I'm being stalked, and no one took serious note of it, and so then I had to stage my own disappearance in order to prove that I was being stalked, to bring attention to the problem of being stalked.

That logic is not what a proof.

He was very close to the grandfather who also was murdered.

Oh dear, and becoming a bit of a theme.

And this young gentleman was the last to see Grandpa.

Oh my goodness.

I'm Andrew Rules's Life and Crimes.

It's that time of year again where we chat about what books to read over summer, and possibly even what films to watch or any other pastimes that crop up.

I'm here with the.

Podcast Long Suffering producer John Burton, whose full name is longer than that, and he is going to take part in this because I think he's a very keen reader and a student of the printer word, among others.

Welcome John, thank you kindly, among others and among others.

Today I'll be more talking about documentaries.

Documentaries, I think sentries.

For those of you who are more audio and video wise.

Oh excellent.

That's good, because I'm not terribly wise.

And what would you recommend our listeners watch or get hold of.

So there's a few interesting ones that are kicking around that are highly regarded, and I highly regard them as well.

One of them, probably one of the most timely, is a documentary on Netflix about Sean puff Daddy Coombs.

Yeah, I've heard of P Diddy.

P Diddy, and you may have been enthralled or at least seen a passing reference or to the recent trials.

And I think he's just been convicted and sentenced to something like fifty months or something like that.

One of the weird ways that Americans, you know, run their prison sentences, sometimes two hundred years, very strange.

But there is a new documentary on Netflix called Sean Coombs The Reckoning, and it's basically this sort of multi part portrait of his rise and fall.

It starts off with footage of him hold up in a New York apartment, frantically calling his attorney and looking over the road to a bunch of law enforcement folk who are looking back at him.

And you always know it's going to be a good documentary if they've got that sort of thing, if someone has found a piece of vision of the person in question in the moment of strife that you know is going to engulf their life.

You know, someone's onto something they've dug somewhere good.

Yeah, it does have that ring about it.

This one of It's somewhere sort of a modern cross between O.

J.

Simpson and The Fall of Prince Andrew.

A bit, a little bit and throughout it it's a mo two part series, but it goes through his rise, but at every stage there are people, you know, warning, you know, the sort.

Of the the against him about him, about him, that he might be a smooth dude and good looking and this and that and make money in the music business, et cetera.

Yes, but deep down he's a gangster with some bad habits, deep down done not all that deep PABs perhaps not just under the surface.

And what was his real name is Sean Combs?

Real name Sean Coombs sort of seen as a bit of a wonder kind producer, seen as someone in the early nineties that was finger on the pulse youthful music and presario knew his way around a recording studio, but interestingly was very early is caught up in some worrying things.

His group organized a charity basketball match which ended up in a crush, too many people trying to get in.

Everyone wanted to be there, multiple people died.

This was seen by some as the making of him, because he got his name out there, even if it was in a bad way.

No such thing as bad publicity in some respects exactly so, especially in the rap world.

No exactly so chouting his rise, but always with that little caveat, and the caveats get bigger, the whispers get bigger.

True, it strikes me, you know, I've been around a while and you can see the way that history sort of changes, but doesn't change that the rise of the rapper group, big money in it, therefore hangers on.

You have rappers with big mobs of people following them around and all, you know, soaking up the money.

Of course, it's very reminiscent of the old time boxes, you know, Liston and Ali and all the rest of them, all the.

Way back to Joe Lewis.

These guys who were.

Black guys making a lot of money in a sort of a new and exciting scene, which while boxing wasn't new when it became televised and had radio coverage, etc.

It became monetized and that meant that boxers were fighting for big purses.

Which gave us those huge.

Heavyweight events, and it meant that these guys became household names and they made millions of dollars instead of not making millions of dollars.

And it seems to me that the rappers are to some extent a bit like that.

And there's always that suggestion that the boxes are mixed up with the mob and with gangsters and with big book makers and with dishonest stuff.

Always that suggestion from that goes all the way back to the bare knuckle days really, and the rappers same thing.

Where there's easy money, there's crooks.

Well, everyone loves to hang around someone who's rich and famous if they can as well.

So yeah, that deadly mixtures of money, notoriety.

You know, the girls will follow the guys, all that stuff, It all goes together.

Yeah, So that's a very fertile feel to make a documentary about.

What other ones we're looking at?

So another Netflix one and it's called Fred and Rose West, a British horror story.

Oh yes, Fred West.

I'd forgotten about Fred West.

It is a horror story.

It is a horror story.

And you know, one of these ones that may have been on the periphery of your knowledge because it was, you know, mid nineties.

It would have troubled the world pages probably back then, but I don't think it was front page material in Australia.

No, I can recall it clearly.

But then again, you know, I'm in the business and probably took more of an interest.

But very strange set up.

They almost looked like each other, Fred and Rosemary West.

There was something very deeply creepy about them.

Absolutely, it should explain the plot.

I think Fred West, one of his and Ros's children went missing, didn't turn up to school, and they found her body under some paving stones in the backyard, and Fred was immediately brought in for questioning and it unraveled.

He thought he was smarter than the cops.

He had that sort of swagger about him, and bit by bit they broke him down and found out.

The true horror of what he was up to.

I think it was nine or more young women who he had murdered, and they were all sort of had a very much a type young women, runaways or sort of girls who were.

Floating through life, hard to trace, hard to trace.

And this was at a time the actual murders happened in the seventies, but the police investigation and they caught up with him in the mid nineties, so they got away with it for a long time.

The first episode is titled Fred, and again, like the Sean Combs docum entry, they've got themselves.

I think they must have got either a police proof of evidence or the record of interview.

They certainly have a record of interview of him, and it seems like it was the first time it's come to light, so they've managed to get that.

They've also got footage of Fred going through his backyard with police and going through the paving stones and saying, well, yes, she's buried here, and this one's buried here, which is quite confronting to look at.

It's sort of old, analog, grainy footage, but it's very compelling.

And so the first episode is called Fred, and so Fred obviously was brought in and he was in it from the beginning.

You know, he was not getting free.

But the second episode is called Rose Rosebary as in the Wife, and it's it's all about well, hang on, maybe Fred isn't the sole butcher here, maybe his accomplice.

And so it goes through a Rosa's story, which in itself is upbringing bad married Fred when she was fifteen or something, and goes through and will.

Have been abused as a child.

It's inevitable, and goes through and it paints a picture of Fred was not the only monster in this family.

Yeah, it's a terrible thing.

It's probably second only.

I don't know if you have a hierarchy in these things, really, but it's up there with that terrible story which became a very brilliant book really about the Moore's murderers.

The book was called Beyond Belief and the Mores murderers were Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and they have also gone into infamy back in the sixties and their crimes.

They killed a series of children up in Yorkshire and buried them out on the moors.

But that same aspect of folly a French call it where you've got a couple, I mean a man and a woman, which is particularly sinister and creepy and awful because most of us tend to trust a couple.

We tend to trust the fact that a woman is present, that a couple won't be abductors or killers.

But when they are how sinister is it?

Because they can persuade children that they're okay, And children who would not get into a car or except the live from or whatever from a man alone, will happily go when it's a couple.

And they are the subjects of that really quite chilling photo or sets of photos, aren't they where black and white?

They're both sort of staring into camera, whiteyde and yeah, very very creepy.

Very creepy.

She had the bleached blonde hair, Mayra Hindley and Ian Brady I think his name was.

He had the quiff, the sort of rock role quick, a lean face like a ferrety face, hard looking Scottish in origin, I think.

And he'd come out of pretty ordinary circumstances in Scotland or somewhere, and he'd been adopted out as a child, which I have to say is a very common shared attribute of a lot of people.

I have done a lot of bad things.

Adopted boys haven't got a great record.

Mister Stinky was an adopted boy.

Paul Stephen Haig, who's still in jail in Victoria for killing seven people, is.

An adopted boy.

And on it goes.

It's quite a long list of monsters and Ian Brady was right at the top of it.

Don't know about Fred West.

It would be interesting to know his background because it will be very patchy.

Well, Rose was not his first wife.

No, what happened to the first one?

There?

I asked, Well, certainly the well and this is where it gets particularly horrifying.

It he and his first wife had a child, and that's one of the more horrific parts of the documentary talking about that and how that ended up.

But to being on a slightly more flippant note, Fred did have a very profound quiff.

He had.

He had the sort of rush back, crush back, and then that that sort of morphed into a kind of a nineteen nineties kind of lad look, even though it was about, you know, fifties at the time.

With the lad look, the lad looks, oh yeah, read this.

Is up in the up in the Midlands or something.

I want to say, it's it's Canterbury or somewhere like yeah yeah.

And it was one of these ones where interestingly, the documentary starts with a journal and this is always good.

It's a small town journo who was her first job was to cover this thing and she did all the right things, she asked the right questions, she did the right searches, you know, really good on the ground journalism.

And then it ends up with a gentleman from the tabloids in Fleet Street, I think from the Mirror talking about paying jurors for their stories and how that had the potential to disrail the eventual conviction.

Oh yeah, of Rose, Oh god, yeah.

And that's on Netflix.

That's on Netflix.

Any other really creepy things you're going to watch?

Is anything just slightly lighter?

I'll give you one more creepy in one light?

How's that for creepy?

Carmen family murders.

The Carmen family murders.

This is a case I'd never heard of before, but neither so.

It starts off with a distress at sea and the coastguard or someone goes out and they rescue this guy who had spent seven days odd on the sort of inflatable life raft.

His boat had capsized.

Sadly on that boat.

Also, was his mother lost at sea.

He came from a very wealthy I think Rhode Island family.

His maternal grandfather was sort of bastion of the Greek American community, had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, started a business, multi millionaire, the large house, the indoor pool, horses, the whole shebang, and his mother.

This guy who's rescued his mother's lost at sea.

The son, the guy who's rescued, is on the spectrum or on the neurodiverse spectrum.

So he quite matter of fact in a lot of the lot of his ways, interviewed by police, and his matter of fact, and either the police didn't know or didn't factor in, or maybe they did factor in his.

Condition.

His condition, and that alt is the way he doesn't act out the emotions the way most.

Of us would exactly exactly around the funeral, he's talking to reporters and he's being very matter of fact and.

All that sort of stuff.

Anyway, so he's interviewed by police.

Now we subsequently learned that previous to that, previous to this particular tragedy, he was very close to the Greek American grandfather that I mentioned before, the one who set up the house and the forces and wys.

Of stuff, who also was murdered, Oh dear, and becoming a bit of a theme.

And this young gentleman was the last to see Grandpa was the last to see Grandpa.

Oh my goodness.

So it sets up and I won't sort of go towards the spoiler, but it goes through the various investigations, and it's one of those ones where they do it a very good job of saying, there is very credible evidence on this side, but there's also credible evidence on this side, right, And perhaps some of this evidence can be explained by his condition.

Yes, but maybe it's not.

This is very interesting, isn't it.

It's interesting how we judge people by their demeanor, and we do it unconsciously.

Unconsciously, but I would call what you're describing a stronger version of the Lindy Chamberlain effect.

Lindy Chaplain and her husband Michael were slightly unusual people.

They were well, they were religious for a start, which meant deeply religious, which meant they had a certain sort of calmness about bad things happening because they believe there was a higher purpose or whatever.

And they had a calm demeanor when many of us would not.

So they didn't carry on, they didn't wail, they didn't cry, they didn't sob.

They were very self contained, and that played against them both because people looked at them and said, oh, you're not upset enough.

We don't trust you.

We think you did it.

And then they set out to prove they did it, and then they ignored anything that was going to exonerate them, and search and searched for any evidence or any witness that they could use to make a case against them.

It became a very one sided investigation merely, I think, largely.

I think because people took a set against them early, or maybe only one or two investigators took a set against them early in the piece, and I think that their demeanor had a lot to do with it.

It's interesting in this documentary because the young gentleman at the center of it all will be in a police interview room and the police will ask him a question, you know, what did you think of your mother?

And he will say, I love my mother very dearly, and I probably shouldn't I probably shouldn't say this, but she's got a lot of flaws.

So she's got a lot of flaws, and listop a couple of floors, and then he stop himself and say, maybe I shouldn't have said that.

Should I have said that?

Yeah?

It builds up a very interesting lisk that does.

Yeah, it is fascinating that because you can see how somebody could just with lazy investigators or investigators who jump to conclusions, that someone like that could just dig a hole for themselves and be manipulated into doing so because we're investigators just want to dick the box and say we've got a result, we've got a conviction, we've got an arrest, and then a conviction.

They attempted to go with the one they've got in the hand rather than one that's out there in the wind that they can't find.

And we've seen this a lot of times.

We do see this, don't we have?

If I can go from the tragic to the comic, I'll give you one last recommendation, Andrew and listeners, And this is one on ABC I Views, so we'll move away from from Netflix.

And this is a series.

It's actually a series that goes across a wide swath of human experience and it's called I was Actually there, Oh yes, And it's events like the two thousand and four tsunami, the nine to eleven.

They've got an episode about that, someone who's at nine to eleven, all of these sort of ones, but the one that I would like to bring to your attention, Andrew is one starring one Fairly Arrow.

I saw this, Oh it is wonderful.

Fairly Arrow the sort of nightclub singer with the Gold Coast, the Gold Coast, a very Gold Coast story, isn't it.

It is Fairly was.

She was the big blonde girl who could sing a bit, and that took a pretty normal Gold Coast voice from the eighties, yeah, eighties, early nineties.

And then we see Fairly Arrow the way she used today after thirty years in America and many many, many years of plastic surgery and a different accent.

It's sort of shocking in a slightly comical way.

Well, but fairly what did Fairly do?

John Well?

Slightly comic in a engaging way is pretty much the way that this documentary.

I was not in a newsroom at this point.

I don't know if that you were sent up at any stage to cover this at the time.

But a Fairly came to police, or came to the world's or the world's attention, Australia's attention when she when she went missing, presumed kidnapped.

Presumed kidnapper.

This was a very very grave thing.

The Gold coast police pulled out all stops.

One of them says in the documentary, we had more of these computer terminals put into our building in order to try to find Fairly Fairly appears two or three days or weeks or.

Something found on the trust up beside of roads and weak.

Yeah, but not very well trusted, not overly well trust, not knocked about much.

No well fed, looked well fed, and not that distressed.

Not that distressed by a couple of young lads who were in this documentary.

They do a very good job in this documentary of finding finding the appropriate people and you know fairly.

It goes to the to the police and they interview on all that sort of stuff.

She then fronts the media almost immediately to tell her story of horror, which is not all that horrible, not all that horrible, because she's sort of half smiling because it turns out gentle listener, I don't think this is a spoiler.

It turns out a gentle listener at Fairly and an acquaintance of hers, had hashed a plot to hide her away in a motel where where she had over the course of the time when she was disappitud Pezza, she'd get room service.

She'd gone out to you know, take the bins out, you know.

She she'd accepted new towels from the new towns.

I asked for some motels.

I think she was having showers, all of that sort of thing.

And she was staying there with a partnering crime if for such as we could say, was a friendly fellow, will call him Cowboy or something.

He did have a nickname like that, and he looked to me like a guy that had once been ado writer or something.

He's a slightly we saw the old version of him, but you can tell he was a swaggering sort of dude back in the day, and you'd be tempted to wonder whether Fairly had done a bolt with him.

And then said, oh, hang on, I want in a bit of trouble here because my husband's at home and he's not gonna be happy.

Perhaps I've been abducted.

Perhaps that's how it's got rolling.

But she sold it to the police and the public, or tried to as they didn't take notice of my claims that I was being stalked.

Yes, I'm being stalked, and no one took serious note of it, which might be true, and so then I had to stage my own disappearance in order to prove that I was being stalked and to get attention, to bring attention to the problem of being stalked with a false claim.

The logic is not waterproof.

You'll know, it's fairly oh some people in them.

We could unwoke past to call it sort of blonde logic.

But it was very silly stuff.

And you do wonder whether she was covering up a temporary liaison with the cowboy.

I don't know, I don't know.

We should say that that fairly ended up being fined.

Magistrate did not see fit to impose any further sanction on her, but she was fined something like twenty thousand dollars back in nineteen a lot of money.

Whereas I think her we say partnering in crimes with air quotes on this one, because I believe her friend was in no way But yeah, he seemed, by the police or anything like that.

He seemed to be a fairly harmless fellow and thought he was doing her a favor or something.

Her husband wasn't amused.

Her husband, who was a member of the singing group the Kinsman, was he Yes, who you know it's funny because you know they do what they do when they grab all of the archival TV.

And there's him in his singing group on family Feud or right, and there she is singing pop song with someone else on very very daytime television at eleven am.

It's very much that.

It's a very Gold Coast nineteen eighties cheesy story in every way it is.

It's it could almost a good The Coen Brothers could make it into a very funny film.

There's a sort of itonia or something like that.

Yes, it issue yea, and fairly as she was then, it was sort of funny.

She's this naive bit, daffy bit and sort of likable in a way, a bit naughty, you know all of that.

Anyway, it's spelt the end for us.

She went around basically being interviewed by everybody then, and they would put her on pay some money to come on, which she needed to pay the police to pay for the cost, she think.

And so she go on Willithy or something and be absolutely grilled and crucified, which had to happen naturally, and then she get a payment for that and that to help pay off the debt.

And now thirty years later.

She's a bit unhappy about that.

She says she thought it was a little bit of an overreaction and she's really only trying to bring attention to being.

She says, stooked, which she never knows she might have.

Been, never know anyway, Andrew, that is the sum total of my recommendations.

And our listeners aren't really here to listen to me, so oh.

Yes, well they do want to hear about that stuff.

Well, books, I'm going to have a little bit of a dip into the self publishing phenomenon.

Crime writing particularly attracts a big range of writers from you know, wonderful writers because in the end, a lot of writing is about crimes of some sort, you know Shakespeare, These a lot of things are right through though, to especially in true crime, to the rankest I mean rankest of amateurs, and they all think they can do it.

And in these days, because the technology is simple and easy and everyone's got a laptop, so anybody can publish some sort of true crime thing, ll do a podcast or whatever it is.

And so we have a range of books out on the market, and I see many of them which are either pretty rough homemade books done by amateurs.

Some are a bit better than that.

They've gone to a vanity publisher who's helped do a bit better cover and knock it into shape a bit.

And some are better again and intrigued by this phenomenon, and a couple of them are quite worth reading.

Now there's one out called eleven Minutes, which is a very good title.

It's pretty sharp.

This one.

It's quite well conceived by a guy called Gregory M.

Carroll.

And Gregory M.

Carroll has a surname which is intriguing because it is shared with a long dead armed robber and probably killer in Melbourne called Ianravel Carrol.

And Ian Carroll was a boxer and a gunman who was without doubt one of the half a dozen people who did the Great Bookie Robbery in nineteen seventy six as I think it was, and that was the Victorian Club in the city in Melbourne.

Great Bookly robbery, very well known.

We've talked about it many times in the podcast.

A big amount of cash officially one point three million, unofficially maybe five or six million dollars in cash untraceable.

It has attracted a lot of time and attention and stuff over the years and what we didn't know was that Ian Carroll who ended up dead within within two or three years because he had an argument with mad Dog Cox, the guy that we call mad Dog Cox, whose real name was not mad Dog nor Cox, and Cox shot him dead down at Matalizer I think it was, and legged it.

And Carol was one of these very heavy hitters and a good crook as they call him, mixed up with the Paterson Dockers and the whole thing in the boxing gym's and classic Melbourne crook.

But his brother, Gregory, his little brother, Gregory, has written this book.

And Gregory was a straight guy who wasn't a crook.

He went into the legit world and did whatever he did, and quite a smart guy.

And he's ended up i think in retirement writing this book, which is basically about the Great Bookie Robbery, which is why he's called eleven minutes because that's how long it took, and he's amalgamated quite clever.

He's called it a novel and he's twisted the facts around.

The facts were a bit rubbery anyway about the Bookie robbery.

There's facts and these assumptions, and there's claims and counterclaims, but he has the advantage of having known his brother, so he perhaps had some sort of insight into his character and the character of the people he ran with, and he's been.

Able to apply that to the whole booky rob robbery story.

But he's also closely studied all the stuff that's been written and said about it in the past and amalgamated it into one pretty good readable book.

Now, it would be improved.

If it were edited a bit better, but it's pacey and easy to read and tough, un laconic.

The dialogue is sparse but pretty good.

It's sort of believable.

It's not lots and lots of it.

It's pretty sharp, and I mean, you could sit here and pick holes in it, but I don't see any point in doing that.

It's quite a good read for what is essentially a vanity publishing, self pubblished thing.

It's at the top end of it, and I'd suggest that it's probably very close to being as readable as Brian Brown The Actors books, which are in his dotage.

Brian Brown, who's now in his seventies, is knocking out these best sellers that are rough, tough crime books, and I think the first one was called Sweet Jimmy a couple of years ago, and he's done some more because he's been quite successful.

And of course the fact that he is Brian Brown and has a profile and he is who he is means he can sell books.

And they're quite readable and they're quite good.

But Brian Brown has written them using the knowledge he has of the film industry, so he sketches stuff in pretty fast, and his dialogue he's there, and it's pretty sparse and tough, and they're pretty good.

They're not literature.

None of this stuff is you know, Elmore Leonard let Alone anything better.

But it's pretty readable and pretty good, and you can see that it would easily translate into film or a streamer into some sort of film.

And I think that Gregory Carroll's book isn't far behind Brian Brown, but of course Brian Brown will always outsell Gregory Carroll because one's a big time actrum Month's not.

There have been some other self published books.

We've done one on the podcast.

It is called Bandit or Priest, written by a man who calls himself Fabian Christian.

That is about a case we've covered in the podcast, and we took the Fabian Christian about a robbery, a real life robbery that happened in the nineteen eighties in the Ara.

Valley, probably Australia's biggest robbery, because it was of.

Gems, opals, diamonds, gold stuff, all sorts of stuff which could have been worth anything up to thirty million then in the eighties, and which now, of course you'd say with inflation, might have been worth a hundred million whatever.

If those valuations.

Are right, it would be by far Australia's biggest ever.

Robbery, and yet it's one that's largely forgotten.

No one was killed, although it did attract tragedy.

As we heard in the recent podcast, the wife of the robbed man died of fright within months of the robbery, and the husband the robbed man, the wealthy man that was robbed, he died of a heart condition fairly soon after as well.

So it wrecked their family.

This robbery not a great book, not a great piece of writing.

But again it's a novel based heavily on a true story, and therefore it has some currency and it's worth it.

It's a good one to read on the beach.

And listeners will have I think just heard that they will have by the time this comes out.

I hope so Fabian Christian is the author, and not totally his full name.

He has a different surname, but it's worth a look.

And I noticed it's another one on my desk.

This is Father Teacher, Child Killer, the Abduction of Louise Bell and Michael Black, and it's by Michael Madigan.

And that is another sort of self published type book or reasonably amateurs sort of book that is a real story about a true case that some people might find quite interesting.

So we're looking at the sort of knock about end of the spectrum here.

This literature.

It ain't.

But if it's literature you want, John, yes, I suggest having a look at some from overseas.

There is an Irish author, a very big deal Irish author called John Boyne b O, Y and A and John Boyne, among many other books, and he's written some big bestsellers.

This big deal he's written a series called the Elements series, I think, and it's four books Earth, Wind, Air, and Fire in whichever order.

I actually think the first one might be Water in the series.

But each of these books they're not terribly long, they're less than one hundred thousand words, they might be eighty thousand, and each of them they all.

Look like each other.

These books, they've got a similar design theme and they all link.

So the main protagonist in the first book, he's a woman who leaves her husband, who's a disgraced politician, and she cuts her hair and wears sippy clothes and no makeup, and she goes and lives on a little island off off Ireland to get away from publicity.

And there she runs into local people and so on, has an affair with a young guy, and all this stuff very readable, very good, and got a bit of edging on it.

It's quite edgy, and there's a bit of blood in it because she's here because her husband has turned out to be a criminal, you know, he's a child molester in fact, and it's a very believable scenario with a crime subplot.

Then the second book, it picks up one of the young guys from the island who leaves that island to go to Dublin and then to London or somewhere.

He becomes a professional football player soccer player, and tells his story, which is involves a crime involves them.

He's a gay kid who's.

Playing soccer just to make money, but he's trying to impress one of his co players, and one of the co players, this co player rapes a girl and it's a moral dilemma crime story.

It's quite riveting.

And then the third book interlocks with the first two, and so on and so on.

So each of these books interlocks with the other, and yet each one has a different main protagonist.

Right, So I think it's a great series to get hold of that having read one, you will want to read the other three.

Recommend John Boyne's Elements series earth Wind, Fire and Watar, which sounds like an old sort of progressive rock album, doesn't not.

Oh I was going to ask, is this a new series of books or has this around for.

A little bit, around a little while.

It wasn't published yesterday, but it's not old.

But John Boyn has been around a long time and has sold a lot of books and won big awards.

He's a very big deal in the Northern hemisphere.

Irish writing is really kicking goals at the minute.

Well, we had on the show the author of The Chain, which did a while.

Adrian McKinty, Irish guy who lived in Melbourne and was a friend of one of our former colleagues, David Power, who worked with us great and good friends.

And Adrian is from I think it was from the North of Ireland perhaps, and he lived in Melbourne because I think his wife was an academic who worked here, and I think he was driving ubers or taxis or something and writing at the same time now in America and has had a had a bit of a hit with a couple of books, I think, and I may have kicked on I hope.

Yes, Indeed, the chain sort of blew up.

The chain was.

Yeah, it was a very well constructed thriller, very American, and you could see that it would film very well, very tense and tight, a couple.

Of different points of view, which is always fun.

Yeah.

True, it was as if you know, it was very well done, as if a computer did it.

Really it was very sharp, although we should say, just for the benefit of listeners, have written before the time of AI.

Yes, true, no, no, no, not at all.

I know it wasn't, but it's just really well grafted together.

Absolutely.

What else is on your reading list?

My reading list?

I should plug someone that we might talk to in the new year.

The evergreen Australian journalist and author.

Gideon Hague now Gideon Hague, is a man of prodigious writing talents and a brain as big as Tasma, with whom I worked when he was a slip of a boy many years ago at another place, and he was a pale faced, thin little guy that used to smoke too much, and I had a worried look and always very very fine writer.

He's become a most accomplished writer as a fully fledged adult writer, A great writer about cricket, particularly which is a passion of his, but also about other things.

And sometimes he's done some very interesting books about relatively small subjects.

I think he did one on the history of the office, the office in Australia.

I think the office as in the office, an office building.

I mean.

And did he do one about the car industry or something.

I haven't read them all, of course, but he did one called Certain Missions about a murder in Melbourne in.

The fifties that was a very big deal.

In the fifties about a young woman who was murdered fair body found down at Port Melbourne or somewhere under a boat, and the man charged with it was a very popular well spoken, handsome radio announcer, and it was a phenomenon at the time.

My mother told me about it.

She said, you know, people were queuing up to go to court to see this, this radio announcer in court.

Gideon wrote a very interesting book about that.

His latest offering is one called who is Wallace and Wallace Mister Wallace, I remember this story happening at the time.

Mister Wallace lived and was jailed or locked up sorry in the Arradale Asylum for the criminally Insane at Ararat for sixty something years.

He went in there in early middle age after shooting a man in King Street, Melbourne in the nineteen twenties.

He shot him in the nineteen twenties somebody, I think, two young men tried to bounce him about something he said.

He told him not to smoke in a cafe and they waited for him outside and we're going to give him a hard time, and he pulled a revolver out and shot one of them.

Now, he didn't defend himself in court terribly well.

He wasn't well defended.

He was found not guilty by virtue of insanity.

He wasn't overly insane, although he did say things like I own Brazil and things like that, but he didn't act crazy.

And he ended up locked up.

Until he died at one hundred and six one hundred and seven, and he became quite famous in the last decade of his life as the oldest effectively the oldest prisoner anywhere in the western world, because he'd been locked up for virtually a well for life, really, and that was more than sixty years.

And in the end he was totally institutionalized.

But he had a nice suit on and eat the same food every day.

He would play chess and beat everybody in the place, and sometimes he would smoke a pipe and they call him mister Wallace to his face, and old Bill.

Behind his back.

Some people would call him Mensies because he looked like Sir Robert Mensi had the big bushy eyebrows.

That is a most unusual book about a most unusual man.

And like Gideon's other sort of crime related books, it's small but sort of perfect in its way.

And if you want something unusual, get hold of that and a couple of the others.

And that John brings us to the end.

Of our holiday.

God, because we've rabbit it on far too long.

Thank you, Andrew, it's a pleasure.

Thanks for listening.

Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true Crimeersustralia.

Our producer is Johnty Burton.

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