The Big Whatever Read online

  PETER DOYLE was born in Maroubra, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He worked as a taxi driver, musician, and teacher before writing his first book, Get Rich Quick, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Fiction. Two more novels followed, Amaze Your Friends and The Devil’s Jump, as did two more Ned Kelly Awards.

  No one knows Sydney (especially its murky past) quite like Peter Doyle. He combed through the archives of the Sydney police department to put together a highly acclaimed and long-running exhibition of crime-scene photographs and mug shots, as well as an accompanying book, City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948, and recently curated Pulp Confidential, an exhibition of Australian pulp publishing, at the State Library of NSW. Doyle teaches writing at Macquarie University.

  LUC SANTE is the author of numerous books, including Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and The Other Paris: The People’s City. He has also contributed introductions to crime novels and memoirs by Georges Simenon, Richard Stark, and Charles Willeford.

  Also by Peter Doyle

  FICTION

  Get Rich Quick

  Amaze Your Friends

  The Devil’s Jump

  NONFICTION

  City of Shadows

  Crooks Like Us

  Echo and Reverb

  © 2015 Peter Doyle

  Introduction © 2015 Luc Sante

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  A Dark Passage book

  Published by Verse Chorus Press

  PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293

  [email protected]

  Design and layout by Steve Connell/Transgraphic

  Dark Passage logo by Mike Reddy

  Country of manufacture as stated on the last page of this book

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doyle, Peter, 1951-

  The big whatever / Peter Doyle ; introduction by Luc Sante.

  pages ; cm

  “A Dark Passage book.”

  ISBN 978-1-891241-79-6 (ebook)

  1. Organized crime—Fiction. 2. Sydney (N.S.W.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.D69B54 2015

  823’.914--dc23

  2015010045

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Big Whatever

  INTRODUCTION

  Luc Sante

  Peter Doyle, in addition to being a crime novelist, is also a social historian, slide guitarist, university professor, and authority on popular culture, police photography, and recording acoustics. He has acquired fantastic amounts of learning, on disparate subjects of all orders of magnitude. Unsurprisingly, he has done a lot of living, in settings of assorted highness and lowness. It has primarily occurred in Australia. That country, which happens to also be a continent, is a bejeweled anomaly in the American conception of the world. The Australians are assuredly not us, but neither are they entirely them. English-speaking, forward-looking, ex-colonial, dismissive of old-world hierarchies and formalities, inclined to avert its eyes from a gutted and abject indigenous population – Australia is like the United States on another planet, complete with flora and fauna that seem nearly extraterrestrial to foreign eyes.

  Putting it that way might seem like the typical American view of the world, in which other cultures are relevant only to the degree to which they reflect – or threaten – the American project. But the two countries’ ties are long and largely subterranean. Over the past two centuries, Australia and the US have done a brisk, reciprocal trade in boxers, sailors, con artists, and evangelists. Their body of lore and mischief can be glimpsed in the slang terms they hauled back and forth. Then, after World War II, America redoubled its effort to “colonize our subconscious,” in the famous phrase from Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road. It was handy that rock and roll came about just when the Americans badly needed a propaganda weapon that would reach the adolescents of the world. The Australians, through their port cities, received the gospel in tantalizing bits, and yet they were hip enough to be down with the Cornel Wilde look even before the accompanying music clocked in.

  The absorption of American style is a continuous theme in Doyle’s four novels, which form a loose chronicle of those years. Get Rich Quick (1996) begins in 1952; Little Richard makes an appearance, quite literally. Amaze Your Friends (1998) starts in 1957; you hear Lloyd Price and “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid.” The Devil’s Jump (2001) leaps back to 1945; boogie-woogie plays throughout. The Big Whatever hops back and forth between the years 1969 and 1973, and between funk and “longer and longer songs, with drum solos that went on forever.” The books feature Max Perkal, the boy wonder of the 88s, perpetually just one hit away from becoming the biggest star in Australian pop history. They are narrated by his best friend, Billy Glasheen, whose purity of heart fails to prevent him from spending a great deal of time on the other side of the law.

  Because for all that music is continuous in the books, skulduggery is twice as prominent. The shenanigans usually feature some toxic blend of drugs, gambling, confidence schemes, and governmental corruption – dimly but not obtrusively, the foreign reader suspects there are entire strata of allusions, in-jokes, and historical corrections going on outside one’s ken. The plots take long, sinuous routes across time and space, gathering characters, generating subplots, exploding into sporadic violence, frequently ending on a note of pastoral calm. They are as involving and as difficult to reconstruct afterward as any of your Chandlers. The Big Whatever is similar to its predecessors but different. The times have changed, emphatically – youth rebellion has become political, and at least some of the drugs are psychotropic – and they demand a different sort of storytelling. The vehicle is a book within a book, Lost Highway to Hell, a very pointed roman à clef directed from one character to another as a coded message, yet dressed up as pulp, observing all the pulp conventions of plot and character. The nested paperback is, in effect, the back story in semi-transparent disguise, and it presents the reader with the – pardon my French – hermeneutic challenge of translating its fictions into the actuality of the main story. This is a tactic I’ve seen employed nowhere else, especially not in a crime novel.

  In The Big Whatever Billy and Max are up to their usual sort of grift, although the youth culture they’ve long cultivated for their own purposes has, in 1969, become imbued with the chimeric promise of revolution. This is fine with them, up to a point – revolution can provide cover for all sorts of mayhem, but it can also bring additional unwanted interest on the part of the police. But all precautions fall to the wayside anyhow, thanks to the novel’s greatest creation, its agent of discord, Cathy Darnley. “Polymorphously loose,” she was a “party girl and former stripper” – “pure trouble” – “who knew everything and did anything;” “she had powers, heavy powers.” Cathy is beautiful, highly sexed, highly intelligent, and as stable as nitro. She is always the one urging direct, violent action, who takes all the insane chances and makes everyone else go along with her. Thanks to Cathy the gang stage a spectacular triple coup under cover of a Vietnam Moratorium march, and thanks in part to her it all goes terribly wrong. But that was then, and now it’s 1973. The party is conclusively over; the years of lead have descended. Everyone is lying low. Wild poets and drug addicts have gone to ground as blandly respectable shopkeepers in sleepy country towns. Nevertheless, the past is unquiet, and mysteries hover over the story like ghosts, demanding resolution. As a crime novel about bitter survivors confronting t
he excesses of their radical past, The Big Whatever has a genre nearly to itself, barring only Léo Malet’s Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge and maybe some things by Didier Daeninckx.

  Part of the book’s appeal is, inevitably, Australia itself, especially in the extended tour of isolated hamlets in northern Victoria and western New South Wales taken by Billy late in the book, a panoramic sequence that manages to sound idyllic despite the anxieties that await the hero at every port of call, and that convincingly renders the landscape while almost entirely avoiding the longueurs of description, employing chastened language to sketch only as much as the reader’s inner eye needs to see. And then there is the music of the Australian language itself, a matter-of-fact tongue with no illusions, impatiently given to abbreviating any word over two syllables, since after all “afternoon” takes longer to say than “arvo.” There is the celebrated rhyming slang, which makes “moreton” mean “gig” by way of the intermediary “Moreton Bay fig.” And there are coinages of breathtaking directness, such as the irreducible “standover man,” meaning “extortionist,” which plays out an entire vignette in two words.

  Doyle’s great appeal as a writer lies in his position always as the sadder but wiser man, who has played with fire in his day and been sufficiently burned as to render him forever hesitant to pass judgment. He is tender with his characters – excepting of course the traitors and weasels and double-dealers – noting their humor and pathos and vain hopes. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean” – well, they’re not always on the side of the angels, either, or not in most obvious ways. They need cash, they need drugs, they need to preserve their hides. And yet, like denizens of the Old West, they observe a code, while it generally turns out that the forces of order, who have the same corrupted human needs, are very much less inclined to moral strictures. Doyle’s heroes are fully paid-up members of the Johnson Family, the mind-your-own-business gang. In William Burroughs’s words, ‘To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations’.” Doyle knows that everybody’s unavoidable task in life is to avoid the other side: the shits, who often tend to be the ones wielding power.

  The Big Whatever concludes with a mystic vision of a Johnson nation, surviving after earthquake or meteor has taken out large parts of the world, in which “a band of outlaw surfers . . . wait on the high ground for each new apocalypse set to arrive. . . . Anarchists, hippies, heads, blackfellas, musicians, fortune-tellers, separatist lesbians, artists’ co-ops, angelheaded hipsters.” Motor vehicles made from scrap parts are involved. Perhaps we then remember that a leading character’s name is Max, and that he’s possibly not quite right in the head. But that’s par for the course: Doyle’s people are always offhandedly inventing the future.

  THE BIG WHATEVER

  SYDNEY, 1973.

  The taxi was outside the Professor’s house as usual, the motor ticking as it cooled. I dropped my bag in the boot, slammed it down twice before it caught, walked round and got in. It smelled of stale tobacco and air freshener. The fuel gauge looked okay, but sometimes you couldn’t tell if it was short-filled until you’d driven for a few hours. I rummaged through the glove box – a few paperbacks, a broken pair of sunglasses, a cigarette lighter – to find the docket book. Filled out a worksheet, turned on the two-way and drove off.

  I picked up the crippled kid from Drummoyne Boys’ High School. Asked how he was, he said he was very good thanks, and I dropped him home without us exchanging another word. Then the pathology run to the city. After that I collected a couple of bank parcels and took them to North Sydney. Copped a street hail in Clarence, which doubled my take for crossing the Bridge. All except the street hail were regular jobs. They went with the cab.

  At six I stopped into Barrack Motors. A dozen drivers were standing around the food van, gossiping, reviewing controversial radio job allocations, telling stories about their idiot passengers. I listened for a few minutes and drifted away.

  A Legion cab on the opposite side of Oxford Street pulled up sharply enough the tyres screeched, then hung an illegal u-turn at the lights and pulled onto the drive. A guy with long curly hair and half a beard hopped out from behind the wheel and came over, grinning broadly. Brian.

  He asked how it was going. All right, I said. How about him? He shook his head. “First job?” he said, “straight to fucking Earlwood.” A driver hovering nearby groaned in sympathy. Brian gave a quick sideways bob of his head and we moved away.

  “Got any of the old smokables?” he said quietly, but with a comical eyebrow triple bounce.

  “Maybe later. See you on the Cross rank? After eleven.”

  “Ace,” he said, and drove off as quickly as he’d pulled in.

  Back on the road. The sun nearly down, traffic easing off. Time for the private jobs. I stopped into a hotel in Croydon. A fellow in the front bar, perched near the door, was waiting for me. I bipped once and he slid in, said in a flat monotone, “G’day Bill, how’s it going?” I told him it was going good. He directed me to a street in Gladesville, then down a long driveway to a garage behind a brick house. We filled the boot of the cab with transistor radios, still in their boxes – they were the mini type, much preferred by off-course punters. Not much passed between us beyond the directions he’d given me and the money I gave him.

  I took the radios to an address on the northern beaches, which I’d hoped would dovetail with the pickup at Avalon. I unloaded the radios, received a wad of notes, then made a phone call from a booth at Brookvale. Avalon was ready to go.

  I drove to the cottage on the headland where Katie, tan-skinned, dark-haired wife of one-time surf legend ‘Mullet’ Jackson, was waiting. A green garbage bag was by the door, tightly packed. It gave off a musty smell, but nothing too strong.

  “Looks all right,” I said.

  Katie nodded. “It is. But it might be the last for a while. Comes from out the back of Lismore. It’s tough up there now . . . the helicopters.”

  She made coffee and gave me something grainy and macrobiotic to eat.

  “Heard from Mullet?” I said.

  “Three nights ago. Hawaii went very well, he said. Showed the film to the locals. Got a good crowd.”

  “Showed it where?”

  “Some old hall where they put on music films, head films and all that.”

  “Like a scout hall?”

  “Maybe, yeah. He’ll be in California by now.”

  I picked up the garbage bag and headed for the door. Katie said to send her love to Terry and Anna.

  I took the stuff straight to Duke Street. Terry and Anna were expecting me. When we opened the bag the smell filled the room. I put a handful of heads in a sandwich bag, then popped into my flat, a sleepout above an old stable at the back of their house, and took a fifteen-minute nap. I was driving again by ten.

  I saw Brian at the Kings Cross rank, slipped him enough gear for a smoke or two, told him to make sure he took a joint down to Steve in the radio room, kept going.

  I ran hot for a while on street hails, then it went quiet. That was all right; I was heading for a 35, maybe 40 dollar night, easy, not counting the other business. So near midnight I pulled up at St James rank and turned the two-way down low. Took a look at the paperbacks in the glove box. A Western, a Carter Brown, a book of golfing jokes, and a slim one called Lost Highway to Hell. The picture on the cover showed a bosomy girl in beads and a headband, dancing, with a gun in her hand. To one side of her was a bloke with an afro, hunched over a keyboard, while a hard man in the background looked on. I opened it. The title page had been torn out. I started reading.

  I sucked on the square of blotting paper and checked out Cathy in the go-go cage. Shaking and twisting. Her hair swayed and swung and flew. Sweat ran down the side of her face. I kept pounding that Hammond B3, man, playing a fat seventh chord with my right hand, syncopated just the way I knew she liked it. She started to shimmy, and the fringe on her dress, and all those sweet bits underneath, shimmied right along.
Dig the wavy lines. A Van Gogh pin-up. With neon colours. How long had I been playing that seventh? Who knows? I was out of my goddamned tree, dig?

  I looked out at the crowd. Johnny Malone, alias Johnny the Lurk Merchant, his pockets stuffed with trips, stood in front of the bandstand, still as a statue, surrounded by dancers, staring at Cathy. Had he seen her smiling at me?

  Another four choruses of soloing, the music pouring out of the big Leslie speaker like nectar, sweeter with every chorus. I had the holy ghost in me. I mean, I was preaching, children. The tune was Ray Charles’s, ‘What’d I Say?’ Archie took over and played his sax like a crazy angel for another, what, fifteen minutes? My time-sense was blown to hell. The music flowed on and on and the sound turned into a swirling blaze of colour. It filled the discotheque, starting at the ceiling and working its way down, until everybody, Cathy, Archie, the Maori bouncers, Mick at the bar, even my sad-sack partner Johnny, was surrounded by pulsating haloes. Sweet LSD 25!

  And it was like everybody else was seeing the same lights I was. Cathy smiled at me again, and I felt it – I mean physically. Watching the beautiful vibrations coming from all those people in the crowd, I imagined that instead of it being 1969 in the Joker Discotheque in Kellett Street, Sydney – the sweet home of funk I co-owned with Johnny, we were time travellers in some freaky space ship, cruising distant galaxies, and we didn’t need speech to communicate anymore, we just understood each other’s thoughts – you dig? – and when we did need to say something, we used pure musical vibration. Ray Charles was our crazy, blind, all-seeing navigator, steering us through meteor showers, alien attacks and shit like that, just sensing where we should go, and wherever he took us, that would be cool. We’d meet up with other searchers, crazy sweet like us, but in different ways – outlaws, poets, surfers, musicians, sacred prostitutes, mystics, artists, blessed anarchist lunatics – brothers and sisters all.