Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > Dead Point

”I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twenties, perhaps five or six thousand dollars, more, in used notes.

Temptation had run its scarlet fingernails down my scrotum. What did it matter? A success fee, that’s all it was. Merchant bankers took success fees. But I wasn’t a merchant banker. People like that grabbed what they could within the law. In my insignificant way, I represented the law. I was a sworn officer of the court. I was a thread in an ancient fabric that made social existence possible.

I was the law.

Sufficiently psyched up by these thoughts, I leaned across the tailor’s table, plucked two soiled fifties and a twenty, pushed the rest back his way.

‘Lester,’ I said, ‘not all lawyers are the same.’”

I wanted to begin this review with this quote especially for those readers who haven’t met Jack Irish yet. This is the third of four novels that Peter Temple wrote with Irish as the protagonist. There are two seasons of the TV show, and, hopefully, there will be a third of Guy Pierce starring as Jack Irish. There are three standalone movies based on the books also starring Guy Pierce as well. Needless to say, as I read this book, Guy Pierce supplied the face of Jack Irish for me. The quote above really encapsulates who Jack is. The painful honesty, the sense of duty he feels, and the need to believe that any money he makes he earns. He feels vulnerable, as if one more mistake will be his last, but he can’t help keep putting himself out there, trying to be someone standing between those in need and those who take.

He was a high flying lawyer with nothing in front of him but blue skies and a fast escalator to the peaks of his profession, then tragedy struck. His wife was killed by one of his clients, and suddenly, the world did not make sense anymore. He was one of the chosen; there shouldn’t be a fall from grace. After he climbed out of the bottle, he apprenticed to a carpenter, and now he splits his time between “sawin’ and ‘lawin’”.

Jack Irish lives in Melbourne. ”Weather’s okay. I like it, very noir.” The book before this, Black Tide, there was so much of Melbourne in it that I finally pulled up a map of Melbourne so I could follow along with Jack as he moved about the city. I’m reasonably familiar with the streets and alleys of the city without ever having visited. Whenever a writer gets details like this correct it lends an extra layer of authenticity to the plot.

Jack has some horse businessmen friends, AKA gamblers, by the name of Harry Strang and Cameron Delray. They don’t break the rules, but they do bend them a bit. The novel begins with them at the racetrack watching a disaster strike. The only thing that could go wrong to completely bugger them happens. For Jack, it is a chance to achieve some financial stability. To make things even worse, one of their gambling associates is robbed and unnecessarily beaten, brutally.

Mercury, the bloated god of commerce, must be too jaded and knackered to do more than chuckle at the feeble attempts of Jack Irish to put his life back together. Aphrodite has also made him a favorite plaything. His girlfriend leaves him for someone else, and with his mind still whirling, an ex-girlfriend, Linda, blows back into town and wants to shag. She routinely drops into his life like a hurricane and just as quickly blows out with the next tropical storm.

His head isn’t really in the right place to look for a missing person. ”Oh, Lord, why hast thou anointed me the fixer of all things? And why hast thou ordained this in a cold season in which too many things need fixing?” It soon becomes apparent that the person he is looking for may not be the person he thinks he is looking for. He discovers that powerful people are very interested in his investigation. They have secrets, and as Jack gets closer to the truth, people start dying. It doesn’t take a slide rule or a TI-89 calculator to figure out that Jack is the next logical victim. His only safety is finding out the truth before he becomes a missing person. And there isn’t another Jack Irish to come looking for him.

Irish is the fictional protagonist that I’ve met recently who resonates with me the most. For him, living a respectful life is so much more important than acquiring piles and piles of money. He wants to do the right thing by others, despite the ease with which he could take advantage because he is smarter and more skilled. He uses his brains and tenacity to fight against the powerful people in mega-corporations, the equally powerful people who misuse positions of government authority, or on the other end of the spectrum, the local thugs using violence to inspire terror. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”― Edmund Burke. Jack Irish, as flawed as he is, is one of those special people who will step forward out of a crowd and say, enough is enough. He is the type of loyal friend that most of us wish we knew.


I was reading the first Jack Irish novel when I started watching the TV series. The series is not based on the novels, though they stay true to the concepts and ideas that Temple based his books on. The movies are based on the books, so you might want to read the books before venturing into the movies. I feel like watching the series and reading the book at the same time created some good synergy for me and increased my enjoyment of both.

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