Arthur W. Upfield (Arthur William Upfield) Biography

Australian crime writer, born in Gosport; he emigrated to Australia in 1911, where he was a cook, boundary rider, itinerant worker, and miner, before publishing The Barakee Mystery (1929; US title The Lure of the Bush), the first of twenty-nine novels in which the detective is Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, a part-Aboriginal Australian. Though the writing is stiff, the setting of the novels (the Australian outback) is impressive: among the best are The Bone Is Pointed (1938), The New Shoe (1951), Death of a Lake (1954), Sinister Stones (1954; UK title The Cake in the Hatbox), and The Will of the Tribe (1962).