© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Mugshots: photos from the NSW Police Criminal Register

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…

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Manhunt: the Simmonds escape and arrest, 1959

When Kevin John Simmonds and prison cellmate Leslie Alan Newcombe escaped from Sydney's Long Bay jail on October 9, 1959, the manhunt that followed was the biggest in Australian history. Their killing of a prison guard at Emu Plains Prison Farm - where the pair had gone to steal supplies - guaranteed the full resources of the state would be put behind their recapture. Newcombe was picked up relatively quickly, about a fortnight after the escape, but Simmonds led the police a long chase, becoming in the process something of a celebrity. When the manhunt moved…

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Charlie and the detective: a vintage Australian true crime epic

I am obliged to my friend Elaine Sheehan, the daughter of Charlie Thompson (who, coincidentally, once lived next-door to my mother), for access to many of the documents relied on for this article. One day in June 1932 Newcastle Sun journalist Charlie Thompson, then living in Denison Street Mayfield, received a surprising letter from a neighbour in nearby Dora Street. The author was a retired Victorian detective, Alfred Stephen Burvett, who had a tempting proposition for the 28-year-old journalist and budding author. “My daughter,” wrote Burvett, “has just read out to me an article of yours…

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