A beautifully written and intriuging novel about family secrets, betrayal and the dissapearance of an adolescent girl. ( )

For me, this is the quinessential Brisbane novel. Armanno captures the steaminess of the Brisbane summers of my childhood, as well as the seediness and corruption of Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s. As with his other work set in Brisbane (Romeo of the Underworld and The Volcano, the second and third novels of what is known as the "Romeo trilogy"), the streets and scenes are captured in such a way that has that zing of familiarity for local readers but can also create familiarity for those unacquainted with the city. Brisbane, for many of Armanno's novels, is the hidden protagonist and this is most true of Firehead. On the surface the novel charts the life of Sam Capistrano over three decades as he deals with the sudden disappearance of his childhood sweetheart, Gabriella Zazo. In following Sam's life, however, we also follow the development of Brisbane from backwater town to an emerging cosmopolitan metropolis. The price for Brisbane's development is the gentrification of such suburbs as New Farm, which comes at the additional cost of the unfortunate decline of Brisbane's rather flimsy Italian community.

Although place is central to Armanno's novel, he was once in negotiations for a film adaptation set in New York. The faithful Brisbane girl in me reels in horror at the thought but the story is one that could easily be adapted to this new environment. It is, after all, the fairly universal story of a man obsessed with his idealised lost love, and who risks his family to uncover the truth behind Gabriella's mysterious disappearance. Herein lies a difficulty I often face in reading Armanno's work. His protagonists are invariably male and middle aged, and essentially deal with their mid-life crises by seeking out relationships with younger women who are echoes of women they once knew - this is a recurring theme in his work that is sometimes executed effectively (Candlelife) and sometimes spoils an otherwise exquisite piece of writing (The Dirty Beat).

Firehead comes at a relatively early point in Armanno's career and so I am inclined to forgive some of the more trite plot devices and the ultimately disappointing resolution to the Gabriella mystery (although arguably its mundaneness is pivotal to Sam's catharsis). Although I would like to see him moving away from the abovementioned theme, I do feel that he has managed to develop maturity in his approach to this since the publication of Firehead.

Despite his flaws as a writer Armanno remains one of my favourite Australian authors and Firehead remains a sentimental favourite from amongst his work. For every trite middle aged crisis, he has pages of beautifully drawn portraits of Brisbane schoolboys and New Farm streets. He draws me into the novel with the poetry of that beautiful opening line, "She sold her kisses for caramels..." As Armanno once said, "Maybe that's the key to success, just a really good first line." ( )