Writing in 1970 on Raymond Chandler, F. R. Jameson established a cultural framework for the private­eye potboiler, an aspect of which is of use in reading Steve Wright’s A Drop in the Ocean. According to Jameson, Chandler’s decrepit settings reflect the dark underside of official American mythology; the picaresque Philip Marlowe type ‘fulfils the demands of the function of knowledge’, by stringing fragments together into a whole vision of society, a revelation that exceeds any possible individual view or experience.

Wright’s not-so-hardboiled narrator, PI Barry Donovan, conforms, insofar as he sleuths his way amongst mundane-realistic Sydney locations – using his girlfriend Gabrielle’s VW kombi, by cab, public transport, or hoofing it. Early indications of tawdriness are promising, with Barry observing the Bondi beachfront askance, its ‘sleazy air that hung over everything like salt from the ocean’, as he and Gabes carry polystyrene cups of orange juice down to the sand. A little girl is seen ‘hopping about on one foot while her mother tries desperately to extricate a rusty hypodermic from the other’. Barry cannot be held entirely responsible for the comic note in the observation, but the genre prescribes isolated vignettes, each of which should refer the reader to the underlying societal critique.

In Wright’s novel, the generic devices are like trappings or effect, which adorn non-problematical, ideologically sound themes. The ‘exposed’ dark reality of the formula – the polluted or stained mythology – becomes a metaphorical base sustaining the plot, with everything relating to environmental issues, in particular, the scandalous destruction of Sydney’s beaches by official sewage disposal practices, exacerbated by the illegal dumping of in­dustrial waste into the city’s drains. And so the opportunity is there from the start for much scatological punning, of a sort in which one assumes an English expatriate PI such as Barry, operating illegally in Sydney because of immigration requirements, would be incomparably adept (an English PI being sufficiently distanced to show up Australian shortcomings).

The trouble is that the issue is such a well-tried, morally commendable hobbyhorse that the detective has to work overtime to maintain our faith in what needs to be the dodgy, wrong-side-of-the-tracks side of his character if he is to reveal to us the ugliness of life. When Barry catches a bus across to Glebe, he may shine like a beacon to city commuters, but he demonstrates a certain lack of self-respect as a pulp PI. The same criticism holds for his empathetic relationship with Gabes, which is full of wholesome sex and kissing, good-natured jibes, mutual understanding, playful pillow-tossing and so on.

Ian McFarlane’s The Siberian Sparrows and Kit Denton’s Red on White suggest cinematic genres, the psychological spy thriller and wartime action and espionage movies. Conrad’s statement of the novelist’s task, ‘it is, before all, to make you see’, comes to mind, so often quoted in texts on novel and film narrative. Whereas the usual progression we think of is from the novel to the film, these novels exhibit a reciprocal arrangement, as though projecting themselves upon an inner movie screen of the mind and translating populist cinematic narrative conventions into literary ones. Perhaps it only remains for the novels to be transmuted alchemically into their purest form. Might they be really, after all, aspiring movies – ur-films?

McFarlane’s novel uses a montage-based narrative, cutting with a varying pace from scene to scene, involving a set of characters whose significances and relationships are not always made immediately explicit nor developed prosaically. Scenes have at times to be puzzled out, and overlie each other in the narrative, while parallel plots are tied in and a system of psychological and other connections imputed, before the characters’ actions can be com­prehended and resolved. Petrov and Philby affairs provide historical precedents for a plot involving Australian Intelligence, the KGB, and an otherwise innocuous ANU academic ‘sleeper’, caught up in a Russian infiltration plan.

The suggestion that the novel incorporates a critique about how such a scenario might occur in reality is not entirely convincing. The novel’s realism is more a function of narrative conventions, reminiscent of how, in the cinema, visual spectacle may be calculated to elicit physio­logical responses, over and above the simple signifying function. In this novel, the effect is one of disorienta­tion rather than shock, with chapter and scene openings such as ‘Kitson surfaced from a dream and snatched up the telephone’, or ‘When Michael woke he was conscious of nothing but a single white beam of light’.

The disorientation contributes to a sense of indeterminate morality, which is brought to bear upon questions of allegiance to spouse, friends, colleagues and country, and the nature of politically extremist-rogue and double agents. Must ‘capitalism, in order to survive ... first convince itself it doesn’t exist’? Who knows, but one thing is for sure, the intellect requires sustenance through the senses, and stimulation is provided once by a pair of ‘firmly pointed breasts shivering in the light’, which on another occasion, while the per­son is swimming, move ‘with a liq­uid fluency, suggesting a curious blend of eroticism and innocence’.

Kit Denton’s Red on White owes less to The French Connection and more to A Bridge on the River Kwai style of linear action narrative, with a group of Allied men’s men discovering the depths of their characters and neuroses while soldiering in Russia during 1918-19.

Denton is adroit in his choice of historical situation (‘Based on a true story ...’), with a mix of Second World War and Russian Revolution that could prove lucrative: not the smell of napalm in the morning, but blood on the snow, sabres and guns, a makeshift motor vehicle, battles on horseback evoking thoughts of cricket – in a word, nostalgia for a time of clear-cut values and the prevalence of the good. A melodramatic polarity of heroism and villainy, projected cavalierly upon the Russian scenario, conciliates capitalist sensibilities. The Bolsheviks are contemptible thugs led by a duplicitous green-coated Count Nicolas Fedorovich Ouspenskoy, whose defection from the aristocrats already attests to the extent of his hypocrisy: “‘He said, this man in green coat, that they will come back. He said is plenty of them and more come to wipe out bourgeois.”’

The fact that good working-class Allied boys are so referred attests to the utter wrong-headedness of Marxist thought. The only thing more inconstant than Reds (whom at least you can run over in a lorry) are women, and our sympathies are finally directed toward the officer who looks back from Dorset in 1940, once an innocent young hero who won a poor damsel in distress, and was yet to suffer the horror of her sexual revelations.

The three novelists are skilled storytellers, each in his different way. They accomplish all that they intend; when they appear to fall short, it is only according to extraneous standards. Mcfarlane is the headiest of the three, but he no more exceeds his generic predeterminations than the others. None of them explores the semiotic and pop cultural possibilities available.