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 Early February. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The Christmas break is memory, the long days of beach and pool and backyard deckchair. Now is the time of relearning to wear the work harness, the surly, fretting, chafing time.

Since late October, Tarmac, concrete, brick, tile, steel and glass have stored the sun. Everything is warm to the touch. The huge city around the pincer-clawed bay shimmies in its hot and dirty air. Night is only a little cooler than day. People drink too much, tempers shorten, crimes of violence increase. When sea breezes come, they take the smog no further than the surrounding hills, where colder air repulses it, sends a toxic blend of hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, aldehydes and ozone – the Spillane Eddy – to circulate the metropolis. Morning exhaust fumes take a 150km round trip and drivers breathe them on the way home. And hanging over the whole state is the fresh memory of the worst fires in its history. After the murderous inferno of Black Saturday 2009, no February will ever be the same.

This is the place and time where Truth plays out. Truth is not primarily a novel about crime or the police. It is about a week in the life of Inspector Stephen Villani, head of Melbourne’s Homicide Squad. Villani’s life and his work have ensured that he views the world through crosshairs. In his 25-year journey through the ranks, he has seen everything:

Villani thought about the dead. He remembered them all. Bodies in Housing Commission flats, in low brown brick-veneer units, in puked alleys, stained driveways, car boots, the dead stuffed into culverts, drains, sunk in dams, rivers, creeks, canals, buried under houses, thrown down mineshafts, entombed in walls, embalmed in concrete, people shot, stabbed, strangled, brained, crushed, poisoned, drowned, electrocuted, asphyxiated, starved, skewered, hacked, pushed from buildings, tossed from bridges. There could be no unstaining, no uninstalling, he was marked by seeing these dead as his father was marked by the killing he had
done, the killing he had seen.

He has also seen dramatic changes in the city. Now it is plagued by drugs, alcohol and violence. Police work, too, has changed. Now everything is tainted by politics and politicians: police numbers, priorities, appointments, even investigations.

In this sweltering week in February, fires are burning across the state, threatening to form one unstoppable, all-consuming front. In the path of one fire, in the high country, is the property where Villani grew up, where his father lives, where stands a forest the man and boy planted, tree by tree.

Villani’s story begins with a young woman found dead in a glass bath in a millionaire’s building. It is immediately apparent that Villani’s superiors and the police minister have no enthusiasm for homicide’s investigation. Then three
men, bandits, are found tortured and killed, a media frenzy develops, and Villani finds his career in the balance.

Enough said. More will spoil the book for readers.

Truth is in many ways the novel I’d always wanted to write: a story about a man caught in a wreck at the point where policing, politics, the media and big money intersect. I hope it is the end of an eight-book writing apprenticeship that began with Bad Debts, ten years ago.

But I don’t suppose it really began there. Where do writing careers begin? I loved reading from the time I could understand simple sentences. Soon I was demanding first go at my mother’s Woman’s Weekly. Some would say that the results of this early and barely comprehending exposure to stories featuring widowed sheep-station owners with glints in their steely grey eyes are now on full display in my books. People can be so cruel.

I soon moved on to what I now know to be crime novels, beginning with Enid Blyton’s hardboiled stories of middle-class English children making mincemeat of inept baddies. All the stories involved caves and secret passages. I had at this point not actually seen a cave or been in any building that could possibly harbour a secret passage, but the concept was immensely appealing. And remains so. I also read Westerns with titles like Ramrod, Rimrock, Crossfire Trail, High Vermillion, Play a Lone Hand, Heller with a Gun, The Burning Hills, Last Stand at Papago Wells, and the immortal Hondo. About this time, strongly influenced by Max Brand (whose real name, improbably, was Frederick Schiller Faust), I wrote my first novel, a Western called Kid Bellamy, Gunslinger, in pencil in a blue-lined classwork book. Then – I was about 12 – I read a book-club edition of Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke. This was a few steps up from the Famous Five: seriously bad people, a foggy London full of menace, an ornate style. Against the wishes of the librarian, a thin-lipped pioneer doorbitch, I switched to adult novels.

Much later, I became aware that there were Great Books all educated people had read. Pathetically anxious to join this group, I read these books. Some proved to be entertaining. Well, a few. Most of them proved to be stunningly boring, in particular those translated from Russian and French. The most highly regarded were the most boring.

This was embarrassing. It was me, it was my fault, I was not worthy of these great books. Needless to say, I couldn’t tell anyone this. I still haven’t. I went back to reading books that captured me in the first few pages – Greene, Amis, Mailer, Irvine, Macdonald, Updike, Farrell, McCullers, Leonard, Fleming – books that drew me in, made me smile, moved me, made me think, made me see some things in a different way.

The years passed. Life happened, countries changed. Writing early and late, I had many stabs at producing a novel. The books were always abandoned because I became tired of them – tired of writing them, exhausted when reading what I’d written. Then one day it dawned upon me. In spite of my experience with the classics, I was trying to write a Great Novel. And so one winter evening, after a day spent editing a high-school education curriculum, for I had been reduced to this kind of desiccating work, I started writing Bad Debts.

It differed from my earlier starts because I had a vague plot and it had characters I liked. But what really set it apart from the earlier aborted efforts was that I now didn’t give a damn whether anyone would describe what I wrote as literary fiction. In creating Jack Irish, a complex man who is no stranger to pain and love and sorrow,
who values friends, who knows guilt and recklessness and heedless exultation,
I found my vocation. I found that I could enjoy writing and I could enjoy being a savage editor of my own prose.

Needless to say, reading the literary canon was the most intelligent thing I have ever done. Many of the classics may be tedious and mannered, but they furnish the mind with serious handmade objects. You do not want to kit out your permanent place
of residence with wobbly chipboard flatpack Ikea Allen-key books. 

Truth is the end of the road that started with Bad Debts and Jack Irish. I have no idea of its worth but I know that it speaks to me. It isn’t always easy to read because it wasn’t meant to be. It isn’t strong on explaining things and it requires a bit of attention to follow what’s going on. In part, it’s a book about people who get up in the morning and go to sleep with violence and death and who are marked and set apart by these things.

Villani started in the normal way, he smiled and said, ‘Hello, Jude, I’m the chaplain from St Barnabas’ and he kicked Luck’s feet out from under him, he fell sideways and Villani stopped him meeting the concrete, not with love, laid him to rest, put a shoe on his chest, tested his weight, moved it up to the windpipe and pressed...

Truth is a novel of violence and the bad things people do. It’s a novel about childhood and family and love and the barbed-wire ties that bind us all to our mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. I hope to write a better novel – for the moment, this is as much as I can do.