Back to the Classics - The Battling Prophet

A classic crime story, fiction or non-fiction.

The Battling Propthet by Arthur W. Upfield was one in a bag of old Penguin books, I purchased during a clearance sale in a second hand bookstore. Lots of Upfield's book were in that bag. Some of them has since been lost when moving, some I have read several times, some only once. Among those this one, which was one of the first I read from that bag in the beginning of the 1980ies. Now I re-read it, and it was way better, than my memory of it.  


Centering on a murder mystery -  who killed the so called Prophet, an uncannily accurate meteorologist - this book is so much more. It is a study in meteorology and science, drinking habits and abstinence, bull whipping, friendship and loyalty, real men and real women, heroes and villains, spies and cold war conspiracies. All the time with an eye for the Australian landscape, the bush and the people living in and off the land. 

I own and have read and re-read many of the Inspector Bonaparte books, not for the mysteries, but for the immersion in a landscape and a time that is no more, but that fostered heroes on a daily base. This is not the best of the "Bony" books in my opinion, but it may easily be the second best.