Hate it when a new book from a much loved series lingers too long on the reading pile simply because of competing priorities. No disrespect intended at all in how long it took me to get to this entry, and much pleasure when I finally did. Anyway they come, I'm quite a fan of the Pufferfish books.

For readers unaware of the Pufferfish series, Detective Inspector Franz Heineken is a gruff, grumbling bear of a man wont to stalk the mean streets of Tasmania with a glare and a stare for anybody who steps outside the bounds of propriety. His very particular brand of propriety.

Which means that the mere disappearance of a toffy sommelier after what's obviously been a violent confrontation in the lounge of his rented house in Hobart is as offensive to the great man as is the attempted attack on a young woman, connected in more than one way to a murderer he wasn't able to catch. Add to that the imposition of a bunch of toe-cutting, restructurers straight out of the Emerald City infesting his police station with their management speak, and an agenda of cost cutting that's making him particularly annoyed, not just because the only high-up in the organisation he has any time for at all is looking like he might be for the chop.

If you are new to this series ROMEO'S GUN may leave you wondering what the point is - there's a level of put-upon-ness that's particularly ramped up here, although to be fair, it's a big part of the entire series. These are tongue-firmly-in-cheek novels about policing, being a bit of a grumpy bugger, and a put upon character forced to endure the indignities of dealing with upper-management, crooks, civilians, other police forces, and the general bother of having to cope with people who refuse to see things from the Pufferfish point of view.

ROMEO'S GUN does wander down some highways and byways, and it narrates those in a typical dry sarcastic drawl. It will take you around the back for a good look at the dark side, it'll drag you kicking and screaming into the high and low life and it'll do it in a round-about, frequently long-winded, more often than not laugh inducing way. As long as you're prepared to relax into the series, take Pufferfish at his best and worst, and deal with anybody who thinks drinking espresso coffee around a liquorice allsort is normal behaviour.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-romeos-gun-david-owen ( )

Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, often with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment.

That’s the definition according to Wikipedia anyway. I went looking for it because as I read David Owen’s latest offering I thought that to call it a novel is a little misleading. It is one, of course, but it is also something else. An old fashioned yarn. An adventure tale. Something you can imagine being slowly doled out by a grizzled chap in a pub somewhere off the beaten track.

On the surface it is about the probable death of a sommelier (his body goes missing before death can be confirmed by anyone official), the growing-cold hunt for the killer of a teenage girl and the myriad ways bureaucracy is screwed. But this is not a story that goes from point A to point B in a nice, orderly fashion. Its embellishments, improvisations and theatrics include the mechanics of international drug smuggling, a lesson in trout fishing, a disguise, a brief history of Cathedral building and musings on the nature of light. I know it sounds like these things might be irrelevant but you’ll have to take my word that none of them are.

The storytelling element of ROMEO’S GUN is heightened by the fact it is told from the first-person point of view of a larger than life person. Franz “Pufferfish” Heineken is – in my mind at least – a little like a good Jack Thompson character. As he was in The Sum of Us for example. Prone to prickliness, bored by other people’s bullshit, easily perceived the wrong way by people too dense or self-involved to see his true qualities. The kind of bloke any sensible person would want on their side in a fight. I often find the first-person perspective unbelievable – or at least unrelatable – because the narrators seem to think with a coherence my own inner voice generally lacks. But Pufferfish’s voice – with some half-formed thoughts and idiosyncratic shorthand – rings very true.

True Blue too. Funny that two ‘foreigners’, Pufferfish (who is Dutch) and his creator (born in South Africa), consistently deliver such a thoroughly Australian sensibility. The evocative setting, the idiom-filled sentences, the way that various social scenes play out are all tied irrevocably to this country or, even more locally, to the often maligned island state we occasionally leave off the map. Though some of those experiences are shared by mainlanders. In my city we too are often visited by highly-paid, expensive suit-wearing ‘experts’ from Sydney over supplied with presentations and recommendations for how we should do things their way improve. In ROMEO’S GUN it is a mythical company called EmploySolution (which of course is referred to as FinalSolution by Puff and his chums) putting the Tasmanian Police Force in general and Pufferfish in particular under its microscope with a view to the eradication of unnecessary spending. It’s a different company in my real world but the same result: roles which perform actual work get cut while roles for managers and executives who do precious little of use quadruple.

I collected ROMEO’S GUN from my post box on the last working day before Christmas which did wonderful things for my seasonal spirit. My delighted anticipation quickly turned into genuine satisfaction as I started reading it almost immediately and found myself once again enveloped in the funny, clever, complicated and mildly cynical world of Franz Heineken. If you are not already a fan of this series you could easily start here. It works as a self-contained story even with its occasional references to earlier events. And then, as I did when I first discovered the series at book six, you can begin your own frustrating quest to track down the out-of-print earlier titles.