The Serpent's Sting

‘It was suffocatingly hot, and the audience of howling children was viciously indifferent to the violence being done to my integrity as an artist by every ghastly syllable I was obliged to utter and by every mincing step I was obliged to take. As the foul smell of the ancient wig I was wearing wafted into my nostrils, I began to view the bombing of Darwin with something like nostalgia.’

William Power, actor and sometime private inquiry agent, has returned from the Northern Territory, shaken...