True West’s boss, Kinslow, is also a major figure in the fictional neo-Nazi Australian Patriotic Movement (APM); Kinslow recognises Lee, and offers him protection from the Knights at a price. Lee’s SAS-trained survivalist father, Jack, one of the founders of the Knights, had hidden caches of military weapons around the state as well as making his son sleep with an MK II hand grenade under his pillow to toughen him up. Kinslow, who served with Lee’s father in Vietnam, believes the APM will need those weapons and the names of Jack’s suppliers for the coming race war, and tortures Lee to try to learn the locations of the caches. Lee wakes up to find himself in an APM safe house in the care of Francesca, a nurse who steals drugs from the hospital for the APM and injects him with enough morphine for him to be somewhat functional. Kinslow introduces him to the skinheads who are torching Chinese restaurants and pasting racist posters around Perth ahead of the election, when Kinslow intends to run for parliament as a far-right candidate.

Lee finds a gym owned by old ex-cons where he can practise kickboxing, and reunites with his girlfriend Emma, a boarder at one of Perth’s private schools, and participates in bank robberies for the APM while working for True West Towing. Then Kinslow takes him to meet the APM’s real leader, who tells Lee just enough of their murderous plans for Lee to realise how much danger he’ll be in if he doesn’t cooperate.

David Whish Wilson (photograph via Fremantle Press)

Whish-Wilson, now a Creative Writing lecturer at Curtin University and one of the founders of the Northbridge Crime guided walking tour, previously taught Creative Writing in Western Australia’s prison system. Inmates inspired him to write Line of Sight (2010), based on the murder of Perth madam Shirley Finn. Like Line of Sight and its sequels, Zero at the Bone (2013) and Old Scores (2016), True West draws heavily on the darker side of the history of the City of Lights. Readers won’t need to know much about Jack van Tongeren, the ANM, or the murder of wrongly suspected informant David Locke to find this a disturbing and gripping read – partly because neo-Nazis and racist right-wing politicians haven’t disappeared from the news, but mostly because the story and its characters (apart from shock jock Howard Sattler) are fictitious and the plot twists entirely original. That said, for anyone who lived in Perth in the 1980s the novel’s description of the posters with which the ANM defiled the city and suburbs will be an uncomfortably evocative element in Whish-Wilson’s vivid picture of Western Australia, good and bad, from its wildflowers and birds to Sandman panel vans, road trains, and the stink of the live-sheep ships. Fortunately, it doesn’t come with a soundtrack, though if you want to play some heavy metal or 1980s classics to accompany some of the scenes, feel free.

As well as being an excellent hard-boiled crime novel and a treat for lovers of Australiana, True West is a coming-of-age story driven as much by character as by plot. Lee’s character has been shaped by four generations worth of toxic machismo from men who fled city life to survive alone in the bush, living off the land while fossicking for gold. His mother disappeared when he was too young to remember her, leaving him with only a few ex-library books to read. His grandfather, an intermittently suicidal Rat of Tobruk, and his speed-freak father both suffered from PTSD, and raised Lee on a diet of tiger shark and kangaroo meat, Nietzsche, Bakuninist anarchism, The Turner Diaries (the ‘race war’ fantasy novel beloved of Timothy McVeigh and other white supremacists), and a little LSD. Lee is the first of his line to reverse the course and head towards civilisation (well, Perth, anyway), but after fleeing one group of violent sociopaths, he is almost instantly ensnared by another he must adapt to in order to survive. He gradually finds himself developing something painfully like a conscience, but only in the final chapters does he have to make an irreversible choice.