Tim Howard

Ryle Winn was a rural valuer and jack of all trades before being laid low by a brain tumour in the mid-1990s. He turned to writing and produced a string of successful titles, including a memoir of his illness, Out of the Blue (2009), and numerous collections of bush yarns and personal anecdotes.

Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs with it, discarding all but the most cursory details of the source story.

For once, it’s fine to judge a book by its cover. Stephen Ives’s busy image of Buster Keaton captures, in co-editor Lisa Greenaway’s words, ‘the essence of [Going Down Swinging] the slapstick/serious; the cultural ruckus; the unwavering stare’. Going Down Swinging is an unapologetic miscellany, distinguished by its vibrant eclecticism.

‘Ice is everywhere,’ observes the narrator of Ice, Louis Nowra’s fifth novel, before succumbing to a bad case of the Molly Blooms and giving us a few pages of punctuation-free interior monologue. No wonder he’s so worked up: ice, in Ice, really is everywhere. It is subject, motif, organising principle, and all-purpose metaphor; it is death, life, stasis, progress; it is seven types of ambiguity and then some. For variety’s sake, Nowra occasionally wheels out a non-frozen alternative – taxidermy, waxworks – but the design is clear: these are merely different nuclei around which the same cluster of metaphors gather.'

The Nugan Hand merchant bank was the nexus of one of the most significant criminal conspiracies in Australian history. Established in Sydney in 1973, Nugan Hand was backed by the CIA in concert with domestic and international crime organisations. It acted as a front for a plethora of illegal activities, including gun-running, money laundering and tax fraud, most of which were ancillary to the main business: drugs, specifically heroin. Its legacy lives on in the heroin market that the bank helped to build and entrench.

Deception is an historical novel that adds to the emergent school of literary fiction concerned with dramatising historical investigation. As with any subgenre, certain conventions abide. The protagonist tends to be male, dour, a bit of a loner. His quest is usually sparked by a relic of some kind: a cache of letters, a photograph. Ultimately, history is shown to impinge on the present; the musty conundrums surrounding the relic are resolved; the protagonist may experience a vague epiphany.