Three Australian Noirs: Dancing Home, Gunshine State, The Rules of Backyard Cricket

Gunshine State

Fast-paced thriller Gunshine State, by Andrew Nette, opens with a heist gone wrong and heads downhill from there.

Gary Chance is a former soldier, sometime bouncer, and generally unsuccessful crook. Whether through back luck or bad choice of partners – usually the latter – Chance finds himself caught in a series of botched robberies. When he gets involved in the double cross of a Filipino gangster, things go from ordinary to worse.

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The novel starts in the sleazy strip of Surfer’s Paradise, and ends up in the quintessentially noir underbelly of Bangkok. Andrew Nette nails the settings for both. Southeast Asia is a part of the world I see writers get wrong all the time, but Nette, who spent many years as a journalist in the region, clearly knows his stuff. Yes, it is mainly the rather ugly expatriate side of Bangkok – which can often be a cliché (because it is a cliché) – but this is inevitable given the protagonist and plot. To this grimy demimonde, Gary Chance is inevitably drawn.

I also like, very much, the way Andrew Nette structures each chapter. He seems to have learned from the Hammett school of the hardboiled in this sense, keeping each to no more than a handful of pages – and in so doing yanking the reader through the book. This is not an easy skill to master: the ability to drive the plot forward, while developing characters, all within three- and five-pages chapters, is damn hard.

Gunshine State is break-neck, and neck-breaking crime fiction, perfect for lovers of the genre.

The Rules of Backyard Cricke

I read The Rules of Backyard Cricket at the start of the year, but can still remember having to stop, put down the book and think, fuck: that is good. Jock Serong at times uses superb prose to make searing observations about Australian sporting culture and masculinity.

The novel starts in a boot, the protagonist (Darren Keefe), tied up, being driven to his death. Reflecting on mistakes made, all those paths taken, almost always wrong, that led to this point.

Those memories track back to childhood, where Darren Keefe and his older brother Wally are raised by their fierce, self-sacrificing single mother. Indeed, the scenes with her are some of the most memorable and tragic of the novel. Serong captures perfectly the sibling rivalry of the brothers, played out in the game of backyard cricket over many long hot Australian summers.

Darren Keefe rises through the ranks to be one of the most promising cricketers in the country, an opportunity he inevitably squanders through bad behaviour and bad company. His brother, Wally, on the other hand, rises to the very top. Yet his brother’s path is not pure: Wally shows the sociopathic discipline required to navigate the intensely competitive – and political – world of Australian cricket.

It is also a corrupt world. As one of the characters says:

“Sport goes to the heart of everything. If you can reach inside it and fuck with its innards, you’re actually messing with society . . . Bigger than drugs. Bigger than hookers and porn, because people shy away, they can smell the desperation. But the same people will go on consuming sport long after they know it’s rotten to the core. They’re insatiable.”

Darren Keefe’s bad boy ways – reminiscent of Shane Warne – lead him down into the gutter, and back again through media-manipulated redemption. The thoroughgoing cynicism of Darren’s rehabilitation is breathtaking, and – given the ample evidence of Australian sporting and media history – unerringly accurate.

So it seems like Darren will make a career for himself in the media eye, and perhaps is past the point of destroying himself utterly. Right up until the point he ends up in a car boot, bullet hole in his knee, contemplating what looks like an inevitable death.

Compelling, finely written, and thoroughly Australian, The Rules of Backyard Cricket is an assured literary crime novel.

Dancing Home

Dancing Home, by Paul Collis, is dubbed a ‘koori-noir’ on the cover – the only such novel in this sub-category that I am aware.

It is the story of ‘Blackie’ a former criminal returning home to Dubbo to get revenge on the police officer who wrongfully arrested him, McWilliams.

It is an unflinching look at the life of a poor indigenous man. There is no desire to find redemption here, to paint the lead character as a ‘modern knight errant’ as Chandler said of the noir protagonist. Rather, Blackie is a violent, self-loathing drug addict whose one motivation is to return home and kill the cop who put him away. His close mate ‘Rips’ is an addict and rapist who served time with Blackie in prison, and the other man sharing the car is Carlos, a Latino thief driving him home to Dubbo (Carlos is ‘white’ and therefore less likely to be stopped by the police).

The description of indigenous life is bleak, and while the narrative often turns to racism and dispossession, it also depicts the grim reality of black-on-black violence. It is the story only an indigenous writer could do justice to, and one that desperately needed telling.

It is revealed McWilliams and Blackie were best of friends when they were young, but grew apart. Here, the novel points to the structural and systematic roots of racism; even though the two have a shared upbringing, this friendship could not endure. Where it went wrong for Blackie is never exactly made clear. There is no precise moment, no series of events where the transition from scholarship student at an elite private school, to career criminal, is explicated.

This is perhaps one area where this short novel could have been expanded. There was more to tell, I thought, of why childhood friends – one white and one indigenous – took the paths they did. A missing narrative of the institutional and cultural forces that tore these two men apart.

Dancing Home is not an easy read. Blackie alternates between thoughts of revenge and self-loathing. He hates what he has become, and wishes his own destruction. One of the few places in the novel where Blackie finds peace is in the land. Even if only fleetingly, it is a place of communion and connection for him.

Dancing Home is a flawed, important, inimitable, darkest-of-the-dark noir.