Queensland has a long tradition of seeing itself as both separate from and somehow better than the rest of the country. In that light, many might consider Matthew Condon one of Queensland’s best writers; in truth he is a fine writer, period. The ambitious novel The Trout Opera (2007) confirmed his superior ability as a stylist, while the excellent Brisbane (2010) honed Condon’s sardonic cum nostalgic take on a home town whose iconic river he describes as ‘lacking poetry’. Although the central business district is today bordered east and west by twin seventy-plus-storey unit blocks – two giant inverted commas trying vainly to give significance to the nondescript jumble between them – Brisbane remains haunted by what Condon terms the ‘quasi-rural mediocrity’ of its postwar years. No writer is better qualified to take on the task of laying bare the truth of the city and the state it capitalises.

Three Crooked Kings covers the period from Terry Lewis’s unremarkable 1949 entry into the police force to the prologue to his unprecedented promotion from district inspector to commissioner (supplanting Whitrod) in 1976. Along the way, detours are taken into the lives of myriad characters sinful, saintly, or some tangled configuration of the two. The book shows how, upstream on that second-rate river, near where parliament and the police headquarters clung to its edge like lawless outposts, a veritable plague of Kurtzes engaged in methods that, to paraphrase Conrad’s Charles Marlow, lacked all restraint in the gratification of their various lusts – vice, money, power, violence. They included the other two crooked kings of the title, Lewis’s fellow rat-packers Tony Murphy and Glenn Hallahan. Condon assiduously maps out the involvement of all of the key figures in what is a triumph of meticulous research.

Yet Three Crooked Kings is a very different proposition from the works that cemented Condon’s literary reputation. It is not the ‘riveting epic and unrelenting tour-de-force’ that we read about in the associated media release. The mostly fleeting chapters and generally skittish format, doubtless attributable to marketing strategists rather than the author, hardly help in this regard. The book has neither the elegance of Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2003) nor Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1992), nor the dramatic exuberance of a film such as Phillip Noyce’s Heatwave (1982), all memorable examinations of institutionalised corruption with antipodean connections. An inescapable provinciality about the narrative means that it lacks that trio’s universal appeal.

Three Crooked Kings is packaged in a tabloid style, with a silly cover image more in keeping with an episode of On the Buses set in Miami. Regrettably, one of Condon’s employers, the Courier-Mail, has led the way in promoting the book through a range of tawdry cross-promotions. In one example, the newspaper’s Terry Sweetman, emboldened by the kind of hubris only hindsight can muster, weighs into former Chief Justice Sir Harry Gibbs for failing (in 1964, mind) to stamp out the nascent criminal networks of Lewis and his cronies. In another, the occasion of the book’s launching is tied in with an article trumpeting additional evidence against Lewis from a former politician. The unedifying sight of an important piece of historical literature issuing forth through the prism of the News Limited circus detracts from the significance of Condon’s work.

Moreover, the project’s much-touted exclusive access to Lewis’s diaries is arguably overplayed. The excerpts provided are almost uniformly dull (as police diaries are wont to be) and their veracity is inherently uncertain. The ease with which these entries could contain fabricationsmeans that, in terms of establishing with any certainty what Lewis did on any given day, the contents are, to borrow from the copper’s idiom which pervades the story, not worth two squirts of goat’s piss. The pedantic scribblings of a puppet commissioner – whose unlikely residence on the millionaire’s row atop the suburb of Bardon stood in contrast to the bawdy houses and sleazy downtown clubs that helped fund such affluence – tend to distract from Condon’s major achievement, which is to establish beyond doubt the wide-ranging nature of corruption in postwar Queensland. The word ‘rumour’ appears regularly in Three Crooked Kings: while the extent of the institutionalised criminality of that era is now incontestable, many of the precise details remain little more than rumours.

One of my first memories is of watching the great fire on Bardon Hill in the early 1970s. I wonder if Terry Lewis was nearby that day too, pondering the flames as they arrowed up into the sky? Perhaps he was scuttling around the city, busy laying the ground for his imminent rise to power. Years later, as a blissfully (or dismally) unaware twenty-year-old, my own entrance ceremony into the Queensland police was presided over by Lewis and fellow corrupt senior officer Graham Parker.

In 1989 I spent several nights in the dank concrete car park that replaced those burnt-out shops at Bardon, conducting surveillance on the hideout of a murder suspect. Lewis would by then have been holed up in his adjacent mansion, suspended from duty and contemplating where it all went wrong as the Fitzgerald Inquiry(1987–89) approached its scathing dénouement. Appointed to an initial plain-clothes position at Woolloongabba Police Station, I had been placed among a host of older detectives who shambled about the place with defeat etched on their faces, both the undoubtedly crooked and the unjustly implicated certain only of one thing: that Queensland would never be the same again. They were half right, for the only thing more startling than how Queensland has changed since is how it has stayed the same.

The fates of many of these police, along with Lewis, Bjelke-Petersen, and other major players from the disreputable period of Lewis’s commissionership, will be explored in the sequel, All Fall Down, to be released later this year.