Newtown Review of Books - Reader's Favourite

Melbourne author Fiona Hardy has broken very different ground with her crime fiction debut Unbury the Dead.

Hardy is well-known in crime fiction circles as a Melbourne bookseller, crime fiction reviewer and, more recently, an award-winning author of children’s books. There’s always been talk that she’s been working on a crime novel, and the result is out now in Unbury the Dead, the story of two best mates, Teddy and Alice, and their unusual way of earning a living.

Alice is a young mother with a part-time job that mostly involves driving people around. Dead or alive.

Alice was barefoot beneath the late afternoon sun and knocking her heels against the sea wall when Choker rang. She looked at her phone for a long time while it rang out.

When he called again straight away, she picked up.

‘You know,’ she said conversationally, ‘I didn’t realise I still had blood on my shoes until this morning. It’s been three days, and I only noticed when I took them off to walk along the beach.’

Teddy is more of an investigator and general fixer with a sideline in enforcement when required.

Teddy left the cinema, threw her oversized popcorn bucket in the bin, and headed to the warm art deco bar by the entrance to order a coke, no ice. She took it over to a window seat and sat there, watching the rain and thinking about how she had never jumped out of a helicopter like she’d just seen Jason Statham do, and wondering if she could ask Choker to get her a ride in one.

Both women work for the mysterious Choker, cleaning up whatever needs to be cleaned up, looking for missing people, and other tasks on terms that he dictates. He has particularly soft spots for these two women, and history with them. Readers of a certain age may find a Charlie’s Angels vibe as this story starts to unfold in a deceptively low-key manner, until everything goes mad.

The third ‘angel’ in this equation is Art, ever bouncy, always cheerful. Art is the son of a very wealthy family who is always on the lookout for cash, so is working with Teddy on her current assignment – the search for a teenager, the mostly unmissed Cole, whose divorced parents couldn’t care less, although his father’s a bit exercised about his car and a lot of cash going missing. Cole’s girlfriend, Streets, seems surprisingly sanguine, and his employers somewhat mystified, but Cole seems to be one of those kids who just vanishes, and it takes a while for anybody to get up a head of caring about it.

Meanwhile Alice has taken a few days off from a beach holiday with her chirpy daughter and long-suffering partner to drive a dead body around Victoria in a blue Rolls Royce hearse known to them all as Valkyrie.

Alice’s holiday mood fell away behind her, and she thought instead about who was dead, and how she was apparently supposed to know them, although they were not a friend, and why the job had to be done by her. In the middle of a goddamn holiday, and not any of his other drivers in any of his other cars. Valkyrie was the best, of course, but she was old, and expensive …

Valkyrie was a blue 1959 Rolls Royce Phantom V hearse, and she was beautiful. She had been purchased in the early 2000s by someone who wanted her for his final drive but sold her before he could be bothered dying. Choker bought her for too much money, and named her after the Norse goddess who guided the souls of the dead to the afterlife. He’d refitted her with a peach leather interior and a few extra false compartments, then added her to his driving fleet.

Pretty quickly, the Charlie’s Angels comparison starts to wobble, the odd ramps up (what is it with the sarsaparilla?) and something akin to Thelma and Louise lurches into view for a minute or two, without the cliff, and most certainly without the regrets.

All of this creates an almost manic desire to keep reading, and quite a bit of smiling at inappropriate moments. Like the encounter between the bereaved mother Elinor, her companion Violet, and an unwelcome visitor, Eddie, that goes a bit pear-shaped after Alice and the hearse arrive for final farewells.

Alice dropped to the ground. A rose bush behind Eddie’s head had erupted in a spray of pale-yellow petals that were drifting slowly onto the gravel as Alice took stock of what was happening. Violet had not moved, but her gun was now pointed towards the ground; Elinor was gazing beatifically at where Eddie had been, fingers still on the compressed trigger.

‘Thought I saw a possum,’ she said.

Central to this novel is the friendship and working style of Teddy and Alice, two perfectly normal young women, one of whom spends quite a bit of time lying on the tiled floor of the flat that she used to live in with her now deceased father. The other is busy balancing the pressures of motherhood, a solid relationship and a normal life with an odd job that takes her away from home for long periods. A job where Rolls Royces have coffins in the back of them, and somebody might slash the tyres of her beloved Golf. There’s also another, more accurate shooting.

The man took a step closer. Art flinched. Teddy brought her gun in front of her, and everybody stopped.

Turns out that the flexible moral boundaries referred to in the blurb of this novel are an understatement as Teddy and Alice find themselves with a most unexpected connection between the case of a missing teenager and the delivery of the body of a dead (but unacknowledged) multi-millionaire who was just a bit odd.

Unfolding the story in alternating viewpoint chapters means that the action is entwined with the women’s personal stories. These are integral to who they have become, and provide some pathos to elegantly balance out the humour and the action. Teddy’s weakness for missing persons cases is known among Choker’s group, and as she considers what could have happened to Cole, she looks back to when she was a child in the Dandenong Ranges, alongside her cousin Rusty, now Choker’s ‘digital marketing officer / hacker’. Everyone assumes that Cole has simply run away, just as Rusty did when he was young, only for Teddy to find him, his teeth chattering, floating in a dam.

‘I wanted to roll over and drown,’ he told her, as she helped him out, ‘but the sky was too blue to leave behind.’ ...

And now Teddy pictured Cole, alone and cold somewhere, waiting for somebody to look for him, waiting for something more than dead, and she hoped the sky was blue enough for him to stay.

Cleverly done, Unbury the Dead is not just highly entertaining crime fiction, it’s refreshingly different. The plot is good barking mad in some places, with plenty of opportunities for Teddy and Alice to show their ingenuity, grit, determination and dangerous sides. These are most definitely two women not to be messed with, and let’s hope that Hardy is busily thinking through their next manic outing.