David Owen's second crime thriller A Second Hand is set in Tasmania with Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, first introduced to readers in Pig's
Head as the unlikely dead pan hero. He is known as Pufferfish and has 'the ability to bloat and even explode under provocation'. A rotund anti-hero
of fifty plus, Dutch born who has not learned to say mate or cobber with conviction, he's a member of the Tasmanian Police Force and out to solve crime
when he's not quaffing red wine or eating chocolate bars or slurping strong black coffee. He eats chocolate continuously, even at breakfast and goes regularly
to a health farm on Bruny Island where he is cleaned up for the next claret and chocolate binge.
Old Pufferfish is not a very attractive character although he does appear to have a peculiar attraction for women, especially the independent
Detective Senior Sergeant Hedda Andover who works with the Drug Squad. She's his opposite, a vegetarian given to wearing tight black jeans and is a brown
belt in karate as well as being tall, blond and eye-catching.
Heineken's creator David Owen was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Malawi and Swaziland. He came to Australia in 1986 and settled in Tasmania
in 1990 after four years in Melbourne. He is a prolific writer and has published five novels as well as the two crime thrillers. His proclivity to
write intimately of streets, pubs and other places where he is living at the time of writing, have a curious charm for the residents of such places. He knows
us as we do, Davey Street has the big old mansions, he's involved with our lives to the extent of calling a pub by its right name (we all know it's really
the Dog House in spite of having the Goulbourn Arms painted on the outside), he knows and so do we, that Tasmania is full of antique and second hand shops.
It's all so familiar, it could be true. At leat, to a Tasmanian.
The plot of Second Hand revolves round the workaholic character of Heineken who is uncomfortable if people like him. There are none too subtle
hints that it's all due to an early love being 're-arranged' by a couple of villains when he was a young policeman in Rotterdam. Retribution úsing
police bullets rather than chains and acid made Pufferfish want to get as far away as possible and so he ended up in Tasmania, which is about as far away
as one can get.
Now he is investigating a clueless attack on a second hand dealer who has a penchant for volunteer work with the Public Donation Soup Kitchen (PDSK no less, we're
dealing with a Public Service mind here), but before old Pufferfish can sort it out, the second hand dealer Ira Cone is savagely beaten to death. After this terrible
act, a lot of things fall into place including the stinking feral Kingo who sleeps on a park bench clad in a sable coat.
There's fundamentalism, nazism and public service ism all included. The public service factionalism is well done as anyone who has worked in the public
service will appreciate. However, I do wonder if policemen in 1995 are as formal as Owen would have us believe. Do they still call their superiors 'sir'?
Second Hand reads a bit slow in the first half although it heats up well especially in the last few chapters. Owen has created a memorable
though slightly unsavoury character in Heineken. There's plenty of sleaze here with squats, middle aged whores and a police pimp called Johnny Shiny. And more than a
whiff of class consciousness and inherited privilege. But then, Owen is writing about Tas. as Heineken would say and we see what our culture has shaped us to see.