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’. Milan is in lockdown and Italy is in the midst of pandemic panic. La Scala and the Duomo closed, the universities shut down, the supermarket shelves stripped bare. News of the impending lockdown had been leaked the day before, convincing thousands to abandon the northern provinces and scatter to other parts of the country, taking the virus with them. It can’t be long before the entire country gets forced into lockdown, and then?
Mack Hannah knows he should just stop reading, but he can’t. An elderly Italian man 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… From the ABC to the Guardian to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mack reads the news, re-reads the news, then starts searching through other news sites, expecting a new development with each click, increasingly hooked on the real and imagined chaos that is happening in Italy. A population hidden behind face masks and fear, politicians at their wits’ end, fights in the supermarkets as food runs out, old people collapsing in the street, ambulances darting endlessly between one emergency and the next, bodies piling up in the morgues. He can’t help but imagine how all this might play out…a society in chaos, riots in the streets, the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government, the stuff of a novel.
After an hour of this shock and horror, the writer gets up from his desk, steps across to the bay window and looks down into the street. A pandemic in Sydney? Teven Street looks defiantly normal. A few parked cars, two kids on bicycles weaving their way along the street, a mother pushing a pram and talking on the phone, the renovation in number ten continuing at snail’s pace and more pathetic barking from the dog in number fourteen. Just another day in Teven Street, but the northern provinces of Italy are in lockdown and that includes the wonderful city of Verona…
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linzi murrie 