A pandemic, a collaboration, a lost child…
Despite the pandemic, Dexter Cathcart is determined to go to Italy to pursue his private case of the mystery journal. He is stopped in his tracks, however, by the closure of the border, then Mack Hannah and his detective agree on another detective novel, this one almost a collaboration.
It’s a strange case of paternity…a wealthy eccentric art collector is anxious to locate the daughter he has never met. The search takes Cathcart to Melbourne, into a disjunctive family and into a bizarre world of influencers, fringe politics and anti-lockdown protests.
Then the writer arrives in the southern capital to pursue the fleeting promise of publication for the writing of his great-aunt, Gertrude, and it isn’t long before their paths cross. Once again, the writer will have to save his detective…
Headlocked is the final novel in the trilogy that began with Writing Between the Lines. It explores the interdependent relationship of writer and character right through to its inevitable end.
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Italy – the news just gets worse. Prime Minister Conte announces a lockdown for Lombardy and fourteen other northern provinces, the commentators are already saying ‘too late’. La Scala and the Duomo closed, the universities shut down, the supermarket shelves being stripped bare. Milan is in lockdown and Italy is on the brink of pandemic panic… Mack Hannah knows he shouldn’t keep reading, but can’t stop. From the ABC to the Guardian to the Sydney Morning Herald, he reads the news, re-reads the news, then starts searching through other news sites, hooked on the real and imagined chaos that’s erupting in Italy. An elderly Italian staggers into a hospital foyer and drops dead, no-one goes near the body…an aged care centre in an isolated mountain town reports a seventy percent infection rate…a hospital loses three nurses and a doctor to the virus in one day…a right-wing politican burns a face mask in protest…another, ignoring the growing death toll, hails the ‘genetic resistence’ of Italians to viruses…
It’s an hour before the writer can drag himself away. At the bay window he looks down into the street. A pandemic in Sydney? Teven Street looks defiantly normal. The usual parked cars, two kids on bicycles weaving their way along the footpath, a woman with splashes of red in her blonde hair pushing a pram and talking on the phone, more pathetic barking from the dog in number eight because the builders are back on the reno in number ten. Just another day in Teven Street, but the northern provinces of Italy are in lockdown and that includes the wonderful city of Verona.
It’s not much more than a year since Mack Hannah was there himself, discovering a city that, till then, had only existed in the writer’s imagination. Verona…with its Roman Arena, its enchanting river, its exquisite bridges, its narrow, twisting vicoli and those wonderful red-pink stuccoed buildings. Verona…that city of beguiling piazzas, of bustling cafés, that city of dark, dark secrets. It seemed like a good idea at the time to set his fourth detective novel in the city of Verona, sending private detective Dexter Cathcart off to Italy in pursuit of the mysterious Raffaello Medicini, but two chapters into Writing Between the Lines, it all started coming unstuck. Dexter Cathcart arrives in Italy, catches the train to Verona and then just goes missing. Not in Verona, where he’s supposed to be, but in the neighbouring city of Vicenza. He spends the night at a hotel there, then disappears, leaving his luggage in the room. Mack Hannah is at a loss, his phone calls go unanswered, his text messages don’t prompt a response. There was nothing for it then, he heads to Italy himself, only to discover private detective Dexter Cathcart pursuing a case of his own about a mystery journal. It’s a different Dexter Cathcart he has to deal with now, a Dexter Cathcart that’s no longer the familiar character from those first three novels…
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linzi murrie 