Sydney Noir

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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.

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