User:JerryFriedman/Wings over the Diamantina

Wings Above the Diamantina is a detective novel by Arthur W. Upfield. It is his third novel featuring Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known as "Bony", a brilliant and unconventional detective of Aboriginal and British ancestry.

Plot summary
The grazier John Nettlefold and his beautiful and intelligent daughter Elizabeth come upon a small airplane that has landed in a dry lake, with a beautiful young woman in the front seat, alive but unresponsive. They take her to their house. Elizabeth insists on nursing her as it will alleviate her boredom on their remote cattle station, Coolibah. The local doctor, Knowles, flies in to treat the patient. While Elizabeth watches the patient during the night, she glimpses a man apparently adding something to the brandy Dr. Knowles had prescribed. Later the liquid added to the brandy bottle turns out to be strychnine.

Nettlefold and Police Sergeant Cox find that the plane (which was stolen) has burned and exploded, so anything identifying the woman in the plane is gone. No tracks are evident. Cox decides to call Bony in.

Nettlefold has his two Indigenous employees, Bill Sikes and Shuteye, help Bony. They use their tracking skills to find that someone had worn sheepskin shoes with the wool outside, thus leaving no tracks. Bony also finds marks showing that someone had parachuted nearby. He concludes that someone had stolen the plane, put the unknown woman in it in a drugged state, and parachuted out, but by a fluke the plane had landed safely.

By questioning various people and searching the outback, Bony finds that Ted Sharp, the boss stockman of Nettlefold's station, has lied about his movements. Sharp refuses to tell Bony what he was doing. Bony also finds clues leading to John Kane, an amateur anthropologist and the owner of a station adjacent to Coolibah. He gives Sergeant Cox a number of assignments, especially after the mysterious victim turns out to be Muriel Markham of Adelaide. Meanwhile, Dr. Knowles and a specialist he summons cannot find a diagnosis and say that she will die in a matter of weeks if untreated.

Bony calls in the aboriginal chief Illawalli, who can read minds, in hopes of getting information from Muriel Markham. After difficulties including an abduction of Illawalli, Bony drives his two Indigenous helpers and Illawalli to Coolibah, racing to arrive ahead of Kane, who Bony believes is headed there to murder Markham. A summer storm causes the Diamantina to flood, and they walk and swim across it at great risk. Kane also tries to cross, and they find him stuck in tree branches. Leaving him, they take Illawalli to Coolibah. He can't read Markham's mind because she is unconscious, but he recognises that she has been drugged with a substance that Indigenous people use to paralyse fish. He brews an antidote from local plants and cures her. A police constable, helped by Shuteye and Sikes, arrests Kane.

Bony explains the whole story. Kane had learned that Muriel Markham was the daughter of his brother Charles—she had been adopted after Charles and his wife died—and that by the terms of his father's will, she was the rightful heir. Kane had invited her to the area to kill her, hoping that if he parachuted out of the plane and it crashed, the police would assume she was the thief. From his anthropological field work, Kane knew how to avoid leaving tracks (Aboriginals used feathers rather than wool) and would have known that Illawalli could read minds and had to be stopped. A young friend and debtor of Kane's had set the plane on fire using the same shoes.

Subplots are also resolved. Bony had seen that Sharp and Elizabeth loved each other and had deduced that Sharp's secret maneuvers were his purchase of Kane's station with money Sharp inherited. Elizabeth had become cold to Sharp when he refused to cooperate with Bony's investigation. Bony tells the two Sharp's story and reveals their feelings to each other. (Playfully, he has Illawalli pretend to read their minds and say what Bony has coached him to say.) They agree to marry. Dr. Knowles has fallen in love with his patient and consequently given up his addiction to alcohol; they too will marry. And Bony arranges for Cox, an able policeman who he says deserves the greater share of the credit for solving the case, to be transferred to a more populated place and promoted.

Reception
Wings Above the Diamantina was serialised in The Australian Journal, where it was quite popular and received favourable reviews. As a result, it was published by Angus & Robertson in hardback and thus became the first of Upfield's books to be printed in Australia.

In America, where it was published as Wings Above the Claypan, The New Yorker commented only, "Almost childish at times, but with some fine local color."