Bony is the sort of detective who enjoys nothing better on a holiday than a little informal investigation. When he agrees to help a colleague in the matter of the disappearance of George Loftus, a farmer whose car was found wrecked near the world's longest fence in the wheat country of western Australia, he cannot immediately find evidence of the murder he suspects. Loftus's wife seems concerned about him, but his handsome hired man is an enigma. It is not until Bony becomes absorbed in the second mystery of Mr. Jelly, an amateur criminologist who himself often disappears on secret business, that he finds the key to the strange goings-on in this seemingly ordinary farming community.
A red mooplane stolen from a flying circus is found the next day on a dried up lake bed nearly two hundred miles away. The unknown young woman in the passenger seat is alive and conscious but totally paralysed. The pilot is missing, but without any tracks showing that he left the machine after landing. It seems a situation from the world of nightmare. This extraordinary case takes Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-caste detective, to an outback cattle station in western Queensland. There, in a race against time, Bony sets out to unravel the bewildering puzzle, with the help of an old aboriginal chief.
No white man would have noticed the small detail in the background of a police photograph of an bandoned car, but the message he read there told Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte plainly that the mysterious disappearance of Luke Marks near Windee Station was anything but accidental. To the infallible Bony, small, almost unimportant things were a tremendous help in this case: the ants out in the scrub country moving stones to warm the eggs in their nest showed him a cut sapphire buried in the earth; in a place where silver would not occur naturally he found a small disc of silver plate; and then a boot nail came to light where he had hoped it would be.
The Barrakee Mystery is the first of Upfield's Inspector Bonaparte mysteries. Bony is introduced as he travels to Barrakee station, a large homestead in the Darling River basin, to investigate the death of King Henry, a local aborigine leader. The wealthy and successful owner of Barrakee station had a gracious wife, a beautiful niece, and a son returning from college. Two things marred John Thornton's happiness: an unresolved argument concerning his son, and the murder of King Henry. When Detective-Inspector Bonaparte arrived, the peaceful Station suddenly erupted--as long-kept secrets were laid bare, and easy-going people turned to violence.
1902. Having pictures made by Troy and Margaret West Kinney. Liljencrantz writes in the Foreword: There is an old myth of a hero who renewed his strength each time he touched the earth, and finally was overcome by being raised in the air and crushed. Whether or not the Angles risked a like fate as they raised themselves away from the primitive virtues that had been their life and strength, no one can tell; but it has been well said that when Northern blood mingled with English blood at the time of the Danish Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon race touched the earth again.
