''White Dog'' (2003) is a 2003

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

n novel by Peter Temple. The fourth novel in the "Jack Irish" series, it won the 2003 Ned Kelly Awards Best Novel for Crime Writing. It was reprinted in the United Kingdom in 2007 by Quercus.

Plot summary

A Melbourne property developer is murdered and his artist ex-girlfriend is the prime suspect. Jack Irish, a lone private investigator, comes in to investigate. In his investigation, he figures out quite the surprise.

Style and subject matter

Reviewer Hutchings describes the novel as "classic detective fiction" typified by its first-person narrative and "engagement with the city".Peter Hutchings (2003, April 18) "A man alone with clues to times past" (Spectrum). ''

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'' p.20 Hutchings also suggests that "the sense of times past" conveyed by Temple in this novel is central to other writers in this genre, such as

Raymond Chandler Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive durin ...

whose hero, Philip Marlowe, is "an anachronistic knight-errant, a defender of past decencies". He suggests that for Temple, along with the Australian crime writers Marele Day, Peter Corris and

Cathy Cole ''Cathy'' is an American gag-a-day comic strip, drawn by Cathy Guisewite from 1976 until 2010. The comic follows Cathy, a woman who struggles through the "four basic guilt groups" of life—food, love, family, and work. The strip gently pokes ...

, "the detective offers a link to a disappearing working-class, egalitarian Australia". As in all his Jack Irish novels,

Australian Rules Football Australian football, also called Australian rules football or Aussie rules, or more simply football or footy, is a contact sport played between two teams of 18 players on an oval field, often a modified cricket ground. Points are scored by k ...

and horse racing feature in ''The White Dog''.

References

2003 Australian novels Novels by Peter Temple Novels set in Melbourne Ned Kelly Award-winning works Text Publishing books {{2000s-crime-novel-stub