The Dream is the second on Iain Ryan’s projected quartet of novels centred around the corrupt environment of Australia’s Gold Cost (just south of Brisbane) in the 1980s. Following on from The Strip, The Dream digs deeply into the relationship between corrupt police, property developers, organised crime and politics. And if that sounds a little familiar it may be because American crime writer James Ellroy did something similar with his own quartet of crime novels set in Los Angeles in the 1950s.
Detective Bruno Karras (apparently the last non-corrupt cop in Queensland) returns from The Strip as one of three point of view characters. When The Dream opens Karras finds an anonymous envelope on his car windscreen filled with photographs that deliver both a mystery and an implied blackmail threat. The photos have been left there by Amy Owens, who not only works for crime kingpin Colleen Vinton, but is also the daughter of dying property developer Victor Owens (who also get some short point of view chapters). In around all of this is political fixer Mike Nicholls who has been asked by his boss the “God Minister” to sort out a stalled amusement park development. Meanwhile a series of high profile bank robberies is plaguing the Coast.
The Dream is dark stuff – every character is compromised and corrupt or corrupted in some way – the narrative is full of drugs, violence and death. Ryan delivers the prose to match this. Riffing on the style and even the structure used so effectively by Ellroy in his LA quartet. Three characters from different parts of the tale who end up coming together, muscular language – short sharp sentences, one word onomatopoeic paragraphs, and full of verbs – and a labyrinthine plot which also ends up cohering in a large set piece finale.
The Dream is not a book for those who like their characters particularly complex or their dialogue nuanced. But as a punchy, in-your-face expose of a particularly corrupt time and place in Australian history, Ryan does the job.
The Dream by Iain Ryan
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