Wayne Peake
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Wayne Peake
and Other Stories
by Wayne Peake
Laughs and thrills aplenty in this Aussie slice of PG Wodehouse & Damon Runyon!
The Sydney Jockey Club’s hard-nosed racecourse detective Rod Gallagher is a reluctant starter in its annual Xmas car rally. At the last moment he is also tasked with solving a cryptic puzzle during the rally to recover a priceless stolen racing heirloom. Oh and he must also win not to lose his millionaire girlfriend Chelsea on a bet. The rally takes Gallagher and co. on a one-day road-trip of 1960s western Sydney that includes racecourses, golf clubs, showgrounds, vineyards, pubs & the African Lion Safari, ending with a bizarre chase on the district’s showpiece homestead.
This volume also includes the short story 'The Two of Hearts Mystery' and the novella 'The Great Trainers versus Jockeys Cricket Match'.
“When Wayne Peake sits down to pen a full-length novel I think he should call it Warwick Farm Revisited. If he draws on the style he has employed in A Xmas Car Rally Puzzle, which I read with a perma-smile on my face, it will have more than a hint of Evelyn Waugh in it. And then, when, in its pages, he conjures up the western Sydney of his youth, and the characters with whom he knocked around, which The Puzzle and The Two of Hearts Mystery show us he can do, he’ll be on a winner. With his awareness of history and popular culture and his ear for conversation, he strikes me as a writer who’s led all the way in his fiction debut at Kembla Grange and will come back for the features at Randwick in the Spring. John Harms: Age and Australian columnist, ABC television Offsiders panelist, author, humorist and long-lunch fancier. I can think of nobody better than Wayne Peake to tell stories of the intrigues and complications of Sydney’s fascinating racing history, and the colourful characters who inhabited it. His stories capture the humour and essence of a time that so many of us remember with a sense of nostalgia and delight. Jim Haynes: Author, poet, historian, musician and 2GB broadcaster. Also a long-lunch fancier. Wayne Peake has produced an amusing tale set in the Sydney of the 1960s. The atmosphere of the times is well captured, and the character are well drawn in a Wodehousian style. There is enough tension in the plot to make it a real ‘page turner’. William Rutledge: ‘Racing royalty’, senior race-club official, author and historian. Ditto the lunches. ”
An Aussie writer & humorist in the tradition of Lawson, Lower & Wodehouse
Wayne Peake was born in Panania, Sydney, in 1960. He attended East Hills Infants, East Hills Primary and East Hills Boys’ High schools (his first ‘trifecta’) and studied English language and history at the University of Sydney. In 2005, he obtained the degree Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Western Sydney for the dissertation ‘Unregistered Proprietary Horseracing in Sydney 1888 to 1942’. He is the author of four books: Sydney Racing in the 1970s; Sydney’s Pony Racecourses; The Gambler’s Ghost and Other Racing Oddities; and Wandrin’ Star: Wild Jack Peake of Peakhurst, and has written on racing in academic journals published by the Cambridge University Press and the Australian Society for Sports History, as well as popular magazines including Turf Monthly and Harness Racing International. He has made regular contributions on horseracing to radio programmes including 2GB’s Weekends with Luke Grant and John Tapp’s Racing podcasts. He attended his first race meeting at Kembla Grange racecourse in 1968 and from June 1975 rarely missed a Saturday meeting at one of Sydney’s four racecourses. He remained a committed weekend racegoer until the end of the great post-war racing boom in the mid-1980s, but still relishes a spring or autumn day at Warwick Farm racecourse and bush picnic race meetings, ‘With the cicadas singing and the sunshine dripping down like honey.’