Harsh heart of the truth

Photo: Supplied Peter Temple's new novel focuses on male relationships as a state goes up in flames. Jason Steger meets the celebrated crime writer. IN A short essay in Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors' A New Literary History of America, Walter Mosley, the creator of ''Easy'' Rawlins, muses on the hardboiled: ''In the pages of any hardboiled book worth its ink is the question can I do right in a world gone wrong? There is no one answer to this question. People in a hardboiled world have had to improvise from the moment they were born. The writer may have a notion of what is right and make a world where the ending, if not exactly happy, is at least satisfying.'' It's not clear if Peter Temple is as hardboiled a writer as some of the examples Mosley has in mind but certainly his main characters are trying in their own shambolic way to get things right. Usually after they've previously got them spectacularly wrong in an uncooperative world. Think Jack Irish, his Fitzroy solicitorcumfixer; think Joe Cashin in The Broken Shore; and now think Stephen Villani. Advertisement: Story continues below His new hero if that's the right word for this flawed character appeared in The Broken Shore, which won the major award from the British crime writers' association and added yet another Ned Kelly to Temple's large collection of Australian Crime Writers Association gongs. Temple is a world away from those US mean streets and a decent train ride from the ones in Melbourne where the new novel is set. He is in the Ballarat cafe near his home where he is a regular fixture, known by many and appearing to know everyone else. The staff is taking advance orders for Truth while he is telling it. He has a strong view on most things, often caustic, invariably perspicacious. He is a man worth listening to. You will be entertained, Rosetta Stone Portuguese you will certainly laugh, there'll probably be a glass or three of red to smooth the process. Truth is not a sequel to The Broken Shore, more a companion piece. Temple was worried that readers might get the impression that it heralded another series. (Not that he's done with either Cashin or Irish. Both pop up in Truth; walkon roles that show his affection for them. And there will be more Irish down the track.) Villani, the head of homicide, is dealing with a couple of ghastly murders of young women and endeavouring to deal with the dismal state of his marriage, his onoff affair with a television journalist and his role as a father, a brother and, significantly, a son. All this in a Melbourne enveloped in the stink of political and corporate corruption and a bush that is about to burst into flames. The British crime writer John Harvey reckons Truth is ''a pretty apt title for one of Peter's books. I don't think he has truck with much less. I hold him in the highest regard as a writer, both in terms of his choice and control of subject matter and his use of language, which is direct and, where necessary, evocative. Above all, readable. ''In common with many of the best crime writers, he often uses the mechanics of the crime novel to strip away layers of hypocrisy. He has a knack of pinning down the daytoday nature of people's lives and laying bare their weaknesses and obsessions.'' Temple has always been interested in power and its exercise ''what I see as the disintegration of things, the way every step forward carries with it its own slide backwards, that all the things we try to do even with the best of intentions are doomed''. And the bleak political world he unmasks in the book? Simply the way he sees it. ''It is the perception of reality. What is the reality itself? People don't really know.'' He doesn't like to make things easy for the reader; indeed he likes to make things as complex as he can.

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