White Dog is a 2003 Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n novel by Peter Temple

Peter Temple

Peter Temple is an Australian crime fiction writer.Formerly a journalist and journalism lecturer, Temple turned to fiction writing in the 1990s. His Jack Irish novels are set in Melbourne, Australia, and feature an unusual lawyer-gambler protagonist...

. The fourth novel in the "Jack Irish" series, it won the 2003 Ned Kelly Awards

Ned Kelly Awards

The Ned Kelly Awards are Australia's leading literary awards for crime writing in both the crime fiction and true crime genres...

 Best Novel for Crime Writing. It was reprinted in the United Kingdom in 2007 by Quercus.

Plot summary

A Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

 property developer is murdered and his artist ex-grilfriend is the prime suspect. Jack Irish, a lone private investigator, comes in to investigate.

Style and subject matter

Reviewer Hutchings describes the novel as "classic detective fiction" typified by its first-person narrative and "engagement with the city". Hutchings also suggests that "the sense of times past" conveyed by Temple in this novel is central to other writers in this genre, such as Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...

 whose hero, Philip Marlowe

Philip Marlowe

Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler in a series of novels including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep published in 1939...

, is "an anachronistic knight-errant, a defender of past decencies". He suggests that for Temple, along with the Australian crime writers Marele Day, Peter Corris

Peter Corris

Peter Robert Corris is an Australian academic, historian, journalist and a novelist of historical and crime fiction...

 and Cathy Cole, "the detective offers a link to a disappearing working-class, egalitarian Australia".

As in all his Jack Irish novels, Australian Rules Football

Australian rules football

Australian rules football, officially known as Australian football, also called football, Aussie rules or footy is a sport played between two teams of 22 players on either...

and horse racing feature in The White Dog.