of Alan Furst, early John LeCarre, Graham Greene, Mankell, Raymond Chandler - rejoice. A new Australian writer, the equal of the greatest, finally makes it to the US with this book - but he has a series of PI type fiction (his detective is "Jack Irish") that are absolutely first rate in all the ways that count - dense, wonderful plots, mature adult characters, complex believable emotions, beautiful way with language - frankly I think that though Temple writes in the spy/PI genre, this is really "literature", running circles around most of what passes for Art these days in modern fiction. He has a spare, Hemingway-esque way of setting mood, character, place and will periodically throw a word into a sentence that sparkles like a diamond with its beauty and aptness. This is superb stuff.

I was interested in electronic eavesdropping --- in the winter of 2006, how could you not be? --- and I bumped into a reference to Identity Theory, so I picked it up. And read the first page. And found myself in Johannesburg, at 2 PM, on a weekday. The character is Niemand, no first name. He's working out. Inside. "Outdoors had become trouble, like being attacked by three men, one with a nail-studded piece of wood." Niemand is no victim: "The trouble had cut both ways: several of his attackers he had kissed off quickly." Niemand, we are told, "didn't get any pleasure in killing." Which hasn't stopped him --- Temple takes a page to recount three killings on his scorecard. You'll have no problem agreeing with Niemand's actions. Now we're on page three. An aging Mercedes --- actually, a new one, hidden under an old, rusting body --- picks Niemand up. We meet Mkane, his partner. They're on personal protection work today, collecting a woman at a shopping center and making sure she gets safely home. She does. Niemand and Mkane check the house out. Thoroughly: "There was one vehicle in the garage, a black Jeep four-wheel-drive. A camera at floor level showed no one hiding beneath it." Rather extreme precautions, you think. What kind of world is this that requires "every cupboard, every wardrobe" to be checked? The woman drinks champagne. Niemand "holstered his pistol, didn't feel relaxed." Her husband arrives, scorning Niemand's black partner. Niemand looked up, "saw something on the ceiling behind him, something at the edge of his vision, a dark line not there before....The man in the ceiling pushed open the inspection hatch..." Carnage. Out of nowhere. With hot blood and screaming and guns that don't work and then do, and bodies, bodies everywhere. In the silence that follows, Niemand inspects the husband's briefcase: envelopes, papers, a video cassette. The phone rings. He answers. The papers? The tape? Yes, Niemand has them. Will he bring them out? Yes, but how much? "Twenty thousand. And expenses." And he's off to London.... And so ends chapter one. Take a breath. Your first in a while. Turn the page. Now you're in...Hamburg. In the office of W & K. Once it was a publisher. Its current business is information --- "looking for people, checking on people." In the modern way: six computer terminals, a state-of-the-art mainframe. Very amoral. Find an address, turn it over. A couple is reconciled. Or maybe the husband, upset by the way she drained the bank account before fleeing to France, kills her. It's all the same to W & K. A former journalist works here; eventually, you know that whatever is on the cassette will come to involve him. "Eventually" is a long time coming. Temple writes real characters, and they have their stories, their frustrating days, their troubled nights. Plot points drop like Hansel's bread crumbs in the forest. But what's the rush? Every paragraph has a jolt of pleasure. Like a man remembering his wife: "..

Although Australian author Temple has won his country's Ned Kelly crime fiction award three times, this is his American debut. And a fine one it is, delivering a complex plot of spies, information dealing and murder. Protagonist John Anselm, an American, lives alone in his ancestral home in Hamburg, Germany, and works as an information dealer for a struggling firm, finding people, things and secrets. The owner is an old friend, with plenty of his own shady secrets. Anselm used to be a roving foreign correspondent until he was taken hostage in Beirut. His captive experience has left him haunted by fears and demons, his memory fragmented. In the prologue we meet mercenary Con Nieman, whose security job ends in a bloodbath, leaving him in possession of a tape showing American soldiers massacring an African village. What this means and why its recovery is important enough for "collateral damage" not to be a problem, weaves together a story of ambition, avarice, political evil and expedience, and even love. Temple's characters are complex and intelligent, his writing is spare and eloquent and the tight plot is exotic and suspenseful. Readers will be looking forward to finding more Temple novels in local bookstores.