As with any delving into historic crime, you can trust that some deeper weirdness will reveal itself, at least some of the time.” But once I started digging deeper, I started to find hooks and themes that engaged my interest. “The drabness of 1950s Sydney suburbia, the grim and depressing nature of everyday crime back then meant it was a bit harder to find anything for me to really come to grips with.

It was a project that first started in 2011 and Peter admits that progress was at first slow: Those images came from the first half of the 1900s but in his latest book he journeys deep into suburban Sydney during the ‘50s and ‘60s, for a highly engaging chronicle of “crime and mishap” – complete with numerous photographs and his own illustrations. In his latest book, Suburban Noir, author Peter Doyle steers well clear of the tabloid approach that many of these docos and bios invariably adopt.ĭoyle is not only a celebrated writer of crime fiction and winner of two Ned Kelly awards, but the curatorial saviour behind the publications City Of Shadows and Crooks Like Us, which brought to life a remarkable collection of forensic photographs from the archives of the Justice and Police Museum. Cold case TV shows have recruited former well-known police detectives in an attempt to re-examine unsolved murders, and mini-series have dramatized the so called ‘underbelly’. Ex-crims have cashed-in with sensationalised, ghost-written biographies, often more fiction than fact. During the past two to three decades in Australia we have seen a rash of books and television programs focusing on the more notorious aspects of true crime.

City of Shadows by Peter Doyle