History

Among the strange books I've collected over the years is a melancholy volume of photographs, designed as a supplement to the 1944 NSW Police Criminal Register. It's a sad collection of mugshots of unhappy lawbreakers, accompanied by short descriptions, and some paragraphs about their known misdeeds. I've often thought the book would make a good source document for any novelist trying to create characters to populate the pages of their hard-boiled crime stories. Published in the war years, it reeks of the leftovers of The Great Depression, and features many uniformed service personnel as both perpetrators…