DOROTHY PORTER – The Monkey’s Mask. Jill Fitzpatrick #1. Hyland House, Australia, paperback, 1994. Arcade, US, hardcover, 1995. Serpent’s Tail, UK, paperback, 1997. Picador, Australia, paperback, 2000. Film: Strand, 2000, with Susie Porter as Jill Fitzpatrick.

   I note this offering from a publisher new to me by an author likewise because it is surely the oddest “mystery” I’m likely to see this year, and maybe any other: an Australian lesbian PI novel written completely in verse. Trust me. If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’. Porter has written several books, and this [the Arcade edition] is not a vanity press.

   The book is blurbed as “an erotic murder mystery,” and I believe that’s a fairly apt description of the story underneath the verse. Details I’m not going to give you, because when someone tells you a dog sang, you don’t ask in what key.

   And if you’re expecting any critical insights you’re out of luck there too, because a) I didn’t read it thoroughly or closely, and b) I’m not qualified to evaluate poetry. The verse is free — it doesn’t rhyme, anyway — and some of it struck me as pretty good; this, though, from someone who thinks Swinburne’s “Garden of Prosperpine” is about as good as it gets. What else can I say?

   
Bibliographic Notes: This is the only entry for the author in Al Hubin’s Bibliography of Crime Fiction IV, but note that that book stops with the year 2000. It was the winner of the National Book Council Banjo Award (Australia’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize).