Sydney

ABC journalist and host of Q&A Tony Jones put the cat among the pigeons last year when he suggested that there was Croation terrorism in Australia in the 1970s. There was fierce debate at that time around this suggestion about Croatian extremists and the involvement of the Communist Yugoslavian Government in potentially creating or manipulating the threat. In The Twentieth Man, Jones doubles down on his claims, in a historical thriller that gives Australian its own Day of the Jackal.

The Twentieth Man opens with a historical bombing in the heart of Sydney in 1972. The bombs are planted by an anonymous Croatian terrorist seeking to destroy targets associated with the Yugoslavian government. Jones uses this opening to introduce a range of characters and it is a while before the narrative settles down around a few key players, particularly Anna Rosen, junior ABC journalist and daughter of a known Communist, Al Sharp, with the Federal Police, and rogue ASIO agent Tom Moriarty. Later in the book the action moves to Yugoslavia where a group of twenty Croatians have infiltrated the country with the aim of creating a popular uprising against the Communist Government. The Twentieth Man of the title is the survivor of this mission.

Jones has crafted a fine historical thriller. The threat, when it emerges, is against the Yugoslavian Premier and becomes a race against time. But behind this fictional assassination attempt is the basis of the historical events which included the operation in Yugoslavia,  election of the Whitlam Government and in particular the installation of Lionel Murphy as Attorney General. Jones creates tension through the real events of Murphy’s war on Australia’s security service ASIO, based on Murphy’s conviction that ASIO was withholding information from the Government. All of Jones’ characters are caught up in this crusade which, in the long run, made that agency more accountable.

The story comes into focus around journalist Anna Rosen and the Croatian would-be assassin Marin Katich who, in the past, had been involved in a Romeo and Juliet-style relationship, their fathers mortal enemies. Rosen is a creature of her time, idealistic, struggling against chauvinism and happy to indulge in recreational drugs. Katich has his own struggles, trying to reconcile knowledge of his father’s wartime activities allied with the Nazis while trying to remain true to the cause he was raised in. While most of the main characters are fictional, there are plenty of historical figures both deep in the plot and included as cameos, most of whom will be familiar to Australian readers. This includes not only Lionel Murphy but journalists George Negus and Michelle Grattan and even a brief walk-on cameo from comedian Paul Hogan, from the time he was a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And Jones also gets the feel of the period right, with plenty of period detail and non-politically correct behaviour.

The Twentieth Man is an incredibly assured debut novel and Jones has delivered a pacey and original historical thriller. While historical detectives seem to be everywhere, the historical political thriller is not a genre we have seen much of in Australia. And this one shines a light on fascinating period of Australian history, a time contemporaneous with Watergate, in an engaging and interesting way.

Many years ago there was a specialist bookshop tucked away in Auburn Road, Hawthorn run by a crime fiction expert and massive enabler (I think his name was Malcolm Campbell). He was one of those real-life people that made me thankful I'd made the trek from the bush to the big city, and Peter Corris was another. Sure I probably would have eventually found his books, but arriving in the city, finding that shop, and eventually being introduced to Cliff Hardy, kind of reinforced at that time it had been a good move all round.

From the opening book in the Cliff Hardy series, here was something that was familiar, and yet slightly different about them. They are, as further study eventually revealed, straight out of the lone-wolf, private eye rule book, and yet quintessentially Australian. They are also very Sydney - with the mean streets that Hardy lived on never that far from the Harbour, yet there is something in the quick-fire delivery, and the quiet determination that reeks of the laconic Australian character. Put a hat on him, push it back on his head and roll up his sleeves and Hardy could have been a man from the bush. Stick him in a Ford, hand him a glass of wine, and have him haunt a few coffee shops and bars and he was city through and through. Part of the appeal of Cliff Hardy is that he has always been as hard to pin down - age / background / look and feel, as he has been instantly recognisable. 

But forty-two books later, Cliff is flagging a little, but game as always, and Peter Corris has pulled the plug, battling a few health problems of his own. So reading WIN, LOSE OR DRAW is one of those jarring moments no matter how you look at it. It's the last ever book of a series that's become as part of all fans January's as has a food hangover or the Test Cricket. It's certainly always been my Boxing Day Test tradition - flat out on a couch, test on in the background, Cliff Hardy book in hand. Glass of white wine beside me. 

It also appears that the decision to call it quits on the series happened after the book had been written - so there's no maudlin fare-the-well's, no tying up of any long-standing questions (not that there really are that many, expect maybe how bloody old is Cliff really!). What we have in WIN, LOSE OR DRAW is classic Hardy, hired by a wealthy businessman, Gerard Fonteyn, to find his teenage daughter. Julianna has been missing for over a year and despite a number of other granted half-hearted attempts there's never been a hint that she's dead or alive. Initially Hardy is inclined to agree with this assessment, but a photograph that eventually comes to light is just enough for him to get out, kick some rocks and see what crawls out.

A nicely complicated plot is elegantly executed with plenty of opportunity for even a slightly cricket distracted reader to keep up, but as always at the heart of these books is the tough-guy, lone-wolf, rough-around-the-edges, good-bloke Cliff Hardy. Even exiting this way, on a high, solving the unsolvable, never looking back, never saying goodbye, no regrets, no apologies, kind of makes sense. It won't make fans feel any better come next January, but then there are 42 of these books that you can always re-read. That's a lot of January's.

There is no denying Peter Corris’ status as the godfather of modern Australian crime. Corris took the American private investigator corner of the crime genre and made it uniquely Australian. Still going now after 33 years, gumshoe and Sydney icon Cliff Hardy is back in action for the forty-second time in Win, Lose or Draw.

Hardy is hired by Gerard Fonteyn, a wealthy businessman, to find his daughter Julianna. Julianna has been missing for over a year and there is little prospect that she will actually be found. Hardy does some digging and agrees with this assessment. But months later a photo of someone who could be Julianna comes to light on Norfolk Island and Hardy is off. Very soon the search becomes extremely complicated involving drugs, under-age prostitution, murder, corrupt police and dodgy investigators. All in all, a typical Hardy scenario.

Win, Lose or Draw delivers exactly what it promises – a hard boiled jaunt through the seedier parts of the Gold Coast and Sydney. Hardy, although starting to show is age (if he aged at the same rate as normal people he would be about 80 by now), is still as tough as ever. Even tied up and looking at the prospect of being dumped at sea he still manages a hard boiled quip or two. The plot, as always, appears straight forward at first but even Hardy admits about two thirds of the way through that it “made my other missing persons cases look simple”. Complicated, yes, and with plenty of conflicting agendas which often collide violently and tragically, but Corris never lets the reader lose track of what is going on.

Win, Lose or Draw is vintage Corris and vintage Hardy. While there are secrets there is no great mystery to be solved, just hard graft of procedural detection. The tension slowly ratchets but doesn’t quite pay off in the way the reader expects, there is a dead pan noir sense of humour and with locations sketched economically but perfectly to give a great sense of place. The author bio suggests that this might be the final Cliff Hardy book. If so then Corris has ensured that his Sydney Private Eye goes out on a high.

Styled as a thriller from the legal world, CYANIDE GAMES introduces Peter Tanner - criminal defence barrister, widower, father. Very much one of the good guys, one of those that takes on a hell of a lot and seems to pull results together despite the odds.

There's some complicated set up underway in CYANIDE GAMES, so a greater part of the book is devoted to what feels like considerable framework construction. Which, given that Tanner is a lawyer, appears to end up involving a large amount of personal investigation, involvement and prodding of various bears with a variety of sticks. Once the action actually moves to a court room, Tanner's involvement - and skills - are considerably more believable and the action seems, oddly given it's mostly court room tactics, to actually heat up quite a bit. 

Legal thrillers must be a tricky undertaking for an author - working what seems to be a mostly intellectual role into that of an all action hero. Believing the central character is capable of just about anything really helps with this reader's level of acceptance. Giving them a seriously good reason to be off on a lone wolf crusade is also vital, which meant that CYANIDE GAMES was a little on the hit and miss side for this reader. Perhaps the character of Tanner was too "out of the box" - he's ticking a lot of the good boxes, and doesn't seem to have much on the downside. Perhaps it's also that the sheer bulk of the set up meant that so much of the book read like a prelude to something really good - which ended up being too short lived to create balance. 

Not to say that the series, on the whole, doesn't have potential. The court-room scenes showed more than enough promise of some very good tactical thinking - and game playing, which hopefully would be more to the fore now that the background is filled out. Definitely worth a read if you're a fan of legal thrillers.

Inspired by the true events surrounding an unsolved murder, Dark Fires Shall Burn is set in Sydney’s Newtown in the aftermath of World War II. - Full review at Newtown Review of Books

Built around the worlds of art fraud, forensic accounting, law and the European Mafia DEATH OF A FRIEND is the debut novel of Australian author Desmond L Kelly.

There's an interesting concept at the centre of this book - two men, friends since their schooldays, different backgrounds, different career choices but stayed in touch. When one of them is killed, the friend left behind feels desperate guilt. The reason he is feeling guilty is his own doubts over his best friends integrity, and the opening chapter in particular, at the funeral of Catlin, is very evocative of the grief and pain that Landry is left to live with. 

An unusual approach to storylines about male friendship there is considerable emphasis in this book on the platonic love and affection felt by one man for his old friend. The juxtaposition of that against elements from a who-dunnit styled crime book, featuring an amateur detective with professional support, is something likely to work for as many readers as it doesn't. Because of the depth into which relationships and the personal are explored, there is a tendency for this to overwhelm the more traditional crime elements at points though, and that may or may not work again for crime fans (from which viewpoint this review is being considered).

Slow to build, with a plot that has elements right out of left field, however you look at it unusual was the word that kept coming to mind when working through DEATH OF A FRIEND.