Onwards
on Oct15 2009
It has not taken me long to let my brain wander into another story and I’m back in the head space of my adult novel set in Sydney in the thirties. Prostitutes, gangsters, deserters. Debauchery at it’s finest.
I stumbled upon this fantastic book by Peter Doyle called ‘Crooks Like Us’ which is a collection of photographs that were taken in the 20’s and 30’s by police photographers. For some reason crooks and crims were photographed in poses and portraits in addition to mug shots. Doyle suggests it was in order to understand the criminal mind, to see if there were some physical way of discerning the criminal from the respectable citizen. In any case, Crooks Like Us is a fantastic chronicle of mis-fits and fences, rapists, murderers, penny-pinchers and schemers. The pictures seem to strip these people bare, to peel back some veneer and expose a rugged, hardened, resolved physchology. Through these pictures I feel I have an intimate view into the characters that make up the world of my story.
