Alex Dook seems to enjoy putting ordinary people through the ringer. In his first book Gunpowder Creek, a mother has to drive a dangerous package through the Western Australian hinterland in order to save her son. Along the way she finds she has survival skills that she never knew she had. His follow up, Nothing Personal, is very different but follows a slightly similar trajectory. The main character, Lola McKenzie, is a fairly ordinary if struggling young woman, until she comes into possession of something that puts her in the middle of a gang war.
When Nothing Personal opens Lola is struggling. She is supporting herself and her father, who was scammed out of his savings, and working a dead end job in a car parts shop for a lecherous boss. The opening finds Lola using her limited funds to buy back a necklace of her mother’s that her father had pawned. With very little money coming in then has to deal with a freak accident when an owl flies into and smashes one of her windows. So when her shady boss Darren accidentally leaves his safe open following a dodgy deal she falls to temptation and takes the brown paper bag full of money. Little does she know that it is the USB stick at the bottom of that bag that has all of the value.
The other main character in this story is Bradley Parker, the eldest son of a local crime boss and whose family runs a protection racket. Bradley is desperate to prove himself and move up in the family business in competition with his half-brother Johnny. Bradley’s father is sick and the family is starting to come under pressure from another gang. But there is a reason that Bradley has been kept on shakedown duty. Bradley is not a particular effective or competent criminal. But it is Bradley who is sent after the USB stick and when he brings along his stoner offsider Crusty this leads to further complications.
Although plenty of characters revolve around her, Lola is at the heart of this book. She is torn by the idea that she has needed to steal money to survive but also is not blind to the opportunity that the USB stick represents. Lola tries to be a criminal but is, unsurprisingly, not particularly good at it. And while readers might question some of her decision-making it is very much consistent with her very amateur status in the world of crime. Central to this is the relationship with her father in which she has become the carer and which is further complicated by issues that readers will discover as they get into the action. Much like Dook’s debut, it is this parental relationship (although flipped in this case) that gives the book its emotional centre.
Nothing Personal this is very much noir territory staked out by the likes of Hitchcock and Tarantino. It is a crime caper featuring a plucky civilian who finds herself in criminal waters, a shady police officer and a bunch of try-hard criminals and it is all centred around a MacGuffin (the USB stick). There is plenty of violence which raises the stakes and while it is not exactly comic, Dook does employ the type of dark observational humour used so effectively by the likes of the Coen Brothers. And this style is supported by the setting of suburban and outer-urban Perth – a mainly working-class landscape of suburban streets, takeaway joints and warehouses.
Dook is one of a few Western Australian writers bringing that part of the country into the crime fiction spotlight along with authors like Lisa Ellery and Emma Styles. And Nothing Personal is also part of a welcome recent Australian crime trend to bring the action back into the cities. Many of these narratives are also focussing on characters who shade on the wrong side of the law. Narratives that draw on the small-time noir tradition. Some other Australian authors in this milieu at the moment include Fiona Hardy (Unbury the Dead) and Tanya Scott (Stillwater) in Melbourne and Lorraine Peck (The Second Son) for Sydney.
Nothing Personal is an engaging package. A sometimes violent crime tale set in the Perth suburbs anchored around a plucky, desperate protagonist who is just trying to get through to the next payment to her father’s creditors. And Dook peppers the narrative with plenty of great cliff-hangers to keep the pages turning.
Nothing Personal by Alex Dook
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