Category Archives: Book Reviews

My top crime reads of 2012

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

What’s the end of a year without a best of post?

Recently, I was asked by UK site Crime Fiction Lover to list my top crime reads for 2012. They would only let me pick five, but obviously I’ve read a lot more books worthy of mention than that. Here’s the long list.

He Died with his Eyes Open, Derek Raymond

A police procedural like no other, it starts, like so many other crime novels, with the discovery of a body. The unnamed cop (the story’s narrator) who catches the case is a tough talking sergeant from the Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14, at the Factory police station. There’s no apparent motive and all the cop has to go on are a series of old cassette tapes in the dead man’s property that contain the deeply unhappy ramblings of a deeply unhappy man. Most police procedurals deal with crime from the point of view of the police. What’s unusual about this book is that the cop concerned is more like his victim.

Raymond was the pen name of English writer Robert William Arthur Cook, who eschewed his upper middle class family for a life of odd jobs, bohemian travel and frequent brushes with the law. Although he wrote for years, success eluded until with the publication of He Died with His Eyes Open in 1984, the first of five Factory books.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Latin and Central America, Crime Fiction and film set in Vietnam, Derek Raymond, Don Winslow, Megan Abbott

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Book review: The Grifters

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Most people probably associate The Grifters with the 1990 film directed by Stephen Frears and starring John Cusack, Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening. But the script, penned by veteran crime writer Donald Westlake, was adapted from a story by Jim Thompson, one of the most influential writers of the golden age of noir that stretched from the late 1940s to the 1950s.

Thompson was an expert at depicting an amoral world dripping with cynicism and desperation. He also wrote fierce, clean prose that told stories better and in half the words of many writers who followed him.

The Grifters is a good example. Clocking in at just 129 pages, this 1963 story may be a minnow length-wise but it’s one of the best pieces of fiction ever written about the world of the con artist.

The story focuses on Roy Dillon, a successful “short con artist’, a grifter, and his relationship to his mother, Lily and his attractive girlfriend, Moira.

When a routine attempt to cheat a shop assistant out of twenty dollars goes wrong, Roy receives a blow to the stomach with a wooden club. As he makes his way back to his apartment, the pain gets worse. He receives a surprise visit by Lily who, discovering his condition, gets him rushed him to hospital.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Jim Thompson, Noir fiction

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Book review: Black Wattle Creek

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Black Wattle Creek is the second book by Geoffrey McGeachin to feature Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, a cop on the beat in fifties Melbourne. The first, The Diggers Rest Hotel, won the Ned Kelly award for best first crime fiction in 2011,

The second instalment is set in 1957. There’s hardly a mean street to be found. Melbourne slumbers, as does the rest of the country in a period of post-war peace and prosperity (the fifties are referred to by some as Australia’s ‘lost decade’). Or so it appears, as dark shadows are on the horizon, the threat of communism and growing political instability in South East Asia.

Berlin has a week’s leave owed him but any plans he has to take it easy are derailed when his wife asks him to look into the matter of a dead serviceman, the husband of a friend of hers, who turned up to his own funeral missing a leg and no one knows why.

His off the books investigation leads to a dodgy funeral parlour and to Black Wattle Creek, a former asylum for the criminally insane. When his off sider on the force is beaten and left for dead and Berlin is warned off his inquiries by a couple of thuggish Special Branch cops, we assume it is connected to whatever is going on at Black Wattle.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews

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Book review: He Died with His Eyes Open

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open is a police procedural like no other I’ve ever read.

It’s a bleak, deeply disturbing slice of genuine Brit noir, a story of busted lives and nothingness.

The book starts, like so many other crime novels, with the discovery of a body. It’s a winter night in London, a police strike is on. The unnamed cop (the story’s narrator) who catches the case is a tough talking sergeant from the Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14, at the Factory Police Station.

As he explains early in the book:

“The uniformed people don’t like us; nor does the Criminal Investigation Department, not does the Special Intelligence Branch. We work on the obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don’t matter and who never did. We have the lowest budget, we’re the last in line for allocations, and promotion is so slow most of us never get past the ranks of sergeant.”

The victim, Staniland, is a middle-aged unemployed writer, a complete nobody, beaten to death with a hammer.

“I went to see the police surgeon who had examined the body on arrival and said: ‘What did he die of?’”

The surgeon said wearly: ‘Everything’.”

There’s no apparent motive and all the cop has to go on are a series of old cassette tapes left behind in the dead man’s property.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Derek Raymond, Noir fiction

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Book review: City of Light

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Years ago I read a book called Big Bad Blood by a Sydney crime writer called Dave Warner.

I can’t remember much about it now, except it was set in Sydney’s vice centre, Kings Cross, in the mid-sixties and involved police corruption, organised crime and a series of grisly murders of local prostitutes. It was a dark, gritty read, set in an era I was (and still am) interested in learning more about. I thought it was great.

I didn’t give Warner a second thought until recently, when I discovered his first novel, City of Light.

Turns out, Sydney’s not Warner’s original stomping ground. He moved there from Perth, West Australian in the late nineties, for reasons which perhaps become clear in City of Light.

City of Light came after a colourful career as a front man for a punk rock band (“Australia’s first punk band” according to his website), stand up comic and play write. It won the West Australian Premier’s Award for best fiction in 1996.

The main character of City of Light is Snowy Lane, a young police constable and amateur footballer, working in suburban Perth in the late- seventies, who gets swept up in the investigation into a string of murders of young women by a serial killer dubbed ‘Mr Gruesome’.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Book Reviews, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, James Ellroy, Neo Noir

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