Fifty years ago, the Great Bookie Robbery occurred in Melbourne, Australia when a gang of well-prepared robbers made off with millions from a bookmaker that was never recovered. While the large sum of missing monies was well known, what was not as known was a secret stash of diamonds that were absconded with, their purported fate even more mysterious.
Five decades later, Gary Chance, a former soldier of the Australian army who served in Afghanistan, now turned criminal, finds himself in a botched robbery of a cult. Though the operation is a bust, he gains a new partner, Eva McCulloch, another criminal who had eyes on the cult’s hidden fortune.
Both searching for that one last job to put their respective criminal lives behind them, Chance and Eva accept a mission from Vera Leigh, an aging socialite/madame/S&M dungeon owner who needs monies to fight ruthless property developers. The new job: track down the mythical diamonds from the Great Bookie Robbery from ages past. With only sparse clues at their disposal, the duo accepts the gig, which will take them to the United States and different cities in southeast Australia, while also being pursued by former accomplices, cult members, criminals, and a retired police officer who all have eyes on the diamonds themselves.
Andrew Nette’s Orphan Road is an Australian crime novel, though with a greater emphasis on the adventure aspects of the criminal underworld rather than the criminal element proper. The protagonists of Orphan Road are “good” criminals in that their adversaries are all unsavory characters themselves, be it a ruthless developer, White Nationalists, a greedy former police officer, and so on, making the morals depicted in the novel black and white, rather than the grey area that is found in more noir-ish crime stories.
The lead protagonist, Chance, is incredibly fun to follow. He is akin to a Jack Reacher-style character: former military, nomadic, off the grid, cunning, finding themselves in the middle of bigger criminal schemes, and extremely proficient at bedding the ladies. The big difference between the two characters is that Reacher is far more noble and near invulnerable compared to Chance, while Chance is a much more grounded character and less of a Gary Stu.
The adventure/mystery of Chance trying to track down diamonds, for all purposes lost to history, it fairly exciting, especially considering the roadblocks and dead ends he and his cohorts encounter. There is a tiny bit of globetrotting, fisticuffs, and gunplay, but the forefront is the mystery. Nette crafts a new mystery (the diamonds) and anchors it to a real-world event (the robbery), which gives the story credibility and buy in from the reader. This does cause a small problem: how does one graft this new mystery when decades have passed and most historic players are long dead and leads dried up. How can in-world amateur sleuths and professionals alike fail to find the diamonds, but Chance is able to get a new trail? The clue is fairly lackluster, a newspaper clipping that, in theory, anyone else would have access to, but its serviceable to get the heroes on their adventure.
The strongest component of Orphan Road does arise from Nette trying to work within these real world confines of lapsed time inherent in old cold cases, and that is its critique on the past and nostalgia. The majority of players in Orphan Road are fairly old, in their 70s and 80s, having served in Vietnam, or East Coast American Mafia of the 80s, or lived through other events. The Melbourne that Chance remembers has been demolished and gentrified, which is supposed to be the ultimate fate of Leigh’s establishment. Leigh, herself, tries to retcon the past by positing it was a time when criminals had class, code, and honour. Chance is quick to point out this rose-coloured view of old school crime, and even confirms it firsthand when he encounters the American mafia, still holding onto their old ways as if in a Scorcese film. Everything in Chance’s mission is old: the archive of files and photos around the diamond caper, the Ford Falcon that is driven, the Luger that is the sidearm, the ruins of burnt down buildings, and even the cult at the beginning of the novel, who worship the lost continent of Atlantis. While there are many adversaries in Orphan Road, the spectre of the past is the prominent one.
The weakest component, on the other hand, is the end of Orphan Road. Not so much the end-end proper, which does nicely wrap up all loose ends of Chance’s adventure – diamonds and all, but it is the in between the book’s climax and then end revelation. After the climax, the adventure resolution is still not within hand, so the book changes its focus from a time-is-of-the-essence thriller to a leisurely explore around and let a large passage of time elapse pace, which kills the momentum. This is unfortunate because everything up to this point is a real page turner, coupled with heightened stakes as Nette is unafraid to kill off a pivotal characters.
There is a passion from Nette on display in Orphan Road, and this is no doubt due to his love of the pulp genre, police procedurals, and gritty crime cinema, all of which he has written essays and commentaries about. With Orphan Road, Nette is able to seize a historic robbery, make it even more interesting, and throw in characters like Chance that are easy to become invested in, while at the same time not resorting to the tried-and-true method of pulling rabbits out of the pop culture reference hat. Orphan Road is anchored historically, despite being contemporary, and it succeeds extremely well.
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