Overview

Benedict Lovelace engages 19-year-old Tommy Turkin to do some rat catching, renovations, and recruiting for his bold new 'project'. Minnie Dix joins Tommy to provide some much-needed domestic help for his expanding troupe, which numbers ten when Johnny Sharp arrives. Tommy Turkin's 'Golden Boys' train hard, swim well, and learn a host of new skills in Old Fremantle without really knowing what their role is going to be. Christmas and New Year bring further surprises, and at the end of January, 1898 the Travelling Show, expanded by Silas Appleyard and his 'Gospel Group', head for the West Australian goldfields. As they progress town by town towards Kalgoorlie, not everyone in the 'unofficial gold capital' of Australia looks forward to their arrival. Michael Doyle and 'Old Man' Casey anticipate the problems that Benedict Lovelace and Travelling Show may bring. They try to enlist the help of the goldfields policeman, Sergeant O'Malley, and his assistant Constable Thompson, with limited success. A blind boy, Jimmy Gimmick, and his guide dog, Sam, further complicate matters, which race to a conclusion involving deception and death. Will this spell the end for the Master Showman, Benedict Lovelace, and his troupe, or does he still have some tricks up his sleeve?

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9781925529166

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Jeff Hopkins (1950) is a retired schoolteacher. He lives in Western Australia with his two Labrador dogs, Jack and Sam. As the drama master at a private boys' school he wrote eleven original musical plays and produced and directed them at the school. In 1992 he researched and wrote a family history, 'Life's Race Well Run' and after retiring in 2006 he has written nine novels: 'Reflections' (2016), 'Artifice' (2015), 'Gnarl' (2015), 'The Spiv: The Robbie Sparrow Story' (2015), 'Impressment' (2015), 'Benedict Lovelace and the Travelling Show' (2016), 'Lord Gnarl' (2016), 'Rocking Horse Rider' (2016) and 'The Hydrographer: The Clyde Steadman Story' (2016). Jeff previously maintained he wrote entirely for pleasure, and to fill in the long summer months between football seasons. Recently he has admitted that he set himself the task of writing in a number of different genres as part of a three year programme to learn about creative writing and self publishing. He said it was like an undergraduate degree course for which there was a strict budget and work schedule. It has since become clear that the whole experiment was one of the most interesting and absorbing things he had done in his life. He continues to write.

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