"No white man would have noticed the small detail in the background of a police photograph of an bandoned car, but the message he read there told Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte plainly that the mysterious disappearance of Luke Marks near Windee Station was anything but accidental. To the infallible Bony, small, almost unimportant things were a tremendous help in this case: the ants out in the scrub country moving stones to warm the eggs in their nest showed him a cut sapphire buried in the earth; in a place where silver would not occur naturally he found a small disc of silver plate; and then a boot nail came to light where he had hoped it would be. Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? Bony felt that the questions lay somehwhere in the sands of Windee." - from the 1984 Angus & Robertson "Arkon" edition.

Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte knows for certain that the man Luke Marks, reported as missing, has been killed when he translates a blackfellers' sign on a tree "Beware of spirits! A white man was killed here." In order to investigate the crime he assumes the garb of a bush tramp and takes a job on wealthy Jeffrey Stanton's sheep farm. He is puzzled by the inability of aborigine Moongalliti and his son Ludbi to read the tracks made by Marks and his killer, but with the aid of infinitesimal clues he is able to find the answer to much of the mystery. This is one case Bony does not finalize officially, though off the record and in confidence he tells the complete story to the Chief Commissioner, Colonel Spendor." - from "The Armchair Detective"

Location: Windee Station in Western NSW, not far from Broken Hill.

The Sands of Windee was first published by Hutchinson, London in 1931. The first American edition was published by the British Book Centre of New York in 1965. This was also the first of Upfield's books having separate editions printed in Canada, by Ryerson of Toronto, and in Australia, by Angus and Robertson of Sydney. Pictured above is the front cover of Angus and Robertson's 1984 Arkon edition. Pictured below are covers from (left) an older unknown edition and (right) a 1980's Collier/Macmillan edition from the United States.