A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: N Is For Non-Fiction

 Non-fiction crime writing is usually called “true crime”. I’ve written some myself(see below). But I also read quite a lot of it while researching for my own book. 

True crime is very popular. People do want to know what really happened. Kids love it too; I had five copies of my book on my library shelves and it was borrowed so much that all of them were falling apart by the end of the year. 

One of the books I used in my research was Underbelly: The Gangland War by John Silvester and Andrew Rule. The two authors are both crime journalists. John Silvester is still writing a crime column for the Melbourne newspaper The Age. In fact, the book is based on a series of newspaper articles they wrote about Melbourne’s gangland wars, which were big news at the time. Everybody was talking about them, and the criminal families who were fighting and killing each other. One of them, drug trafficker Tony Mokbel, escaped to Greece by boat, but was caught in Greece and brought back. He has, at this writing, been in prison for 18 years, but is appealing and has been let out on bail. 

The book was fictionalised into a TV series, though that wasn’t shown in Victoria when it came out because the subjects were on trial at the time and showing it might have led to bias. A bit silly, really, as it was easy enough for Sydney people, for example, to record it for family and friends in Melbourne, but I suppose they didn’t want to take a chance. 

If interested, you can buy it in ebook, and I’m guessing you can still find it in print.

As I said above, I used it as part of my research for my children’s book Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly. Yes, I wrote a book about crime for kids, about 9 to 12. One of my Year 7 students told me that it had been withdrawn from the shelves at his primary school because kids in  Year 2, including himself, wanted to read it! I gave him a copy, signed to him with “You are now old enough to read this.” He read it in a weekend, bless him.

It includes the gangland wars, but historical stories from the Batavia incident (17th century mutiny off the coast of Western Australia) onwards. I made sure that there were the sort of gruesome stories kids love, but not written to create any nightmares for the young readers. Some, like the April Fool’s Day robbery, were written for fun. That was the story of two idiots who went to rob the Dandenongs restaurant the Cuckoo on April Fool’s Day and left with nothing but a bag of stale bread rolls the manager was taking home to feed his chickens.  

Here is the trailer made for YouTube. It was created by a teenager on work experience, but I thought he did a very good job. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aT12MtGyxoA&pp=ygUbQ3JpbWUgVGltZSBTdWUgQnVyc3p0eW5za2kg

I am still proud of this book, which was shortlisted for the Scarlet Stiletto Award. 

If you are interested, the publisher still has a few copies for  Australian readers, but I have some copies I can sell you if you want print. Or you can get it easily in ebook, both Apple Books and Kindle.