Danger Awards Shortlist Announced by the The Bad Sydney Crime Writers Festival

There have been a number of Australian crime fiction books recently that are tackling the effects of poverty / deprivation / loss and family breakdown in small towns, on small boys in particular. A TOWN CALLED TREACHERY is following, successfully, in the footsteps of authors like Mark Brandi and Stephen Orr, all three of whom have delved deeply, and sympathetically into damage, and resilience.

Life is very hard for eleven-year-old Matty Finnerty. Mother dead, father's absent even when he's around, and his grandfather is slipping further and further into dementia, he's not got a lot to be proud of, or to seemingly look forward to.

Which makes his chosen role-model an obvious, yet disconcerting choice. Stuart Dryden is a rundown, drunken journo, more attached to the pub (where he lives) than his job, his interest finally twigged by a grisly local murder. Or is it Matty, with his disposable Kodak camera and a way of sneaking in under people's guard that is intriguing him?

An unlikely pairing a ... friendship ... working relationship .... .something connects Dryden and Matty over, unfortunately, the murder of Matty's favourite teacher - Wendy. It's a bit more than just the photos that Matty manages to capture at the scene, it's a lot more than Matty's father being the town's prime suspect. And it's definitely nothing tacky or uncomfortable. Maybe Dryden's grateful when Matty's photos give him a chance for a bit of reputation restoration, and some career prospects. Maybe it's Matty seeing the possibility of a guide to the future. Probably it's more that two misfits with not a lot else in their lives stumbled across each other and somehow a friendship, as an unlikely as that may seem, formed. Maybe there's a bit of respect, especially as the investigation into poor Wendy's dreadful death, starts to flush some of the secrets many in the town have worked overtime to keep undercover.

The setting and feeling of small town life in A TOWN CALLED TREACHERY is spot on, with the complicated back stories, past connections, inter-generational problems and difficulties with economic hopelessness sadly believable.

The characters are perfectly imperfect, with ways in for most readers to find connection and understanding. That's not to say it's sugar coated. People in this book lead difficult lives and there are plenty of knock downs from which too many of them have to get back up again. 

Now I just need to stop feeling so surprised that this is a debut. It's so assured, so clear, so beautifully written. This is an author to be watched.

In Claire Sutherland’s debut crime novel, a body is found on an isolated track on the Wimmera Plains, where Mount Arapiles towers over all.

Anybody who has ever spent any time in the Wimmera around Gariwerd (the Grampians) in Victoria will know how striking the contrast is between the vast flat plains and the sudden, towering mountain range. It’s an astounding sight, bringing to mind the ancient age of the landscape and, if you look at the climbing faces of Mount Arapiles, the danger that awaits the unwary.

This enormous old sea cliff rises from the relentless flatness of the Wimmera district like Uluru. With more than three thousand climbing routes snaking up its faces, it is world-renowned in climbing circles, but barely known to anyone else. Even the locals hardly visit. Most of them think the climbers are mad. Why scale it when there is a tourist road to the lookout at the top?

The author calls herself a weekend warrior when it comes to rock-climbing, but her husband is an experienced mountaineer, and her knowledge of the area, and the sensibilities of its people, comes across as assured and real without being cloying or romanticised.

The Crag opens with a prologue that reminds us of human dangers:

Flashes. Darkness then distant asterisks of light then darkness. The sky? Yes, the sky. Branches arching over the road, momentarily blocking the stars above. The wind on her face but not on her body. Was she wrapped in something? The engine loud, straining. Fear beginning to stir, then rearing, poised to overwhelm. Then nothing. Grey seeping from the sides of her eyes until the last pinprick of light winked out.

The first chapters then switch to the dangers presented by the natural world:

They were boys.

They were always boys.

Stuck halfway up Skink, the void sucking at their backs, no moves left and the ground eighty metres below them. They were now resigned to the humiliation of rescue. Skye knew they’d still crack a few jokes in weak, wavering voices, an attempt at bravado, but they and everyone else would know they were shit-scared, near tears and thinking of their mums.

The thing about Mount Arapiles and the Wimmera, and most regional areas in Australia for that matter, is that self-reliance is mandatory, and in this area in particular, climbers are rescued quite often, mostly by the local climbing community. Skye is just such a local, born and bred on one of the farms on those endless plains, growing up to join the ambulance service, followed by a stint in Melbourne and a return to Horsham with the love her life, Callum. They needed a change, a simpler life post Covid lockdowns – for Skye, to escape the increasing craziness of being an emergency services worker, and for Callum, to escape some of the excesses he had got caught up in, mostly courtesy of his brother Andrew, a man whose life has spiralled out of control thanks to an ice addiction and many poor decisions.

It’s on one of Skye’s long walks with her dogs, down a rough bush track, that she discovers the body of a woman dumped near a crumbling old house. Skye’s been leery about that location ever since she encountered an odd man shooting out there a while ago.

It wasn’t until she spied the sporadic empty shotgun shells that stood out like colourful crayons in a landscape of beige and rust that she remembered why she hadn’t been here in well over a year. She’d made a promise to Callum, and herself, not to come out this way on her own again.

It’s this discovery that introduces her best friend from school, Senior Constable Sylvie Merry, and then the chief investigators into the death, Senior Detective Elly Shaw and her partner Sam McPherson, who find they have a real mystery on their hands. The woman isn’t local, and this isn’t the sort of area where a stranger would go unremarked. Although there is a farm nearby in Natimuk, and a farmer with a history of domestic violence who has been involved with the local police over the years.

There’s a really strong sense of place in this novel. The author has a keen eye for the nuances of the landscape, from the broad farming plains to the mountain range itself. There are descriptive elements here that sing stories of the places and celebrate the rugged, challenging landscape. There are also elements that highlight the difficulties of life out in the regions. The distances, the particular sorts of jobs ambulances and police attend on a regular basis – accidental farm shootings / minibus crashes / tractor accidents / people falling off things and under things. All these little glimpses provide hints of day-to-day life, alongside the coffees and meals out, film nights with friends, dog walks, and Skye and Callum talking about starting a family – a plan overshadowed by Callum’s past drug use, questionable friends, and attachment to brother Andrew, all of which have left Skye struggling to trust him.

Identification of the dead woman comes about as a result of dogged police procedure – checking missing persons reports, looking for clues – until eventually a Brazilian backpacker named Adalita Alves comes to light. This leads to the trail of a traveller recently arrived in Australia: a stay with a friend that ended oddly, and a website offering jobs in the bush – fruit picking, cooking for work crews and the like. Adalita had boarded a train in Melbourne heading for one of those jobs, but never arrived. She vanished somewhere around Ararat, and the task of tracking her final moments isn’t helped by the lack of witnesses, cameras, or records. Until there’s a tenuous connection to the climbing walls on Mt Arapiles, and Skye is brought into the team as a specialist consultant. Victims of domestic violence are discovered, and, sadly, another body.

It’s never an easy undertaking to write a book set in a community that is made up of incomers like the climbing community and locals with generations of forbears buried in the local cemeteries. Particularly when the author is one of those incomers herself. But Sutherland is a journalist by trade, and there’s obviously something in the skill set of the job that helps. That and some empathy.

Skye saw plenty of death in her job, but usually it was fresh death accompanied by deep outpourings of shock and love from friends and relatives, confirmation that the person was loved and would be missed.

In The Crag she’s written a story that straddles both these communities well, just as her main characters do on a daily basis. She’s also written some excellent lead female characters. There are realistic and believable blokes in this novel, but the standouts are Skye and the ragged circle she’s trying to draw Elly into. Both these women are flawed and fragile, strong and very determined. They go into this novel a bit rough around the edges and a little damaged. They come out of it carrying a few more scars, some strength they didn’t know they had, and a determination and decency that shines through.

A new crime novel by Garry Disher is always exciting. In Sanctuary, he introduces a new protagonist: a female lone wolf.

Meet Grace. She’s a very good thief, having been taught by experts and practising since she was a kid. Specialising in small, high-value hauls, she’s mobile and extremely astute – this is a woman who knows her Jaeger-LeCoultre watches from the Patek Philippes. She’s also always moving, very watchful, cautious to a fault. And tired of that life.

She’d been calling herself Grace for a while now. Too long, probably. She’d be safer using one of the other names, of which she had a few stashed away, culled from death notices and gravestones over the years. But she’d grown into Grace, somehow. It was a long way from Anita, her name in the orphanage in western Sydney.

There have been a lot of ‘mentors’ and associates in Grace’s life over the years who worked with her and taught her the basics that she’s developed into an art. As you’d expect with a young woman, and a lot of men, some of these relationships have been manipulative, some convenient, and some mutually beneficial. Her entire background, most importantly, has taught her to be self-reliant, self-contained, and very independent.

It’s an encounter with one of the men from her past at a stamp fair, where they are both definitely up to something, that sends her running, looking for somewhere to lie low. So a help wanted sign on the front of Erin Mandel’s rural antique shop is exactly what she’s after – she has already worked out a legend (background story) for exactly this type of job: the family business in New Zealand, parents tragically killed, similar language, further away, harder to check. But Erin’s friendly, laid back and doesn’t seem to need to check past the items she asks her to evaluate in the shop. In addition to the job, she can also solve the problem of accommodation, and feels just the sort of person that Grace could come to like, although trust is a big step away.

A lot of Grace’s life was hoping for luck; a much smaller part was encountering it.

In time, it turns out that Erin has a hidden past as well – and someone is looking for her.

Soon as he found her again, he’d remind her of the calibre of man she was dealing with.

At the same time, Grace’s past is about to catch up with her.

Username elbow-grease, one of his Telegram contacts, had just encountered Anita. Except she’s calling herself Grace now.

Both pursuers are very dangerous men, and while the women might be on edge all the time, they may not know just how close the threat is getting.

Fans of Disher’s work could see some similarities between Grace and his more well-known unrepentant thief and lone wolf, Wyatt. There are a lot of resonances in the ways both characters plan fall-back positions, set up emergency stashes, scope out every location, and always have an exit plan. Each is an expert in their own particular field, and each is resilient and admirable, no matter how uncomfortable that might make readers – or Grace herself – feel.

… funds were running low; she’d need to pull a job before long. And why was she thinking about pulling another job when she was also trying to go straight? Was that her true nature somehow?

No. She didn’t need to be like that. It was just old thoughts, old habits, creeping in again.

The interesting twist in Sanctuary is that Erin and Grace seem to be a case of opposites attracting, and their friendship is almost instantaneous. But there’s more to Erin than you realise.

Erin, settling onto the chair beside the bed again, kicked off her shoes and slurped at her tea. ‘It’s all safe,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘All your stuff, both stashes. It’s all safe.’

In Sanctuary, fans of Disher’s work will also see another excellent example of the way he can seamlessly write place, character and action using a straightforward, matter-of-fact tone that’s lyrical in its sparsity, laconic (except when it isn’t), and effortlessly engaging. His style is quintessentially Australian in tone and wit, and he can draw word pictures that resonate:

Friday, Auction Day. As Grace drove to work, her old Toyota clanked, shook, whined and stuttered – the music of her days.

Within the crime fiction world, it is rightly acknowledged that Garry Disher is a giant of Australian fiction. He writes elegantly with such a clear way of showing the reader the situations his characters find themselves in, and the resourcefulness with which they manage their predicaments.

He should be lauded outside the genre as well; this is a writer deserving of every accolade that comes his way.

A group of short stories, this a both gripping, and incredibly clever crime fiction, set within a scenario that will be familiar to some Australian readers. 

The central premise of this collection is the reverberations of a serial killer's crime in the lives of ordinary people. The connections are both unexpected and more obvious, but the impacts less predictable, and sometimes disconcertingly random. Each story provides a glimpse into the way that one person's actions create an outward ripple effect, how complicated connections can be, and more importantly, how chance plays such a big part in so many lives.

The central connection is that in 1998 a quintessentially "he was so quiet" man was arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders, all connected to a stretch of road, and a bush setting where bodies were found (and may not have all been located). The news of this shocked the nation, devastated a lot of victim's families, and then, out through his own family, neighbours, friends, and random people who had somehow crossed paths with a serial killer.

Taking those murders as their starting point, each of the stories in HIGHWAY 13 touch on a variety of different points to these murders - from the killer's rural home town, across Australia, and out through the world as people grow up together, or meet, love, marry, separate, work, and simply go about their lives. Sometimes curious about the murders, sometimes unaware of the past or their futures (thank goodness for that one). 

Ultimately these stories are a favourite part of crime fiction for this reader - consequences, and for a series of short stories, they are breathtaking in their wideness of scope and intent.

As the blurb puts it:

What damages, big and small, do these crimes incur? How do communities make sense of such atrocities? How does the mourning of families sit alongside the public fascination with terrible crimes? And can we tell true crime stories without putting the killers at the centre of the story?

CUTLER, the novel, features Paul Cutler, the former undercover operative, now working "off the books" in the dangerous and unpredictable world of investigator for hire. In this story he's tasked with finding the truth about the disappearance of an Australian marine scientist, whilst on a Taiwanese distant water fishing vessel, working in the incredibly murky and dodgy world of deep sea trawling and fisheries. With the complication being Bevan's father has his own fleet of distance trawlers, and may not quite be the legal cleanskin he seems to be. Once Cutler starts to scratch the surface of Bevan's disappearance, a slew of dark, horrendous crimes against people, ocean's, environment and just about everything else in their paths, comes to light. 

Whish-Wilson has a number of strengths when it comes to his fiction writing. For a start he's a serious, dedicated researcher who is motivated by wrongs in the world. Read the author's note and acknowledgements at the back of this novel and you can get a very clear sense of what triggers his thinking, and how he goes about his work. He's also blessed with the ability to write lean, mean, pointed and unflinching prose in a way that, confronts, but never repulses to the point where readers are forced to look away (remembering always that the subject matter in this one is pretty bloody awful all the way down). 

One of the reasons I'm such a lover of crime fiction is a willingness to shine a light into areas that need a bit of UV therapy, especially when it's human activity that doesn't sit at the forefront of everyone's minds. It stands to reason that modern industrial fishing (same as human slavery / live animal exports / battery hen farms) must be flat out wrong. There's plenty of history that shows that exploitation of others in order to make "money" has come with hefty doses of cruelty, disregard for sustainability, and a ruthlessness that's breathtaking. Maybe it has always been possible because it tends to happen in the dark, under the radar. Which is where good stories like CUTLER, which also don't pull any punches or indulge in too many weasel words, shed that necessary light, and sometimes bring an unlikely hero into play. Cutler is the perfect sort of cynical, been there, done that, sod it, sort of a hero that brings a real sense of realism to this story. As does the brutality. It's hard to avoid the feeling that brutality and greed have always been there - but have now been industrialised, mechanised, and weaponised. We need more Paul Cutler's and writers like David Whish-Wilson that are willing to turn the wrongs that they see into illustrations for the rest of us.