Novel ways to case the joint
The Age
Saturday October 10, 2009
Two journalists find a new genre for wicked deeds, writes Jeff Glorfeld. King of the Cross By Mark Dapin Macmillan, $32.99 The Tower By Michael Duffy Allen & Unwin, $29.99 BOTH King of the Cross and The Tower are crime novels set in Sydney. Both are written by journalists €” Mark Dapin, a popular Good Weekend columnist, and Michael Duffy, a Sydney Morning Herald columnist and ABC Radio National broadcaster. They are first novels for both men. Each book has a sexy Irish female character named Siobhan. But apart from that, the books have nothing in common.King of the Cross is a hectic ride through Kings Cross, peopled by characters named Natural Science, Mad Dog McCoy and the Little Fish. At times it's less a story than a tirade, punctuated by lacerating comic dialogue and scenes of explosive violence, full of the kind of inventive word play and thinly veiled social commentary that make Florida-based crime author Carl Hiaasen so much fun to read €” and, as with Hiaasen, there's ample substance beneath the dialogue.The eponymous king of the cross is 81-year-old Jewish entrepreneur Jacob Jake Mendoza, a man whose appetite for what law enforcers call vice and corruption seems to know no limits. He is callous, cruel and without remorse. He is also erudite, charming and subtle.The book consists of a series of interviews between the king and young English journalist Anthony Klein, of The Australian Jewish News, interspersed with scenes of Klein's often inebriated escapades through the Cross, as he is drawn deeper into its biorhythms.But why is Klein so clumsy with his interview technique yet so handy with his fists? In Mendoza's violent and shadowy world, many things are not what they seem.In telling Mendoza's story, Dapin is telling the story of the Cross, or a version of it, from the 1940s to today, through the eyes of the man who proudly claims to have created its every seedy aspect, from the free-wheeling bars and strip clubs to the sex trade and bringing Frank Sinatra to Australia. His character's cynical amorality is breathtaking.And yet Dapin manages to make this monster sympathetic, at least some of the time. The plot is functional if not enthralling €” there are, however, enough change-ups and surprises to keep things interesting beyond the clever and the often startling writing.Michael Duffy has chosen a more conventional avenue into crime fiction, with a pair of Sydney homicide detectives, Senior Constable Nick Troy and his partner, Sergeant Jon McIver. A woman's body has come plummeting through the night fog, smashing into a parked car. High above looms the unfinished mass of a skyscraper known as The Tower.Troy and McIver arrive on the scene and get to work. Who was the woman and what was she doing on the site? Is it a suicide or murder? The action quickly accelerates as characters swarm into play.The police are hamstrung by internal politics and budget constraints; the crime scene, a construction site covering a full city block and more than 100 storeys, is impossibly big.Duffy wants to convey the impossibility of the task facing them. Unfortunately he succeeds a little too well €” as their frustration becomes ours, and it takes some effort to get a handle on the ever-widening cast and each person's spheres of influence. After the initial flurry of action, the plot settles into a churn that adds welcome detail but scant development.Midway through the book, Duffy lifts a few veils and the story's pace regains momentum before a satisfying series of concluding scenes. Expect to see more of Troy and McIver.
© 2009 The Age
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