Read himself has attracted considerable attention from local and foreign media. His status as a mainstream celebrity was confirmed in May when he was featured in the Australian Story series on ABC television. There could be few less likely candidates for middle-class respectability than the man whose nickname is derived from a penchant for removing his victims’ toes with bolt-cutters, but there he is. And it all sprang from a short book of jailhouse tales.

Read’s writing career has taken a path beyond generally accepted ideas of literary and publishing practice, to say nothing of taste, and even tests the limits of the strong Australian faith in innate talent. Read’s prose is rambling, digressive and contradictory, coloured by alternating outbursts of bragging and self-reproach. Read acknowledges his unreliability as a yarn spinner: ‘Writing about real people and telling true stories means the whole truth cannot always be told.’ This apparent paradox is the sort of thing that exercises the minds of literary theorists in academia, but it is a matter of practical expediency to Read, who was charged and convicted of attempted murder not long after the publication of his first book.

Chopper: From the Inside can most usefully be regarded as a ‘good bad’ book, which George Orwell defines as ‘the kind of book that has no literary pretension but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished’. Such books are by writers ‘whom it is quite impossible to call “good” by any strictly literary standard’, but ‘who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste’.

Read is an authentic voice of the aesthetic underworld as well as the criminal one. His books are not literature, and yet the writing, at its best, is raw and exciting. The crucial point is that the art, such as it is, cannot be separated from the personality of the artist. Orwell notes that ‘one of the advantages of good bad writers is their lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane of the novelist and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative gift may suffer.’ Read’s words are compelling because of the force of the personality that unleashed them.

I know of no other Australian criminal who has written at such length and in such detail about his activities. The only other autobiography by a criminal I am aware of is that of Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith, the New South Wales crime boss linked with drug trafficking, armed robbery and police corruption. This is also an independently published book that was greeted with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. Smith’s memoir, which is aimed at paying back the police who finally betrayed him, proved similarly provocative, in part inspiring the ABC television mini-series Blue Murder.

Read, however, is not just a professional crook serving life with a grudge. It seems to me that his nearest precursor is Ned Kelly. Like Kelly, Read seems to be regarded by many people as a ‘good criminal’ – having only preyed on other criminals including drug dealers like Neddy Smith – but, more than this, he created an image that is larger than life and is the stuff of legend. Smith writes with an ulterior motive, but Read’s books, like Kelly’s Jerilderee Letter, manifest an irrepressible urge for self-expression, despite the resultant legal trouble.

The criminal careers of Kelly and Read contain some interesting parallels. Read describes himself as always having been ‘a bit of a show pony with a flair for the dramatic; that’s what separates crooks who are remembered from crooks no one ever remembers’. Ned Kelly’s flair for the dramatic encompassed costume, stage-gallantry and memorable speeches. The final exchange between Kelly and Judge Redmond Barry is perhaps the best-known piece of dialogue in Australian history. Even while they were on the run, the Kelly gang found time to entertain their captives with displays of trick riding. Ned’s genius for image-making was readily appreciated by theatre producers of the time, the first of several shows based on the gang’s exploits having its début in Melbourne before their capture.

Kelly was not particularly good at crime as such, but he was better than anyone else at being a bushranger. Read’s invention of the fearsome ‘Chopper’ persona – essential for his success as a stand-over man – is similarly ingenious. His development from the awkward, bullied child rejected by his mother and brutalised by his father into a hardened criminal is traceable in the series of mugshots that are included in the ‘plates section’ of Chopper: From the Inside. In the first of these, taken when he was an overweight teenager, Read appeared in a cardigan and rolled-up jeans with a confused, hurt expression on his face, and seemingly on the brink of tears. Nearly twenty years later, the hurt has become a dead-eyed gaze, the relaxed demeanour communicating a murderous intent.

Ned Kelly fashioned his armour out of some old iron, but Chopper’s armour was carved in his own flesh. Apart from the famously absent ears, which were hacked off by a fellow prisoner at Read’s request, his entire body is covered in crude tattoos and gruesome scars, the latter testifying to numerous stabbings and beatings suffered at the hands of other criminals. Read’s indifference to the extreme pain he has undergone and, of course, inflicted is frightening, but even more remarkable is that the unusually hard exterior conceals a talent for description and a capacity for reflection. In Chopper: From the Inside, Read claims to have ‘shot, wounded and crippled 11 men altogether’, only two more than the number of books he has written.

In terms of their reputations as writers, the gap between Kelly and Read is wide. Ned has begun to be accorded true literary status more than a century after his death. In his introduction to the newly published Jerilderee Letter, historian Alex McDermott asserts that Kelly’s text prefigures Irish modernism and mentions it in the same breath as Joyce’s Ulysses. Peter Carey, one of a large number of writers, dramatists, artists and filmmakers whose re-imaginings have enlarged the Kelly myth and deepened its mystery, was quoted in a recent round of interviews as having heard echoes of Beckett as well as Joyce in the text. Although such assertions could not withstand serious critical scrutiny, they signal that Ned Kelly has, at last, gained acceptance as a writer.

Read may have a valid point when he observes in Chopper 4: For the Term of His Unnatural Life that his crime writing is subversive merely by virtue of the fact that it is true: ‘I notice when other writers shit-can my books or are asked to act as critics in relation to my books, they are always fiction writers. These people see true life crime as a threat.’

There is, of course, a large amount of respectable prison writing produced by those sent to prison because of what they wrote and others who write because they are in prison. Wilde himself wrote the sublime ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’. It would be tempting to dismiss Read on ethical grounds, but this would also exclude writers such as Jean Genet (pimp and thief) and William S. Burroughs (drugs). If Genet and Burroughs are deemed worthy of serious critical attention, then, in due course, why not Read?

Read writes not about what he imagines but what he alone knows. His prose style is disarmingly intimate and confessional, and he appears to write purely out of a need to express himself, and not in order to justify his actions. Each book features documents and photographs that relate to Read’s criminal career. These include his criminal record, prison psychiatric reports and police pictures of the blood-soaked body of Siam ‘Sammy the Turk’ Ozerkam, a petty villain whom Read admits shooting to death but of whose murder he was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence.

‘Chopper’ is thus both the subject and object of Read’s writing. His books are autogamous, as much space is devoted to Read’s shedding his battered criminal skin and becoming what he describes as ‘an observer and a writer’. By setting down the troubles of his past and present, Read is engaged in a kind of self-therapy. His is not a literary career; indeed, he regards the trappings of authorship with a mixture of bewilderment and contempt. Autograph-hunters, he says, regard him as a ‘freak’. His most devoted fans are similarly unlettered, with one female admirer telling him that she had only read two books in her life, Chopper 1 and 2.

The story of the semi-literate thug who became one of Australia’s biggest-selling authors has the potential to enter publishing mythology. According to his editors, Read bombarded them with three hundred unsolicited letters on small pieces of prison notepaper, which he had written at night by the light of the television in his cell. These epistles were the basis of the first book, with the same method being used to compile three subsequent volumes.

The notoriety gained by the first book meant that it subsequently became difficult to convince prison censors that Read’s letters were not being used to profit from his crimes. After the third book, Read was forbidden to write by the prison governor and resorted to subterfuge in order to transmit his manuscript. There would be few, if any, other Australian writers who are obliged to work under such conditions. Certainly, the writing has made him a more visible subject of police inquiry, and his confessions can only serve to lower his reputation before a court of law. Writing may have made Read more law-abiding, but it has also forever fixed him in the minds of others as a dangerous criminal.

The absence of style matches his material, which, for the most part, is a collection of violent and blackly humorous yarns. His account is at odds with the requirement of conventional crime fiction for narrative coherence and a mystery capable, ultimately, of resolution. Plausibility, however, is not the same thing as truth. As Read observes: ‘An act of violence, whether a broken glass in the neck, or a bullet in the body, is over in the blink of an eye, and to write about it should not take more than a page or two. That is why I will never be accepted as a proper writer by other writers.’

In the first of Read’s four attempts at fiction, which are covered in volumes five to eight, the narrator concedes that coherence is elusive: ‘Not all situations within the criminal world and its many twists and turns can be figured out. Not everything has an answer.’ Read’s writing disrupts the fantasy of completeness that crime fiction, like science fiction, creates for its readers. By virtue of its mere existence in print, Read’s work gives the lie to Hannibal Lector and any number of fictional villains. Most violent criminals, Read reminds us, are not evil geniuses, but in fact display a childish inability to control their lives and anticipate the consequences of their actions.

In classic crime fiction, the disruption to the social order in the end always has an explanation, and the movement towards resolution keeps the pages turning. What used to be called ‘vulgar suspense’ is exploited even by such self-consciously literary novelists as Vladimir Nabokov. Intoxicated by the master’s lyricism in Lolita, it is easy to forget that what we are reading purports to be a criminal’s confession to murder and child abuse. Without the murder plot to hold it together, Lolita would be a purely scenic representation of the American landscape in which drama is absent.

Conventional narrative modes are constructed in accordance with what Roland Barthes called the ‘hermeneutic code’ so as to prolong the reader’s basic desire to know what happens next. Readers of crime fiction expect the unexpected and can be confident that all the important questions raised along the way will ultimately share in the one explanation. Read’s method, however, violates this code as readily as the man who wrote them has offended against the criminal code.

In the books there is no narrative line, no suspense, just a series of sensations that Read admits can be very pleasurable: ‘It is no use denying it, I got turned on living a life that would have frozen most men’s hearts with blind fear.’ Although he has written four attempts at crime fiction, it is not his forte, for the simple reason that he rejects its conventions, just as he has eschewed the values of normal society.

Read’s fictional stories defy logic and common sense, featuring the most wildly improbable situations. Narrators who tell their tale over a hundred pages or so while they are dying of gunshot wounds, crimes that turn out to be ludicrously paranoid conspiracies, and perfunctory violence and sex do not work as fiction in Read’s hands.

They do, however, work in his autobiographical idiom. Orwell’s observation that among good bad writers ‘there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, [rather] than erudition or intellectual power’ is borne out in Read’s first four books, but the subsequent fictional quartet is laboured.

For its part, Read’s most recent book Chopper 9: The Final Cut was written after his release from prison and, although it marks his return to autobiography, it lacks the urgency and grit of the first four volumes. Prison made Read as a writer; life on the outside has restored his liberty but dulled his imagination.

Part of the appeal of the early books is their complete lack of pretension and artfulness. He does not blame anyone else for what he became: ‘I know it’s popular these days to talk about all the abuse you got as a child. Personally I’d rather keep the worst bits to myself.’ As Australian vernacular autobiography, Read’s self-proclaimed ‘unfortunate life’ is the dark companion to more respectable accounts such as A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.

Read’s life of crime is a mixture of low life and, bizarrely, high principle. The criminal world he portrays is one in which the social constraints that limit most of us to the odd white lie or petty deceit do not apply. In the midst of the carnage of gang wars and the torturing of drug dealers for money, Read places an impossibly high value on loyalty and friendship. He is at his most sentimental when speaking of fallen ‘comrades’ who have died in prison and on the mean streets of Melbourne, a grotesque caricature of the stories of mateship told by Anzac veterans. Many of the photographs in Read’s books are stiffly posed handshakes with fellow criminals, as formal in their way as any sepia-tinted portrait of yesteryear.

This distorted concept of mateship leads to sub-romantic gestures that verge on insanity. Read’s first book was written while he was serving a fourteen-year sentence for kidnapping a judge in an attempt to force the release of a friend from Pentridge. That same friend later stabbed Read almost fatally for his troubles. Characteristically lacking in bitterness, Read describes this betrayal as heartbreaking, and it is difficult not to believe him.

As with Ned Kelly, ‘Chopper’ is genuine and also a myth. Designed originally to terrorise his intended victims, the Chopper image is waiting for a Sidney Nolan to transform it. A prototype iconography appears in the instantly recognisable cover image of the author in silhouette posed with one of his many guns, which is varied on each volume. Chopper is already the basis of a character called Blackwell in William Gibson’s novel Idoru, but the character pales against the original. As Gibson concedes, ‘Mr Read is a great deal scarier than Blackwell’. Distasteful though the prospect may seem, perhaps Chopper will outlast us all, including the man who created him. Mark Brandon Read is proof of Lord Henry’s theory that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age.