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Mean Streets – Big City Crime
Sydney
While clinical psychologist LEAH GIARRATANO harnesses her expertise in psychopathology and trauma counselling in her four crime novels, she doesn’t go as far as some crime writers whose main characters seem akin to author avatars, sharing the same profession. Instead, Giarratano’s series centres on ambitious Sydney detective Jill Jackson, who survived a traumatic childhood. In the third book Black Ice, Jill has shed her cop persona and is experiencing Sydney’s drug scene up close: working undercover in a dingy flat, befriending addicts, and aiming to take down one of Sydney’s most violent drug kingpins. But when Jill’s sister Cassie, a model dating a high-profile lawyer, overdoses and is hospitalised, plans fray. Cassie’s boyfriend is connected to the drug trade and being targeted by a vengeful ex, further complicating matters. Giarratano guides readers into a gritty world where addicts high and low will do anything for a fix, and amoral suppliers harvest profits from others’ suffering. Taut writing and memorable, authentic characters elevate a troubling tale that will make readers think about the lives behind the headlines.
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For all the middle-aged aspiring crime writers out there who are worried they’ve left it too late, BARRY MAITLAND is an inspiration on two fronts: first, he’s a superb storyteller worth studying as well as reading for enjoyment; second, he’s had a fruitful career (16 novels and counting) since publishing his debut partway through his sixth decade. Following a dozen books starring Detectives Brock and Kolla and set in his childhood home of London (the second of which, The Malcontenta, was co-winner of the inaugural Ned Kelly Award), Maitland launched a new series set in the land he’s called home for most of his adult life. Crucifixion Creek introduced maverick Aboriginal detective Harry Belltree, who carts plenty of baggage from his military service and the car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife. When a Sydney journalist uncovers a link between three peculiar incidents – a meth-addled biker gunning down a woman during a siege, an elderly couple committing suicide, a tradesman being stabbed – Harry has to turn to the soldier inside himself as much as the cop. Maitland keeps the tension crackling with gripping action, characterisation, and setting, leaving readers wanting more of Harry Belltree. Thankfully, Ash Island and Slaughter Park followed.
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Nowadays known for its exquisite Vietnamese cuisine, a generation ago the western Sydney suburb of Cabramatta was considered a ‘war zone’ by police, an open-air heroin market sparked by American servicemen and fought over in gang shootouts. PM NEWTON plunges readers into that maelstrom via Detective Nhu ‘Ned’ Kelly, a part-Vietnamese cop who stars in a very fine duology. In Beams Falling, the follow-up to Newton’s award-winning debut The Old School, Nhu’s body and mind are torn by past events. She’s seen as a hero by her bosses but not all her colleagues, and while struggling to recover is made the token Asian officer on a task force investigating Cabramatta’s immigrant population as part of the War on Drugs. Politics and personalities clash as teen killers roam the streets, but Nhu has an elderly kingpin in her sights, for personal vengeance. Newton, who was a Sydney detective herself, delivers a confronting tale brimming with veracity that spares few from suffering. A crime novel that’s as much about corruption, trauma, and healing as solving a mystery.
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While the smash-hit HBO adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon takes place in coastal California, LIANE MORIARTY’s novel Big Little Lies is set in Pirriwee, a fictional suburb in Sydney’s ritzy Northern Beaches. It’s an area known for its wealth and overwhelming ‘whiteness’ in an ethnically diverse and multicultural city. Big Little Lies is a captivating book that explores some disturbing issues (bullying, domestic violence, rape) beneath its chick-lit veneer. Opening with a shocking death at a school trivia evening, Moriarty then backtracks and takes readers through all that led up to the deadly night. Madeline, Celeste, and Jane are three kindergarten mothers, all with secrets and stresses, meeting at the school gate. It’s a world of competitive parenting, schoolyard scandals, and factions forming over children’s actions and accusations. Adult secrets, big and small, fester throughout an unusual murder mystery that’s not just a whodunnit, but a who-died? Moriarty melds humour and gossipy characters with sharp observations about parenting and the complexities of family life, crafting a clever tale that deepens and darkens as it unfolds.
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From Rebus’s battered black Saab to Inspector Morse’s burgundy Jaguar (a Lancia in Colin Dexter’s original books), several famed fictional detectives have their favourite cars. Billy Lime, the anti-hero of MARK HOLLANDS’ delightfully caper-style novel Amplify, leans more Magnum PI or Miami Vice in his means of transport. The music promoter is notorious for racing around Sydney streets in his bright-green Lamborghini. When a legendary singer is poisoned ahead of a lucrative world tour, and a biker gang has stashed $100 million in cocaine in the band’s freighted equipment, Lime’s world implodes. Amplify takes readers backstage for an unvarnished look at the world of rock music and events promotion. A compelling debut that veers over-the-top on occasions, it’s a fresh and rip-roaring tale peppered with dark deeds and leavened by a fun, almost tongue-in-cheek vibe. Full of crazy characters, humour, and high-stakes action; Hollands does a fine job conducting the fray.
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Long before the current, global ‘domestic noir’ boom, Sydney journalist and academic BUNTY AVIESON traversed such territory in her 2001 novel Apartment 255, an acute psychological thriller which went on to scoop two Ned Kelly Awards. It’s the story of best friends Sarah and Ginny, who’ve known each other since their school days. Sarah is cheerful, Ginny is shy; Sarah is protective of Ginny. Things begin to go awry when Sarah meets Tom, moves into a stunning apartment with him, and starts planning a marriage. Ginny wanted Tom for herself; she wants Sarah’s life, and starts stalking the couple. And worse. Sarah may be protective of Ginny, but perhaps she needs protection from her. A chilling tale of envy and obsession swirling around striking and indelible characters. Avieson followed Apartment 255 with two further psychological thrillers, The Affair and The Wrong Door.
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There’s a rich tradition of campus mysteries in crime fiction, dating back to Golden Age queen Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night set among Oxford’s spires in the 1930s. CATH FERLA offered a fresh spin on the pressures faced by students and teachers, and secrets cloistered within educational institutions, in her evocative debut Ghost Girls. When a Chinese student at a Sydney language school leaps to her death, only for it to be revealed that she’d stolen someone’s identity, new teacher Sophie Sandilands is driven to investigate. The trail leads her deep into the city’s Chinatown, a place of rich flavours and hidden networks that leaps off the page thanks to Ferla’s assured and sensory writing. There’s a pulsing authenticity throughout, from the scratching at the underbelly of Sydney and the exploitation of foreign students wanting to learn English to the times the tale flashes back to mainland China, where the author has lived and taught. An evocative and insightful first bow.
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Long before Peter Temple, Michael Robotham, and Jane Harper were scooping CWA Gold Daggers and raising the flag for Australian crime writing on the global stage, a strong foundation was laid by the great PETER CORRIS. The prolific Sydney author singlehandedly kick-started the modern era Downunder in 1980 when he broke through after much publisher rejection with The Dying Trade. That tale was a distinctly Aussie version of the American hardboiled tales that Corris loved, with a distinctly Aussie hero: boxer and soldier and law school dropout turned private eye Cliff Hardy. By the time the Ned Kelly Awards were launched in the mid-1990s, Corris had already published 18 Cliff Hardy books. He was one of the early recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Crime Writing Association, in 1999, and would go on to write dozens more. ‘The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction’, James Ellroy, called Corris a true original and praised his ‘forceful, hard-driven, compassionate’ portrayals of Australian crime. In The Black Prince, the 22nd in the series, Corris delivers a pacy, engaging tale while exploring issues of sport and ethnicity in Australia as Hardy is called to investigate the disappearance of a star athlete, the son of the West Indian owner of Hardy’s gym. The Sydney private eye finds himself traversing rural New South Wales, a remote Aboriginal settlement in Far North Queensland, and the corrupt world of underground, illegal boxing. In the more recent Follow the Money, Hardy is aging and in a slump: he’s lost his private eye license and his entire life savings – embezzled by a dodgy financial adviser, who later wound up dead. But then Hardy’s unofficially ‘hired’ by a slick lawyer to find out whether the embezzler faked his own death, an assignment that has the budding granddad entwined with ethnic gangs and Sydney’s gritty underbelly. Sadly, Corris passed away in 2018, but he remains a giant on whose shoulders many have stood.
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One of the pillars of the early years of Australian crime’s modern era, MARELE DAY made her name with a quartet of novels that subverted the masculine tropes of hardboiled private eye fiction. Her Claudia Valentine mysteries explored the seedier side of Sydney in the late 1980s to early 1990s, scooping...
