5 Weird and Wanton Crime Novels Set in Australia's Suburbs

Australia has sold itself well to the world over the past fifty or so years. The pitch has been as consistent as it has been factual: sunlit white sand beaches as long as your barefoot legs can walk; ancient rainforests that hum and soar to the song of untamed evolution; a population forever punching above its weight—the downunderdogs, if you will —and offering the same life-sustaining sacred two-word couplet response to every one of our failures and successes, our triumphs and our tragedies: “No worries.” There are no lies in that sunshine pitch.

There are, however, omissions. Namely, the fact we always withhold the dark stuff. “I’ll slip another shrimp on the barbie,” quipped our iconic beach-bronzed brand ambassador, Paul “Hoges” Hogan, in the 1980s. Hoges was essentially inviting the good TV ad-watching public of America over to his place for an ol-fashioned “barbie,” a suburban Australian backyard party, otherwise known as a “piss-up” or “gatho” or “Sunday (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday et al) sesh.”

Hoges neglected to mention, of course, that some suburban Oz barbies are best abandoned before midnight when the king prawns have burned to charcoal and the rum has reached the red line and someone’s dad has gone to hospital with half a beer glass in their neck.

My latest novel, Gravity Let Me Go, is a story soaked in the suburban Oz-gothic invisible underworld Hoges never told you about. A world of neighborhood weirdos and lawn-mowing devils with smiles on their dials. A world where countless bodies lay buried beneath the lemon-light glow of the great Australian dream.

It’s the story of a down-on-his-luck journalist, husband and father of two living in the seemingly idyllic middle class northern suburbs of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, who has a page-one murder scoop literally land inside his letterbox. Our foolish but well-meaning journalist becomes so dangerously obsessed with the true crime scoop of his lifetime that he grows blind to an even bigger scoop unfolding inside his very own home.

I spent two decades as a full-time magazine journalist exploring the river of darkness that has flowed for 100-plus years beneath suburban Australia. My job was to knock on closed doors across the suburbs and unpeel the most shocking layers of darkness that some not-so-ordinary-after-all Australians keep locked in the basements of their souls. True crime tales of murder, violence, betrayal, madness and straight-up evil hiding in plain suburban sight.

I channelled every last one of those real life stories into Gravity Let Me Go. If you happen to read Gravity and wanted to dive a few layers deeper into the suburban Oz darkness that I speak of, then here’s five cracking reads exploring the stuff you won’t see in the tourism ads.

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Christian White, Wild Place

White is a genius with a twist and he’s fascinated with the dark stuff swirling through the suburbs of Oz. Here he tells the tale of a seemingly idyllic suburb called Camp Hill—sounds nice enough. Cue a missing local teenage girl, rumours of Satanic rituals, community-shattering secrets, neighborhood accusations tossed like grenades and a high school teacher who gives a damn.

To be read only in a cushioned environment: ya jaw will hit the floor at the end.

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap

An extraordinary and riveting slice of suburban Melbourne life, exploring the ripple effect of one single moment in time: when a man slaps a misbehaving four-year-old child at a barbecue. The dark mysteries unravelling here are the deeply complex lives and motivations of all who witnessed the slap. Human nature is torn open from the inside-out and, somehow, modern suburban middle-class Australia is torn open with it.

Tsiolkas is the sweetest man on the planet but that doesn’t mean he cannot readily access the darkest parts of the human condition. For about three straight years after this was published, Australian book lovers were asking each other: “What would you have done after the slap?”

Emma Babbington, The Neighbors

How well can we ever really know our neighbors? When the body of a high-profile plastic surgeon is found dead in a park, the scandal-loving eyes of the nation turn to the neighbors with whom the not-so-good surgeon shared a suburban cul-de-sac. The story focuses on neighbor, Liv Elliot, and her gradual realization that her daughter, Grace, might be at the centre of the murder mystery.

Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

Australian page-turner queen Moriarty is the master at wedging crowbars into the cracks in the veneers of wealth and privilege and apparent domestic bliss. A total magic box of a novel set in the well-to-do suburbs of Sydney’s northern beaches.

It’s all school drop-offs-meets-secrets-and-lies as the lives of four school mums are drawn together by a revelation that speaks to what is quite possibly the greatest social challenge facing Australia—and maybe our greatest shame: the fact one in every five adult Australians has experienced some form of domestic abuse in their lifetime.

Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

Had to throw this one in there because it’s the suburban flip side to Gravity Let Me Go. My debut novel is the semi-autobiographical tale of a boy named Eli Bell being raised in the working class outer western suburbs of Brisbane in the 1980s by a couple of heroin dealers that he loves with all of his heart and all of his soul. When his mum, Frankie, is sent to prison for two years, Eli and his brother, Gus, form a plan to bust in to Brisbane’s notoriously brutal Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day to save his mum’s life.

This book is bursting with the colors of the suburbs I knew in my childhood: mango trees, BMX bikes, tattooed gangsters, toothless hustlers, wingless suburban angels, ice-cold soft drink cans, sweat-soaked nightmares and rainbow-colored dreams. The funny thing about Boy Swallows Universe is that the kid in the book dreams of moving from his lower-class government housing suburban neighborhood to the more middle-class suburban neighborhood that I later featured in Gravity Let Me Go.

This was based on my own real-life dreams of moving to a better suburb when I was a kid. The characters in Gravity soon realize—as I did in real life—that the exact same amount of human darkness dwells in all corners of life, even in the streets where the gutters are cleaner and the trees are greener.

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