Bingham Along the Stuart Highway

On holiday in Australia, Bingham and Lina come across a stranded motorist, his car hung partway up a tree, the result of avoiding a kangaroo. Their act of kindness takes them to Yulara, the staging post for the sacred rock, Uluru, where they meet Nellie Doolan, an Aboriginal of mixed race, and, eventually, her father. While there, they are told that Helen Lewis, who runs the local Aboriginal art gallery, has gone missing.

Arriving in Alice Springs, they visit a similar gallery where the owner, Marjory Fink, has also disappeared. Talking with the locals, particularly the woman’s son, Henry, and her former lover, Ben Evans, they find little cause for concern.

Bingham, however, takes the view that coincidences are for Russian novels and he begins asking questions that leads to an investigation by him and Lina that takes them back and forth along the Stuart Highway, visiting the roadhouses as they go.

Their search is marked throughout by an awareness of the strange and startling Aboriginal culture which leads Lina, alone in the region of the sacred rock, along the Pathways of the Dreaming and a simple truth.

This is the sixth in the Bingham series of novels and the first in which he and his wife, Lina, are both involved in an investigation from the very beginning.

Author Biography

James Warden was a teacher for forty years and retired in 2006. He now enjoys his retirement as much as he enjoyed his time in the education service. He writes every morning.

He acts in several Norwich theatres and this experience informs his writing. His stage adaptation of Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was performed at the Sewell Barn Theatre in November 2009. His original play, Letters from a Boy in the Trenches, which was based on the letters of a WW1 soldier, was performed in Marchington, Staffordshire in 2015.

He and his wife travel as much as possible. They have taken several holidays in Mediterranean resorts – the basis for his first novel, Three Women of a Certain Age, which was published in July 2010, and Bingham Goes to Cannes, to be published in 2024.

His play scripts for children include the one that formed the basis for his children’s story, The Great Gobbler and his Home Baking Factory at the North Pole, which he wrote in 1982 and published in December 2010.

He has three sons and they inspired three of his novels – The Vampire’s Homecoming, which was published in 2011, and The One-eyed Dwarf, published in 2012 and The Haunting of Thornham Staithe published in 2022.