Category Archives: True crime

Policing Melbourne’s TV mean streets: Homicide at 50

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

HomicideIt’s been a day for nostalgia. Foremost I’ve been thinking about the passing of Australia’s great reforming Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, who died this morning at the age of 98.

But I’ve also been giving a lot of consideration lately to another Australian icon, probably the most influential Australian television show ever made, the crime drama, Homicide.

At 7.30pm on Tuesday 20 1964, Channel 7 showed the first episode of Homicide and what Australians would see on their TV screens would never be the same. Homicide’s influence was truly revolutionary. It was introduced at a time when an estimated 97 per cent of drama content came from the US and Great Britain. It was the first locally produced show to hit number one. It spawned several similar programs, including Matlock Police and Division 4 and established many of the key conventions of Australian true crime television: the team of dedicated police solving a crime per episode and a commitment to realism.

Homicide ran until 1975. The individual Homicide episodes have aged remarkably well in my opinion as self contained hour-long pieces of hard hitting TV crime drama. They are also a fascinating glimpse into the class, gender and social relations of Melbourne society in the sixties and seventies. If you want proof, check out this clip for episode 475, which aired in 1975, towards the end of Homicide’s run.… Read more

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Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Crawford Productions, True crime

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Book Review: Jacks and Jokers by Matthew Condon

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

tpm3ftt5-1395618559Meticulously researched, broad in its historical scope, Jacks and Jokers (QUP, 2014), the second books in Matthew Condon’s examination of police corruption in Queensland from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, is among a wave of recent books that have redefined the craft of Australian true crime writing (John Safran’s Murder in Mississippiand Anna Krien’s Night Games, are two others).

Indeed, the label ‘true crime’ almost doesn’t seem a fitting way to describe what Condon has done in Jacks and Jokers or the first instalment, Three Crooked Kings (2013). The books almost form an alternative history of a period of Queensland’s development that has been much talked about and often parodied, but little known or understood, both in and outside of the Sunshine State.

As was the case with Three Crooked Kings, the narrative spine of Jacks and Jokers is the career of Terry Lewis. Lewis joined the Queensland police force at twenty and rose to be commissioner before the Fitzgerald Inquiry in the late 80s or, as it was formally known, The Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct, which led to his trial and conviction on various charges, including accepting vast amounts in bribes to protect vice and illegal gambling.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, True crime

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Hit-and-run books & ‘literary’ works: true crime, from Garner to Chopper Read

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

1920s-gangster-hit

In her latest book, This House of Grief, Helen Garner examines the case of Robert Farquharson, who on Father’s Day 2005 drove his car into a dam off the Princes Highway near Geelong, drowning his three young sons. It is among a number of recent works that demonstrate how true crime writing has changed over the last few years.

Others are Anne Krien’s Night Games: Sex Power and Sport, which won the 2014 Sisters in Crime Davitt award for best true crime book, and Robin De Crespigny’s The People Smuggler, ostensibly a non fiction story about the experience of an Iraqi asylum seeker, which took the 2013 Ned Kelly crime writing award for best non-fiction. Matthew Condon’s Jacks and Jokers is another example. The second instalment of a trilogy about police corruption in Queensland from the sixties to the Fitzgerald Inquiry in 1987, it has the feel of an ambitious alternative social history rather than a piece of true crime writing.

“In terms of definition,” says veteran true crime writer Lindsay Simpson, “true crime is a literary rendition of a particular crime which pays homage to veracity by researching the crime across multiple sources including interviews and primary source documents while at the same time engaging the reader through its narrative.”… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian popular culture, David Whish-Wilson, True crime

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My 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival top ten

Posted on July 27, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

sorcerer-truck-on-bridgeThe Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) kicks off in few days. As usual, there’s a packed program full of cinematic goodness. If you’re wanting to check some films out but are stumped as to what to see, here’s my ten picks.

Sorcerer, 1977

The newly remastered print of Sorcerer, William Freidkin’s 1977 homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic, The Wages of Fear, is up there as one of my top MIFF picks for the festival. The story is about a group of four men, each of them on the run from various sins committed in their past life, who are hired to transport a truck load of volatile dynamite across an incredibly hostile stretch of Central American jungle. Freidkin may be better known as the director of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) but this hard boiled slice of pure cinematic noir is, in my opinion, his best film.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films – 2014

I really enjoyed Mark Hartley’s documentaries, Not Quite Hollywood (2008), about Australia’s Ozsploitation film scene, and Machete Maidens Unleashed (2010), his look at American film making in the Philippines in the seventies and eighties, so expectations are high for this one. Electric Boogaloo is the story of Cannon Films, the Hollywood B-studio responsible for such cinema gems as Lifeforce (1985) and the pre-Rambo, Rambo film, Missing In Action (1984).… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from China, Crime fiction and film from South Korea, Crime film, Melbourne International Film Festival, True crime

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True Detective

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

true-detectiveLong before it was a television series, True Detective was the name of an American magazine that specialised in lurid, sensationalised stories of real-life crimes, often told from the point-of-view of the grizzled police veterans who investigated them.

This reference point is important when discussing the television incarnation of True Detective. The central thread and internal mythology of the show – two tough, damaged police detectives, hell-bent on avenging the murder of innocent women and children in the face of considerable official complacency – owes much to the true-crime magazine genre. It’s also been a standard trope in crime fiction since the 1930s.

The eight-part series (and careful, some spoilers follow) begins in Louisiana in the mid-90s. Two police detectives, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and his new partner Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) are assigned to investigate the murder of a young woman. Particularly shocking are the presence of strange occult symbols on the woman’s body and surrounding crime scene. All we know about the woman is that she was a drifter and a prostitute. With the exception of Marty and Rust, no-one wants to spend too much time and energy finding out what happened to her.

As the investigation proceeds, the detectives begin to link her killing to a string of apparently unrelated disappearances across the huge expanse of rural Louisiana.… Read more

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Posted in Crime film, True crime

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