Perth, capital of Western Australia, fourth most populous city “Down Under” sitting on the Swan River and with the charming port town of Fremantle close by. Founded as a city in 1829 as the Swan River Colony on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk and Noongar peoples. The city boomed on the nineteenth century gold rushes and still profits today from all that valuable “dirt” in the lands around the state. And, of course, it’s also a centre of the ongoing Aussie crime writing wave too….
Let’s start with David Whish-Wilson, the author of ten novels. His Lee Southern novels are set in Western Australia. True West (2019) begins in 1988 as 17-year-old Lee Southern betrays the Knights bikie gang (Aussie for Hells Angels type outfits) and finds work as a tow truck driver in Perth. There he encounters right-wing extremists, blackmailers and kidnappers. It’s pure noir, Western Australia style. Lee returns in I am Already Dead (2023) investigating a series of bribery attempts targeting a wealthy entrepreneur. Now he’s hooked up with retiring PI Frank Swann. Both books originally published in Australia by the great small press Fremantle Books who specialise in authors from Western Australian or who live in the area.
Go back a bit and Frank Swann was a cop. In Line of Sight (2010) he’s Superintendent Swann of the Western Australia Police and dealing with a local brothel madam shot dead on a Perth golf course in 1975. Heroin is the new drug in town and the money is finding its way into some very respectable hands. Swann returns in Zero at the Bone (2013). Now it’s Perth in 1979 and a royal visit in the offing to commemorate a century and a half since colonisation. But mining is the new treasure chest for the region and people will do anything to secure mining leases. The price of gold is up, and few are incorruptible before its lure. In Old Scores (2016) Swann’s left the cops and has survived into the 1980s and is working as a low-rent PI. Someone’s bugging the Premier of Western Australia’s phone and Swann is asked to find who and why?
And finally (before he returns for a cameo on the Lee Southern series, above) Swann is back in the fourth and final book of his own tetralogy, Shore Leave (2020) – it’s 1989 and an American navy ship docks in Fremantle. Soon there’s trouble in the brothels and concerns over a nuclear warship in town. The whole Frank Swann series is a effectively a history of modern Perth and Western Australia that then segues into the Lee Southern series bringing us bang up to date, with hopefully more to come from Whish-Wilson.
The transformation of Perth and Western Australia by the mining boom is also apparent in Dave Warner’s City of Light (2015 – and also published by Fremantle Press) takes us back to Perth in the 1970s – today Perth can feel like a well-healed, but quiet town, but in the 70s it was positively deserted. Snowy Lane, preoccupied with a ham sandwich and the odds of making the football team on Saturday, takes the terrible phone call that signals the beginning of a series of events which are to reverberate in his life and shake the city to its foundations. Warner is also the author of several books featuring Detective Inspector Daniel Clement and set in and around Broome, a small town 1,271 miles from Perth (honestly, not that far in Western Australia terms!!). the first, Before it Breaks (2015) won the prestigious 2016 Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Novel (Kelly being the legendary nineteenth century Australian bushranger, outlaw, gang leader, and bank robber). On the edge of the desert, a man is found dead in a crocodile-infested watering hole. And he is the first of several. The connection between the victims is elusive, but Clement must pursue it as a decades-old mystery begins to unravel and a monster cyclone brews on the horizon.
After the Flood (2022) sees DI Dan Clement and his Broome police officers confronted with a violent death by crucifixion near a remote north-west station, the theft of explosives from a Halls Creek mine site, protests at an abattoir, and a break-in at a child health care clinic – could they all be linked somehow? From Perth to Broome, Clement is perhaps the cop in fiction who covers the widest territory, Western Australia being roughly the size of Western Europe! But with just under three million people. And finally, When it Rains (2024) has Dan Clement still stuck on backwater Broome in the wet season rains with random body parts turning up in crocodile-infested waters.
The dreariness of West Oz mining towns is all over Robert Schofield’s Marble Bar (2014) when a cop decides to make a new beginning in the iron mines of Newman, up near the giant Mount Whaleback mines. But when he returns home from the night shift and finds his flatmate has been murdered, suspicion quickly falls upon him. He summons his old ally from the Gold Squad, DC Rose Kavanagh, and soon they find themselves in Marble Bar, searching for gold.
Alan Carter’s Cato Kwong series is set in and around Perth. Detective Philip “Cato” Kwong is a disgraced cop and ex-poster boy for the police force banished to a mining town on the edge of Western Australia’s nowhere. In the first book of the series Prime Cut (2011) Kwong is sent to investigate a murder in the Antarctic as punishment for his transgression. But in the second book, Getting Warmer (2014) he’s back in Perth and on the trail of an unsolved mystery of a missing fifteen-year-old girl that leads to the city’s millionaires and nightclubs. In the third book, Bad Seed (2015), Cato is sent to Shanghai on the trail of the killer of a Perth property developer. In Crocodile Tears (2021) Kwong is investigating the death of a retiree found hacked to pieces in his suburban Perth home. The trail leads to Timor-Leste, with its recent blood-soaked history. And lastly, Heaven Sent (2023) finds Cato is on the case of a killer murdering Fremantle’s homeless people. Altogether a fun series that bounces between Perth, Western Australia and a host of other locations.
And finally, a great debut novel from Jacqueline Wright – Red Dirt Talking (2012), a missing person’s tale set against the backdrop of north-western Australia “big wet” (the heavy rains season), was shortlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin award and is being marketed as literary crime. It’s set in the town of Ransom, just before the “big wet”, when traditionally people tend to go off the rails. In the midst of a bitter custody battle, an eight-year-old girl goes missing. Maggot, the local garbage collector, gets to hear all the crazy theories about what might have happened to her, while Annie, an anthropology graduate fresh from the city, is determined to uncover the mystery of the child’s disappearance. As Annie searches for the truth beneath the township’s wild speculations, she finds herself increasingly drawn towards Mick Hooper, a muscly, seemingly laid-back bloke with secrets of his own. A novel that felt super fresh back in 2012 that is still a one-of-a-kind original set in Western Australia.
