Arthur Upfield books

Anthologies

Inspector Bonaparte Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Arthur William Upfield (1890-1964) was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England, and was sent to Australia by his father in 1911. He spent the next two decades drifting across the outback, working as a boundary rider, cattle drover, trapper, and cook. He fought at Gallipoli and in France during World War I, marrying an Australian nurse in Egypt in 1915. The years of hard traveling gave him firsthand knowledge of the Australian bush and its people.

Upfield introduced Detective Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte in The Barrakee Mystery (1929) and went on to write 29 novels featuring the character. Bony is half-Aboriginal and half-white, university-educated, and equally comfortable reading philosophy or tracking a suspect across salt flats. The novels are set in remote parts of Australia, and the landscape is as important to the stories as the crimes themselves. Upfield also wrote The Murchison Murders (1934), a true crime account of a case where a real killer used a body-disposal method from one of Upfield’s own unpublished manuscripts.