David Whish-Wilson's blog

I recently came back from a few days tour of the Somme region with my father and brother, who both served in the armed forces as younger men. My father wanted to see where his grandfather had served as a stretcher bearer, before being gassed and sent home, where he spent the next years bedridden - too weak to do anything except struggle to breathe, before he mercifully died. The horrific numbers and the tragic stories from the Somme battlefields are well known.

It was a Wiradjuri bloke I know who once told me that, from his point-of-view, every book written in Australia is a work of crime fiction, especially those books that have nothing to do with the ‘true history’ of this country. He was squatting on the old mission land outside Dubbo, a visible reminder to the council (which was considering developing the land) of the generations that had lived there and whose descendents had moved into town, to ‘vegemite valley’ as he called it.

Line of Sight has just been chosen to kick off ABC 720 Gillian O'Shaugnessy's new bookclub, in January 2011. More details to follow, but in the meantime see -  http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2010/11/22/3073413.htm?site=perth&section=competitions

There's going to be a public event at the ABC studio's in East Perth on January 25, where I'll be interviewed by Gillian and will answer questions from the book club audience.

KILLING: Misadventures in Violence, Jeff Sparrow, MUP, 2009

I was standing at the true crime section of my local bookshop yesterday and got talking to an off-duty copper. Like all WA coppers, he was very familiar with the Shirley Finn ‘story’. We went and had a coffee. Turns out he didn’t know anything new, but he was pretty forthright in saying that the hit was done by WA detectives, or at the very least they’d helped cover it up. He named all the familiar names, and the familiar reasons why. ‘Bad times, they were’ he reckoned. ‘Bad times and bad bad bastards.’