Product Description

Murray Whelan, political adviser to the newly appointed minister of culture, is hanging on to his job by his toenails after the most recent ministerial shakeup. His learning curve is forced quickly upward when, on his first day, the disgruntled young artist Marcus Taylor is found dead, drowned in the ornamental moat outside the National Art Gallery. A born detective despite himself, Murray digs, and the deeper he goes, the more puzzling the mystery becomes. Who is this other painter, Victor Szabo, unknown in his lifetime and now the darling of the art world, his paintings fetching crazy prices? And what about art maven Lloyd Eastlake, who seems like the chess master moving his art-world pieces...but toward what sinister end?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1124480 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 309 pages

Amazon.com Review
Murray Whelan, a political advisor to the Australian Minister of the Arts, tries to protect his boss from scandal and save his own skin in Shane Maloney's witty mystery about intrigue in the art world of Melbourne, Australia. When a disgruntled artist is found dead in the moat surrounding the public arts building, Murray Whelan investigates the case to make sure that there will be no negative political impact on his boss. In the process, he stumbles upon widespread misuse of government funds, begins to suspect a forgery scam, and tangles with two beautiful women. Meanwhile, Whelan's childhood nemesis lurks menacingly on the edge of the action. People start dropping like flies.

"I might not know much about art," says Whelan, summarizing his number one job skill, "but I've been a member of the Labor Party long enough to recognize the aroma of a rodent when it wafts my way." Whelan's knack for the apt turn of phrase adds a special charm to this book. When he meets a wealthy patron of the arts, he notes that the man resembles "a cross between Aristotle Onassis and a walnut."

In some thrillers, the hero is simply put in harm's way. In this one, Shane Maloney goes the extra mile and puts the hero in a ridiculous situation, then puts him in harm's way. At one point, our beleaguered hero is trapped in a warehouse full of puppets and the only method of escape he sees is to don an enormous octopus costume with stilts and sidle towards a high window. Of course, he falls, hurts his ear, and has to endure Van Gogh jokes for the rest of the adventure. "The trick with stilts, in case you ever need to know," Murray Whelan advises, "is to stay in motion. Much like a bicycle. Or politics. Stand still and you're stuffed. Keep moving or you take a dive." That's sound advice. This book has wit, an amiable protagonist, and velocity. What's not to like? --Jill Marquis

From Library Journal
First published in Australia, this award-winning novel provides a jaunty, arch, and sometimes maliciously cynical view of society. Narrator Murray Whelan, political adviser to the minister for ethnic affairs in Melbourne, navigates uncertain political waters when, through cabinet reshuffling, his boss becomes the minister for water supply and the arts. Murray's first contact with new duties involves a reception at the new Center for Modern Art, where he encounters a sexy magazine editor and then murder. Author Maloney has a quirky eye for descriptive details that lend frequent humor to a fascinating and adventurous plot. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Melbourne, 1989. The latest ministerial scramble has tossed Angelo Agnelli from his safe berth in Ethnic Affairs into the maelstrom of Water Supply And The Arts, and his political advisor, Murray Whelan, is maneuvering to shake every new hand without getting shaken down by artists and impresarios avid to secure government backing for their pet projects. Murray is especially wary of a recent winner of the Australian-largesse sweepstakes, Cultural Affairs Policy Commissioner Lloyd Eastlake, who persuaded Agnelli's predecessor Gil Methven to give shoe mogul Max Karlin a whopping $600,000 for Our Home, the late Victor Szabo's magisterial painting of a suburban lawnmower, by raising half the money from corporate donors. And Murray's suspicions zoom off the chart when he finds a copy of Our Home among the effects of unappreciated painter Marcus Taylor, who drowned himself in the National Gallery moat, despite improbably shallow water, a recent grant, and a surprisingly rosy financial balance-sheet, in protest against government indifference to the arts. What's the connection between spurned Taylor and Szabo's painted poem to the bourgeoisie? And is there anybody, in the current administration or not, who isn't party to the rondolet of felonies--fraud, forgery, bribery, homicide, and questionable aesthetic judgment--that Murray's antic investigations reveal? Maloney's debut, winner of the Ned Kelly Prize, Australia's Edgar, is funny, inventive, and tonic for all Americans worried that they have a corner on official corruption. The best news of all may be Murray's hint that plenty of bodies remain buried for the sequel. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Funny politics in Australia
Meet Murray Whelan, gofer and fixer for the newly appointed Minister of Water and Arts. He has no ideas about arts, but then politics is politics, and how difficult can it be? He finds out without delay, when young artist Marcus Taylor is found floating in the moat in front of the National Gallery. Time for damage control. But then things become increasingly weird. The overpriced picture of a shadowy, and also dead, artist named Victor Szabo. Hold it! Is the picture a fake? Who painted the duplicate? How about all those suave self-made millionaires and their sudden interest in art? Mayhem erupts as everybody tries to cover up their nefarious schemes. And Murray in the thick of it, of course.

The book is presented as a mystery. But that part does not come off too well with all the fun intervening. Rather, it is a send-up comedy about Australian politics and the doers behind the scenes. If you really want to laugh for a few hours, then read this book.

A Murder and Mayhem Bookclub review
The things a ministerial assistant must do. Murray Whelan's exact job title and the details of his expected duties have never been fully explained but they certainly call for a deft kind of versatility in adapting to all possible situations a Labor party man might find himself inserted into. In yet another show of party shuffling, Murray's boss Angelo Agnelli has picked up the Arts portfolio, and Agnelli's need to endear himself to a new brand of people has now become Murray's personal headache. With suitable gothic dramatism, a failed artist has chosen the first day of Agnelli's new reign to off himself in the moat of an arts building, leaving behind a likewise dramatically worded suicide note which of course blames someone else for the necessity of the deed.

Being rather sceptical that anyone could be willing to die for their art these days, and with the thought that making a public comment about the lack of Government funding is rather pointless once you're dead (as in not being there to reap any possible changes or benefits as a result of your stunt), Murray rolls out the rolodex and gives himself a crash course on the fine art of receiving an arts grant. There's a lot of re-appearing names in all of this, and somehow it all comes to Murray being trapped in a closet, listening to someone else's bump'n'grind. Throw in a feared face from Murray's childhood, more than one smarmy arts patron, the usual various little toadies and conniving blood-suckers out to silence any who dares to question their mechanations and there you have it, just another day in the life of the unappreciated, the world of the Labor party underclass.

Murray Whelan's second outing takes place a few years after STIFF and uses a similar format in that Murray must juggle the affairs of his office with looking after his young son, lamenting his lack of a romantic life and out-stepping various political minefields along the way. This has less to do with the Party and more to do with the small-town nature of the Melbourne arts community that seems here to be all too quick in offering up a carcass for the culture vultures when the situation is required. This is a tighter work that spends a little less time on Australian larrikism and more on digging out the rather innocuous bad guys that lurk about in the town's business community, with the Arts here being well and truly about money, the ego and shameless elf-promotion.

Maloney manages to make Murray Whelan the hero and at the same time a likeable every-man, putting the poor creature in some truly awful situations and not being adverse to bashing him about the head a bit in order to extricate him from them. Maloney's analogies via Whelan's mouth are of the best kind - insightful, funny, wry and, we suspect, spot-on.

To acknowledge the gripes that there is little mystery in THE BRUSH OFF, one can only balance that with the fact that the writing is so bitingly good on several platforms that it seems a shame to categorize the read into any particular genre. An Australian can only cringe if these novels are described as social commentaries on our kind (whatever that may mean) and it is impossible for an Aussie not to identify something of themselves in the characters encountered in this novel. Maloney skilfully has a lend of all that we Australians regularly have a whinge about, and displays it all beautifully against a background of multi-cultural Melbourne.

Always fast and funny, Melbourne author Shane Maloney hits us between the eyes again with another crafty little adventure, starring one of us, Murray Whelan.

Australian SF Reader
The dodginess in this novel is in the art world. When an artist of some notoriety is found dead, Murray gets involved. With Agnelli now Minister for Arts he is pretty keen for Murray to clean up this problem, but the bodycount keeps rising.

Murray also gets trapped in a factory with some huge parade float puppets, very amusing.