Simon Collinson

How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling is sold as a crime novel, but this is a crude categorisation for an unusual book. Mr Big is more like a fictional memoir; the story of Nick Smart, a high-school graduate who signs up to work as a jackaroo at the remote Palmenter Station, but quickly discovers that it is a front for a people-smuggling outfit. He then kills the station’s murderous namesake and takes over the operation.

Reports about the Mossad often have the unfortunate trait of reading like a John le Carré novel. We hear of spies assuming false identities and injecting poison into the ears of Israel’s enemies, or of a Mossad director beginning his weekly meetings with the question, ‘Who are we going to assassinate today?’ Unfortunately, most of these stories are true. As well as enhancing the agency’s notoriety, the Mossad’s outlandish methods serve to distract from their less exciting but more consequential activities. They also obscure the more worrying truth about intelligence agencies: they are run by ordinary people, and ordinary people make mistakes.

A number of such mistakes are evident in the story of Ben Zygier, the Australian–Israeli man who recently died in an Israeli jail under mysterious circumstances. Zygier grew up in Melbourne, found Zionism, and moved to Israel to work for the Mossad. A few years into his career, however, he was arrested on unknown charges and secretly held in isolation in an Israeli prison, where he committed suicide on 15 December 2010.

Fremantle is rapidly becoming a preferred setting for novelists seeking to explore the hidden costs of the mining boom. Within weeks of the publication of Tim Winton’s Eyrie, which is haunted by the crime and gritty emptiness of the city’s rough side, we now have Getting Warmer, Alan Carter’s second novel and the sequel to Prime Cut (2011).

Matthew Condon is a writer who confounds expectations. He followed his prize-winning epic novel The Trout Opera (2007) with Brisbane (2010), a meditative exploration of the city’s rich history. In The Toe Tag Quintet, he turns his hand to crime. This is not a novel but a series of novellas about a detective’s exploits following his retirement to the Gold Coast. The stories are consecutive but distinct, a mosaic structure not unlike the one Condon used to great effect in his début collection, The Motorcycle Cafe (1988).