Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair Mysteries
by Jennifer Bryce
Sulari Gentill is onto a good thing with her collection of Rowland Sinclair mysteries. This is the seventh in the series and I have read all but one. The stories are a little like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five for grown-ups. Rowland Sinclair and his friends have many adventures but they revive themselves with gin and tonic rather than cocoa. Rowland is the youngest son in a wealthy Sydney family – so he has the means to do all manner of things – in this case, participate in a car race in his yellow Mercedes on the dangerous Maroubra Speedway. http://www.vintagespeedway.com/Maroubra.html
Rowland and his artistic friends are disapproved of by his older brother Wilfred – the head of the family. But the family is so well-heeled, it is a case of, What will Rowley be up to next? And Wilfred telephones for a doctor or sends for a chauffeur to rescue Rowley from numerous tight-spots.
Each chapter references an article written about an event or phenomenon in 1930s Australia. The historical period is particularly well described and it’s for this that I enjoy reading the books as much as the detective aspect. Sulari Gentill has a special skill in depicting place and time. In this book, Rowland has almost too many scrapes – but the reader, along with Rowland and his friends, is kept on tenterhooks trying to solve a murder – along the way getting entangled with SP bookies and, in particular, the very right wing pro Nazi Eric Campbell and the New Guard.
Colonel Eric Campbell
littlesmackerel 
Looks like Eric Campbell would have made a good Aussie Hitler.
What I like about this novel and other Gentills is how she captures the right wing sympathies of this period that were everywhere in Australia (and the US, as Philip Roth has also shown in his war-time novels). It took an attack by Germany on a British ally to turn politics to anti-German rather than anti-Semitic, and a lot longer in the US, almost till the Japanese foolishly attacked them.
And we seem to be re-cycling back again now.
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Thanks for that observation, Tony. Extraordinary to think that in the 1930s so many ‘intelligent’ people thought that the Fascists were doing good things. And yes – some say that history repeats itself.
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