When you hear the title, what do you picture?

Well, you’re probably wrong. Although this sounds like it’s about a monster similar to the Loch Ness Monster – which would have been experiencing a surge when this book first came out – the “Lake Frome Monster” is actually an example of what I think of as Australian humor: tongue-in-cheek, exaggerated, earthy.

First of all, Lake Frome is not a lake; it’s a huge puddle in the desert for livestock to drink from, resulting from a deep well. And the monster is actually a huge, feral camel, said to be bigger than most, who tramples unwary travelers to death in the night.¹

One night, a visiting geographic photographer who is camping near one of the wells disappears and rumors swirl – is the Lake Frome Monster responsible? Later, when the photographer’s dead body is found by a ranch supervisor and two aboriginal hired hands, the hands proclaim the monster’s responsibility – until the supervisor turns the body over and asks if the monster is known for shooting its victims. The police descend from the nearest town and trample whatever clues are left following a sandstorm and migrating cattle herds, then depart, unable to find the culprit. Silence descends and the case goes cold.

Enter Detective Napoleon Bonaparte, undercover as he often is. He takes the job of maintaining a section fence erected to keep wildlife and domestic animals apart. During windstorms, tumbleweeds blow against the fence, then sand blows against the tumbleweeds, burying the fence. So often, this is what Bony’s cases are like in the Outback: a lot of incidental suspects that tangle the main plot, and catch clews, burying the truth beneath the sand. If Bony can catch the tumbleweeds and toss them to the leeward side of the fence, the wind will carry them away, preventing the sand from amassing and keeping the fence clear.

Meanwhile, between bouts of work, Bony reads the land, casually questions suspects over numerous cups of tea, and even solves the mystery of the Lake Frome Monster himself.

And finds a murderer.

I like Bony’s methodical means of approaching the case, similar to a preservationist, carefully tweezing apart the strands of an antique tapestry, then weaving them back together again to form a clear picture.² He starts out trailing the murderer and, at some point, gets one step ahead of them. In this book, for example, he is strictly undercover, but then he asks one of the few people who does know his true identity to start a rumor that he might be a policeman. This causes the bad guys to turn the local aboriginal tribe against him, and they start using hmm – in the US, we’d call it voodoo – to get inside his head and interfere with his rational thinking. Bony has had the “bone pointed” against him in the past and almost died; so he knows what is happening and doesn’t want it to happen again. He sneaks up on the aboriginals who are seated around a campfire, working their magic, and interrupts them in a forthright way, derailing their attempts. One step ahead, as usual.

This book is unusual, however, because the murderer actually gets the jump on Bony at the end – how he resolves the situation is humorous and unique and clever (clever by the author, not clever by the character).

Which is why I love these books so much.

1. It does seem like I recently read – or saw – something about a feral camel in the Southwest US who was doing the same to unwary travelers… ↩︎
2. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories: once a year we’d hire a firm to go into every location and count the merchandise, then send us a date-stamped file with the counts so we could update our systems with RTI and then orders would fire to fill the inventory gaps. This year, for some reason, the files weren’t loading and the orders weren’t firing. Why weren’t the files loading? The process involved five or six different departments. Emails were flying, fingers pointing. I got everyone in a room and forced them to walk me through the process. Who kicks off the process, what kicks it off, what is the output of that part of the process? Who picks up that outcome and acts on it? They didn’t want to be there – they wanted to be out fixing the problem – but they patiently walked me through each step, clearly humoring the newby. We got to one step and someone was droning on about that part of the process: “So then the file is uploaded. The file date is compared to the date in the system.” “Wait a minute,” I said, “what date in the system? I must have missed something. Who loads the date in the system?” Silence. I repeated, “Who owns putting the date in the system?” Everyone starts talking at once, pointing fingers at each other. We had found the problem. I volunteered to have someone load the dates in the system for this year’s inventories if they would create an upload for the dates next year. They agreed. Problem solved. Sometimes to see the full picture, you have to unravel it and weave it back together again. ↩︎