Back in October I took my mother to a talk hosted by the Glen Eira Library. Billed as ‘Underbelly of crime writing’ it looked thoroughly interesting. The speaker was Andrew Rule, co-author of Leadbelly: Inside Australia’s underworld wars, crime writer for The Herald Sun.
Ignore his dour look, he’s entertaining. A good speaker with an excellent grasp what makes a good talk and how to keep people interested and entertained. He told us about various criminals he’s written about over the years some of whom are petty criminals and some are gang leaders. Rule had us in giggles with some stories and worrying about his safety with others. I had to buy his book, it just felt mandatory.
To the book. This is true crime and much better than the John Safran book I mentioned a few weeks ago. Entertaining is not a word that comes to mind with this book, informative and chilling, yes. Leadbelly is in two parts, one is the gangland murders that make up the series of Underbelly while the other is the murders and arrests that encapsulate how the police lost the safety that was their uniform. While googling both Rule and Silvester I came up with this article by Silvester, it has brief references to some of the murders (both police and otherwise) detailed in the second part of the book.
It is a totally fascinating book, chock-a-block with facts and challenging to read. It gives facts about the criminals and their arrests or murders or both. I remember hearing about some of the murders and wondering how dangerous Melbourne was to live in at the time, reading the book has brought much of this back to me. There were 30 murders over 10 years and at the time it looked as if the police were powerless to stop them. Just to give you some idea of how widespread they were here is a list of just some of the suburbs where a murder took place (in no particular order):
- Templestowe
- St Kilda
- Port Melbourne
- Beaumaris
- South Yarra
- Sunbury
- Chadstone
- Essendon
- Coburg
- Armadale
- Kew
Then to give you a visual of how widely varied they are I’ve created this map the flags are just the suburb and not the specific street, if you want more details you’ll have to read the book (funnily enough you can buy this here). There’s about an hour’s drive between some of these suburbs, some were low socio-economic while others were high socio-economic i.e. there’s little sense in the killings by looking at the suburb.
There are some details published in the book but generally only those about people who don’t care or don’t need to care. Some names have been shortened to an initial while other people are referred to by pseudonym. There are two main gangs talked about, the Carlton Crew and the New Boys.
Photos have been printed in this book, they are photos of the deceased sometimes while they’re alive and other times after they’re dead.
Finishing with a quote from the book.
In the underworld, fringe benefits can be tempting, but the redundancy package is distinctly unattractive. It is small, made of lead and arrives suddenly. You don’t even see it coming.