When one of Australia’s best writers takes on a 150-year-old mystery, it is time for readers to sit up and take notice.
Drewe has returned to his West Australian roots to flesh out the real-life mystery of Johnny Day, the small boy from Ballarat, who became a 19th century world champion in pedestrianism, the sporting craze of the day. Four years later, in 1870, and aged just 14, he was the jockey on a horse called Nimblefoot who won the Melbourne Cup … then Johnny Day disappeared.
Day’s father, a butcher, is an almost Dickensian character, limping because of a snake bite treatment, a florid entrepreneur of his son’s talent in Australia as well as overseas. He is bashed to death in his own butcher’s shop because of something his son witnessed the night of his Melbourne Cup win.
Like a classic whodunnit, in Nimblefoot Drewe uses characters such as a corrupt Victorian Police Commissioner, a shady bookmaker, and Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, a dissolute son of Queen Victoria, noted for his liking of Melbourne brothels and high living when he visited Australia. Drewe has Johnny Day disappear from Victoria after his father’s murder, changing his name, and travelling by ship to Western Australia, where his adventures continue.
Who knows where the real Johnny Day went? It does not matter as Drewe has provided a rollicking good yarn involving a pub south of Perth that ran its own horse races; a nearby quarantine station; Chinese employees; an outbreak of bubonic plague; a southern fishing community; and a vengeful private investigator/psychopathic killer who remains on Johnny’s trail.
In a tangential aside, even the disputed yarn about how the Granny Smith apple was developed in Western Australia gets a slight turn and polish from Drewe, becoming the Lady Jessica apple instead. It’s good versus evil in a most satisfactory plot.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
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