The television series ‘Underbelly’ has stirred up a lot of interest in organised crime and corruption in this country. Drugs, cops and power, it seems, don’t make a great mix in civilised societies. In crime novels, however, they’re fertile territory, packed with questions of trust, doublecrosses, naked greed and plenty of cold, hard cash. P M Newton worked in the NSW police force for 13 years and it shows in the details of this crime novel. The Old School is set in Sydney in the early 1990s when corruption was being exposed in the police force. It traces the career of young undercover detective Nhu ‘Ned’ Kelly as she (yes, it’s a she, for a change) investigates how a couple of dead bodies came to be buried in the foundations of an old Bankstown building. Naturally this leads Ned into the dark heart of Sydney politics and its old school policing, as well as her own family. I liked the fact that this novel steered away from the ‘traditional’ setting of Kings Cross, concentrating instead on Bankstown in western Sydney. While the story was reasonably well plotted, it was the details in this book that made it seem authentic.
Shane Strange is an ex-bookseller and writer. He is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Canberra. This review originally appeared in the July 2010 issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine. You can read about the current issue here.
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Tags: fiction, P M Newton, penguin, The Old School, Viking
