Crime Scene: ADRIAN DEANS Straight Jacket. Reviewed by Lou Murphy

Tags: Adrian Deans/ Australian crime fiction

This is crime fiction with a humorous bent. In Straight Jacket Adrian Deans gives life to Morgan Tanjenz, an enigmatic and compelling leading man to whom everything is a game.

Tanjenz is a lawyer living in the affluent suburb of Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore. A wealthy man, he uses his money and dubious underworld contacts to alter the life paths of randomly selected strangers. His overblown sense of justice guides him in meting out either reward or punishment to his oblivious subjects. He calls this game ‘life sculpture’.

One hapless object of his vengeance is Gavin Millet. He is guilty of concreting his back yard, ensuring the demise of the cicadas that inhabit the soil beneath, and Tanjenz systematically damages Millet’s marriage as punishment. He accomplishes this through various means, including planting false evidence of sexual impropriety in his house. Tanjenz uses the services of Xeno, a small-time criminal, to achieve his purpose:

Ever since Xeno had obtained copies of the Millets’ house keys, it had been possible for me to take life sculpture to unprecedented levels. Not that I broke into their houses myself, of course – but Xeno brought me information and implemented my instructions in a manner which enabled me to apply my justice so profoundly that they never suspected that the evil and misfortune in their lives was not their own.

Juxtaposed with this is Tanjenz’s treatment of Melanie, an unhappy young woman drawn to a fraudulent cult called the Centaurians. Tanjenz befriends her in the guise of becoming a potential recruit himself. With Xeno’s help he uncovers the hidden machinations of the cult, saving Melanie plenty of heartache and money in the process

The scope of Tanjenz’s social engineering goes beyond his hobby of intervening anonymously in the lives of strangers. As well, he uses his life sculpture skills to secure his own promotion at his legal firm – at the expense of his colleague, Jock. Anyone familiar with the contrived niceties of most corporate environments will find his manipulation of office politics gleefully irresistible. His disdain for the artificiality of human interaction also extends beyond the office to the inhibiting etiquettes of polite society. A social rebel, he uses his personal prestige to gain entry into a world that he detests in order to wreak havoc on it … ‘I was put here to combat the small venalities of the bourgeoisie.’

Disguising his true motives, and often his true identity in the process, Tanjenz also uses his facetious charm to attract women. When he is invited to a barbeque at an old school acquaintance’s ‘up-with-the-Joneses villa in South Turramurra’, he promptly seduces his host’s wife, Clair, sparking a torrid affair. She calls him on the phone:

‘You’re a legal executive, quite wealthy … you like expensive sauvignon blanc and high grade coke … you dress impeccably, drive a Jag and are completely devoid of morals.’

‘Not completely.’

‘Let’s look at it objectively, shall we? You walk into an old schoolmate’s house … insult him, take drugs and screw his wife in the marital bedroom while he’s playing outside with the children…’

‘And you find that attractive do you?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so … but here we are.’

Clair is a detective assigned to Operation George – a team formed to investigate a series of murders involving young female victims. The bodies of the victims all bear the same signature killing, and they were all discovered dumped at the Galston Gorge. It becomes apparent that the team is dealing with a serial killer, and Clair is instrumental in discovering the identity of the murderer

Deans has expertly crafted the novel so that Tanjenz’s life sculptures seamlessly segue into the crime mystery, contributing high-stake clues to the watertight plot. Straight Jacket is not only a well-thought-out and exciting crime thriller, but also hilarious entertainment.

Adrian Deans Straight Jacket High Horse Books 2013 PB 288pp $24.95

Lou Murphy is the author of the crime novel Squealer, available from http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouMurphy

To see if this book is available from Newtown Library, click here.