The Greenwich Apartments by Peter Corris

Publisher's Synopsis

Is brilliant young film maker Carmel Wise the innocent victim of gangland violence or is she enmeshed in a pornography racket as the press and the police imply? Carmel's businessman father hires Cliff Hardy to find the real reason 'the video girl' was shot dead outside the Greenwich Apartments in Kings Cross.

Hardy follows a trail which is broken but clear - houses and flats with the power on and the rent paid, stand empty; photographs and other documents lead to Lionel Darcy, owner of the Champagne Caberet; banks and business houses will supply just enough information to keep Hardy warm.

The trail takes him to the sunny peninsula, leafy Lane Cove and the industrial waterfront. Hardy finds that every question and every answer has to be paid for in pain and fear. And to some questions there may be no answers at all...

My Review 

The Greenwich Apartments sit just off a main street in Sydney's Kings Cross. They are also the scene of Carmel Wise's murder. It's Carmel's father, owner of the apartment block who hires Cliff Hardy after he was unsatisfied with the way the police investigation was being handled. The apartment is filled with video cassettes, the product of Carmel's love of movies, a passion that prompts the media to dub her with the rather dubious nickname: 'the video girl'.

It turns out that Carmel not only loved watching movies but she was also a very talented film maker with a promising career ahead of her. To her father's disgust, the police were heading down the path that the kind of movies she made involved pornography and were linking her to the sleazy sex industry.

Hardy's investigation takes him to the Greenwich Apartments room, finding that as well as the videos it also contains clothes belonging to people other than Carmel Wise. Suddenly he finds himself chasing shadows from Kings Cross to Lane Cove and beyond as he struggles to connect Carmel to the room's other occupants.

What he finds is a lot of trouble, enough to have him in serious fear for his life. But Hardy's single greatest quality is his determination and once he's latched onto a trail it takes more than a few life-threatening moments to shake him off.

This is a fairly lukewarm series entry that takes quite a while to get going, creeping along gathering just enough clues to maintain the story's momentum and, ultimately, my interest. A thin thread holds the entire story together and, from time to time, it was difficult to work out just what it was Hardy was hoping to achieve as he moved from one inquiry to the next.

The first person narrative allows us to get inside the head of Cliff, although things get a bit shifty when a number of times he picked up some important pieces of information and they weren't shared with us. With the plot already on the slow side, I would have appreciated a little more promise that things were about to pick up. Of course, it eventually does pick up with a last minute flurry of action, but it tends to create more questions than answers, almost as if there is a "to be continued..." tacked on to the end.

Peter Corris writes with a tight descriptive flair and the city of Sydney is brought to life under his guiding hand. The dialogue is nicely clipped serving to cast Hardy as a compassionate tough guy with a wry sense of humour.

Regular readers of the series will remember Helen Broadway, the woman in Cliff Hardy's life. They share a rather unusual relationship together that consists of Helen spending 6 months of the year in Sydney with Cliff, and the rest in the country with...her husband. In The Greenwich Apartments she is in Sydney with Cliff, but it would appear that there may be a couple of issues to be sorted out between the two of them. As a hardboiled protagonist, this would put Cliff in line with just about every other fictional detective out there.

The Greenwich Apartments is a hardboiled mystery that features a few of the qualities that has made the series so popular. Hardy's capacity for following an obscure trail, his uncanny knack for getting into and out of dangerous situations and the way he can absorb a great deal of punishment are all evident throughout the course of this investigation. It just seems to take longer than usual to get there.