Sydney Noir
Introduction
City of Change
Sydney has a long and distinguished criminal history. From the arrival of 756 convicts in 1788 through to the postwar waves of ethnic crime gangs, this city of five million people has more unsolved murders than any other Australian city, as well as more drive-by shootings and more jailed politicians. Noir is as much a part of Sydney’s character as frangipanis and cockroaches, rusted iron lace and sandstone terraces, torrential rain and potholed roads.
A subgenre of crime fiction, noir is the most democratic of genres in that it includes people from all walks of life and in all kinds of trouble. The protagonists are not private eyes and implausible police detectives from central casting, but ordinary people caught up in crime and violence, the kind of people you pass in the street or sit next to on overcrowded buses and trains.
In the early 1980s, I was working in a rundown bar in Darlinghurst that was a popular watering hole for the notorious 21 Division, a flying squad of the city’s hardest detectives. On Friday and Saturday nights, a couple of middle-aged women from the western suburbs would sit out on kitchen chairs on Riley Street soliciting for customers. On the other side of the street was a flea-ridden hostel for alcoholic men, and farther down the road was a tow truck business with criminal connections, while upstairs, the publican, a capable older woman, had shacked up with a Maori biker.
The bar was unlike any I had been to in Hobart, where I grew up. On busy nights cops, bikers, would-be actors, rock-and-rollers, trannies, small-time celebrities, and general riffraff turned up in that Darlinghurst pub to drink to excess and hatch their plans while complying with the unspoken rule that no actual drug exchanges were to be undertaken on the premises.
The 21 Division detectives, chosen specifically for their size, congregated in the doorways so that everyone had to squeeze past them to get served. The old diggers from the hostel drank at the front bar perched on their stools like babies in high chairs. The sex workers were a friendly lot and ordered a sherry or gin and tonic after their shift, waiting in the lounge bar for their partners to pick them up for the long drive home. Sex and drugs and money and booze all came together in this seedy pub situated in the hollow between the central business district and the Cross. That old, rough-neck, Anglo-aboriginal inner Sydney is mostly gone now, modernized and corporatized, but the pub still stands and its clientele park their Audis and BMWs outside while they dine at the rooftop restaurant.
Nothing lasts in Sydney, especially good fortune: lives are upturned, shops are sold, roads dug up, trees and houses knocked down, premiers discarded, and entire communities relocated in the name of that economic mantra — growth and progress. Just when you think the traffic can’t get any worse and the screech of the 747s descending over your roof can’t get any louder and the pavements can’t get any dirtier, along comes a wild electrical storm that batters the buildings and shakes the power lines and washes the garbage off the streets and you stand, sheltered under your broken brolly in the center of Sydney, admiring this big beautiful city.
What never changes, though, is the hustle on the street. My father was a detective in the vice squad shortly after the Second World War, and he told stories of busting SP bookies in Paddington and Surry Hills, collaring cockatoos stationed in the laneways of South Sydney, and arresting sly-groggers. Policing back then was hands-on for the poor and hands-off for the rich. Crime and Sydney have always been inseparable: a deep vein of corruption runs beneath the surface of even its most respectable suburbs.
These brand-new stories from some of Australia’s best writers deal with men and women who work in finance or serve in Liquorland, drive cabs or beat-up utes; they might be architects or struggling students, athletes or aboriginal liaison officers, retired coppers or contract laborers, patternmakers or photographers, philosophy lecturers or drug dealers. Some are desperate for revenge or money and fame; others are simply caught up in circumstances beyond their control or in a sexual relationship gone wrong. These fourteen stories take us from Kings Cross to La Perouse, from Balmain to Parramatta, Redfern to Maroubra, Clovelly to Bankstown, Sydney Harbour to Edgecliff, Newtown to Ashfield, and Lavender Bay to Mosman. There are no safe spaces in this collection. What Sydney Noir does best is to provide a window onto the street.
So sit back and enjoy the view.
John Dale
Sydney, Australia
November 2018
Part I
Family Matters
The Passenger
by Kirsten Tranter
Balmain
Skye kept one hand on the front door, looked me over, and gave a sort of laugh. I wasn’t sure if she would even remember me, but right away she said, “Rob,” in a low drawl, “you used to seem so tall.” She stood with one bare foot on top of the other. Her toenails were painted glittery pink. A teenager now.
“Hello, Skye,” I said.
“Oh, hello yourself.” She opened the door wide enough to let me in. “Virginia’s here somewhere,” she said, and gestured with a sloppy wave.
The back of the house was crowded with people; it was Fred’s sixtieth. I’d been invited to the party but had come really for Virginia, Skye’s older sister. Afternoon sun spilled in through the open doors leading out to the deck. The house — an enormous 1970s monstrosity — was perched at the east end of the Balmain peninsula. Ugly from the street, but you forgot about that ugliness as soon as you stepped inside. It was all redeemed by the view through the wall of glass that looked over the harbor toward the bridge. There was a mooring for the family’s aging sailboat below.
Houses around them had been renovated or torn down and replaced with designer mansions since the last time I had visited, but nothing had changed at the Dawson house. The Berber carpet was worn through practically to the boards and the wood paneling was scratched; the durable Scandinavian modernist furniture had been recuperated by fashion and was cool again. I caught sight of Fred out on the deck, a bottle in his hand, his white linen shirt open at the neck by one button too many. I looked for Virginia. Everyone else at the party was about Fred’s age: women with hair dyed orangey henna red and spectacles with brightly colored frames, men wearing Hawaiian shirts and smoking cigarettes. I recognized the local member of parliament in his shorts and Blundstone boots, beer in hand, arguing with a woman drinking from a can. It was old Balmain, aging bohemians, the generation who had bought workers’ cottages down the street from the housing commission flats and derelict Victorian terraces by the water in the seventies and eighties when it was cheap, and were now sitting on millions of dollars of real estate. Writers and teachers and social workers and artists, and some of them, like Fred, men who dealt in money. I never knew exactly what his work entailed: he just said “finance,” and grimaced. He was the money and his wife, Maureen, was the artist, a playwright. At university, one of her plays had been on the list of readings for an English course I’d taken, although I never actually read it. Virginia would change the subject if it ever came up.
Maureen waved at me from across the room and made her way over, voluptuous and perfumed and wearing a dress that seemed to be made of a hundred silk scarves sewn haphazardly together. She kissed me and I could feel the trace of lipstick on my cheek, the corner of my mouth. Her eyes were sharp and dark. She winked. “Robert,” she said, “we’ve missed you.” She squeezed my hand, her rings pressing uncomfortably against my fingers.