This latest Crawley caper, The Japanese Job (A&R Blacklist, $10.95 pb), is set in the supposedly reformed post-Fitzgerald Sunshine State, where the body of a Japanese tycoon named Yasuhiro, fifth-richest man in the world, is found encased up to his neck in cement with a steel rod through his heart. There’s a message scrawled in the cement, too: ‘Australia’s not for sale.’ There’s wishful thinking for you.

Enter Ray ‘Creepy’ Crawley, a seasoned, cynical spook who describes himself as a ‘no-frills kind of guy’, a sort of antipodean Alec Leamas and every bit as convincing as the Le Carré character. I must say I find it impossible to visualise him as anyone other than that wonderful actor, Bruno Lawrence, which is part of his appeal. Crawley flies East-West, stays in basic hotels and has simple tastes. He also has a botched marriage – his wife, Mandy, is overseas screwing around, he believes – a couple of teenage kids, one of whom turns out to be gay, unhealthy habits and a generally disorganised, unsatisfactory life. He’s normal, in other words.

What we have in this book is a clutch of high-ups – army brass, politicians, public servants – called the Loyal Alliance, who look back nostalgically on the good old days and are hell-bent on destabilising the Labor Government. Their operative arm is the Differs, a pathetic bunch of ex­soldiers, veterans of Korea and Vietnam, who will do anything to prevent the sale of Australia to Japanese interests. One of these has his head shot off, after which Crawley and his semi-retired off-sider, Huck, get in well and truly over their heads, fighting the Yasuhiro Corp, a Yakuza hitman, Diggers and, of course, their own duplicitous superiors. Along the way there’s just enough breathing space for the ever-libidinous Crawley to exchange intimacies with a beautiful Japanese-American, Mary Kurosawa, a key player who’s a bit too ambitious for her own good.

The Japanese Job is an action­packed thriller, frequently violent – there’s a particularly nasty bit in which a woman has her throat cut with a shard of glass by her psychopath husband – funny, insightful and right on target theme-wise. Corris is at his best when he’s at his toughest, unimpeded by current ideologies, and they don’t come much tougher or any more satisfying than this.

The enterprising people at Wakefield Press in South Australia deserve a big pat on the back for their bold new venture, a re-issuing of what they call Classic Australian Crime Gems. These are handsomely-produced quality paperbacks sporting great covers, especially in the case of The Misplaced Corpse (Wakefield Press, $12.95 pb), written by one-time show business entrepreneur, A.E. Martin, and first published in 1944. Simultaneously re­released is Patricia Carlon’s The Whispering Wall (Wakefield Press, $12.95 pb), a Hitchcock-style suspense story which, oddly, has been published overseas but never before in this country.

The glamorous, red-headed, nineteen-year-old P.I. of The Misplaced Corpse is Rosaleen Bosanquet, who calls herself Rosie Bosanky to rhyme with swanky. She’s a thoroughly modern – if unsophisticated – young woman of the world, who has this to say about herself:

I have a snubby bit of a nose and blue eyes and a figure which sticks our far enough in the right places because my pappy always taught me that it is a good idea for a young girl to leap outa bed by dawn’s early light an’ do a lotta physical jerks, an’ I dress to get the best out of it ... a Paris gown may entice a man around the block but it’s what’s inside it will lead him around several hemispheres.

Pretty naughty stuff for 1944, and as this passage indicates, Rosie has little respect for the King’s English. In fact, a foreigner would probably be advised to read this book with a dictionary of Australian slang and underworld colloquialisms handy.

Rosie has a mission: her father, a policeman, was gunned down by a thug named Stalozzi in New York. One way or another she’s going to even the score, but in the meantime, there’s a rich young man named Roy Stockforth Adams whose exotic wife Malwa has disappeared. He naturally wants her found, but when he takes Rosie to his mansion, there’s a strange man lying in his wife’s bed with a knife sticking out of his neck. Roy’s the suspect of course, but Rosie knows he didn’t do it. She takes the case on, mixes it with dangerous oily types, uncovers an elaborately-concealed gambling den and drug operation and is eventually taken prisoner by a gang of kidnappers, who are also holding Roy’s wife for ransom. But Rosie’s a tough and resilient little firebrand. She’ll need to be, and she’ll need that derringer she carries in her garter, too.

The Misplaced Corpse is a well­woven whodunit, but Rosie herself is its main drawcard. She’s street-smart, resolute, sexy, Runyonesque and a laugh a minute with her malapropisms and other verbal miscarriages. Rosie would have made a terrific serial character, but unfortunately there’s no more where this came from.

Patricia Carlon’s The Whispering Wall is a claustrophobic, edge-of-the­seat thriller in the style of Lucille Fletcher’s radio drama Sorry, Wrong Number and Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, in which a crippled Jimmy Stewart is helpless to defend himself against a killer living in the flat opposite and whose activities he has closely observed. In The Whispering Wall, Sarah, a paralysed stroke victim, lies ‘like a fish on a slab’, with everyone treating her as if she’s a vegetable when in fact her brain is in perfect working order.

The occupants of her house – a nurse who patronises her, a niece who wants to sell off furniture, boarders who invade her privacy – drive her to distraction, but it is when she overhears a murder conspiracy from the room below via a chimney wall that Sarah’s helplessness takes on dramatic proportions. Able only to communicate by blinking, she just can’t get the message across except to a precocious young girl, but then the intended victim, a has-been singer, arrives, and through word games with him she is gradually able to impart fragments of information. The twist comes when the conspirators realise that she is onto them, so Sarah too must now be disposed of.

The book was greeted with rave reviews when it was published in England in 1969, and no wonder – it’s tight, tense, beautifully controlled writing. The perspective of a mute and immobilised woman, boxed in and physically sealed off from events, is an infuriatingly effective one, creating a genuine nail-biter right to the last page.

As with Martin’s book, it is not specifically located anywhere in Australia – evidence of a cringe perhaps or an eye to overseas markets – but since much of the action occurs inside Sarah’s head, this is not a problem. If the rest of Wakefield’s list is up to the standard of these two, there’s a great deal to look forward to in the next twelve months.