There seems to have been a lot on this week with days out to BIFoR (nothing to do with books but very interesting) and nights away in the camper so there is only one post for author Arthur William Upfield. I’ve been scanning in his PAN covers from 1954 to 1984 making it a total of 67 and including backs was not only time consuming but a bit boring as well hence a few done at a time. I have put the individual covers under their PAN numbers and all of them on one page HERE which might take a while to load in! As usual, pleased let me know of any I might have missed.

Arthur William Upfield was born in Gosport on 1st September 1890 and was registered under the name of William Arthur Upfield but his names were later reversed to avoid the diminutive ‘Little Bill’ apparently. He moved to Australian in 1911 and fought with the Australian military during the First World War. following his war service he travelled extensively throughout Australia obtaining a knowledge of Australian Aboriginal culture that he would later use in his written works. He is best known for his books of detective fiction featuring Detective Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force, a mixed-race Indigenous Australian. In addition to writing detective fiction Upfield was also a member of the Australian Geological Society and was involved in numerous scientific expeditions. After living at Bermagui, New South Wales, Upfield moved to Bowral where he died on the 12th February 1964. His last work, ‘The Lake Frome Monster‘, published in 1966, was completed by J.L. Price and Dorothy Strange.

PAN didn’t publish all his 29 titles but ETT Imprints did in uniform editions from 2019. They can be found on the Arthur Upfield website.

While looking through literally hundreds of different editions I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance between the Heinemann hardback edition of 1959 and that by James McConnell for the 1962 PAN edition of ‘Bony and the Black Virgin’. I can’t find a name for the artist of the Heinemann edition.

It’s also interesting to see ETT Imprints used the same TV series photo in 2020 as did PAN for ‘The Barrakke Mystery’ while all the other 28 covers from ETT appear to use artwork.