It’s been five years since I last posted in my ‘2, 2 and 2’ series featuring writers talking about specific aspects of their new books. I love hearing about those kernels of inspiration that lead a writer into a new work, and also about how their works connect with particular places. The third ‘2’ is different for each writer, and either the writer chooses something important to their work or I choose something I’m curious about.

Up to late 2020, I had featured 56 books. A chance reference to one of these posts recently made me think it’s time to revive the series.

David Whish-Wilson was my last guest, so it is entirely fitting that he should be the first now, and I’m delighted that he agreed!

David is an impressively prolific writer, having published eleven novels and three creative non-fiction titles while somehow also managing to teach creative writing at Curtin University in Perth and to create stunning-looking knives—this last possibly very handy for a crime writer! His crime novels have received two Ned Kelly Award shortlistings, and his last, Cutler, was shortlisted for the Danger Awards and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.

David’s new release, O’Keefe, is the second in his Undercover series (following on from Cutler). Here is the blurb:

Fresh from his exploits on the high seas, undercover operative Paul Cutler assumes a new identity to become Paul O’Keefe.

Paul is tasked with stepping into the shadows to reveal the mysteries surrounding a surge of Mexican cartel meth flooding Australian streets. Assigned to infiltrate a newly appointed security company at Fremantle Port, he discovers a clandestine world of off-the-books operations, and a business front that goes far beyond mere security. There’s a dangerous game afoot over who gets control of the port’s smuggling operations, and O’Keefe is caught in the crossfire.

A pulse-pounding thriller that takes a hard look at the Australian ‘cocaine gold rush’, where maritime crime meets the ruthless currents of the underworld.

Over to David…

2 things that inspired the novel

The first thing is that I wanted to follow on from the maritime theme of Cutler, which was set on the high seas amid the depredations of a modern industrial fishing vessel and all that entails. I greatly enjoyed writing Cutler, but because my protagonist was the only English speaker on board the vessel, it limited my enjoyment in terms of writing dialogue in the Australian vernacular, something I remedied by setting O’Keefe largely in Fremantle port, amid a mixed bunch of smugglers, local characters and policing officials.

What really inspired O’Keefe was coincidentally seeing an old friend from the Netherlands in a news bulletin following the murder of Holland’s best known journalist, Peter de Vries, in 2021. I was watching a late-night YouTube video about the murder and there was my friend, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years, distraught and grieving, a member of the public who’d gathered outside the journalist’s home. I became interested as a result in the pernicious influence cocaine money is having on Dutch and Belgian civil society, with the murders of lawyers and threats against politicians and judges, to the point that some have begun to label these two countries ‘narco-states’ (in the same vein as Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, etc.). Given the high price of cocaine in Australia (the most expensive country in the world, bar two Middle East countries where drug possession carries the death penalty) and the fact that we’re per capita some of the largest users of cocaine in the world, I began to follow local events more closely, seeing some of the early warning signs of what has happened in countries like Holland, Belgium and parts of Spain and the Balkan states (where cocaine money brings violence, but also mass political corruption and the erosion of trust in civic institutions). I wrote O’Keefe as a way of situating that research in a local context, using examples of things that are on the public record as happening here already, and indicating the potential for some of the more serious things that have happened elsewhere.

2 places connected with the novel

This is probably my most Fremantle-centric book, despite the frequency of settings here in earlier Frank Swann and Lee Southern novels (and in some of my non-fiction). O’Keefe is a work of fiction, and there’s no suggestion that what I write about is actually happening now in the port (where I write, looking across at it), but I loved revisiting some of my favourite haunts in a contemporary context, when my earlier novels were all historical in some sense.

Even though what guided the setting of the story here was the port itself, the emotional momentum behind it was the awareness of the consequences that the so-called ‘war on drugs’ has meant for similar places, especially due to the extraordinary amounts of money generated by cocaine smuggling specifically, when large bribes can be offered without affecting the bottom line, when large amounts of money can be used to buy political influence without affecting the bottom line, and when well-funded violence is ruthlessly used to silence those who threaten business interests.

Two sobering thoughts

One quote contained in the book that really describes the way this particular branch of organised crime works is the terrible choice that people in positions of influence are forced to make between accepting either ‘the bribe or the bullet’. O’Keefe is written as a crime thriller, an entertainment for those who enjoy the genre, and designed to be enjoyed by anyone whether they’re interested in drug policy or not, but behind the thrills and spills is the reality of this quote for the characters in the story, but also sadly for many people caught up in the business reality of the world’s most lucrative recreational drug.

I highly recommend anyone interested in the failures of the war on drugs to read British journalist Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream. Treating drug addiction as a medical issue and decriminalising drug possession (such as in Portugal) will inevitably result in some degree of social harm; however, given the destabilisation of nation states caused by drug cartels and traffickers, the horrific violence associated with the international drug business, the overdose deaths and the incarceration of drug users and small-time dealers worldwide, the wastage of police resources and the fact that wherever there is prohibition there is organised crime, and wherever there is organised crime there is political and police corruption, it’s incredible to read in Hari’s text that the near universal prohibition on recreational drug use is the result of a single, troubled, moralistic, hypocritical and highly motivated American public servant, and that things could have so easily been so different.

O’Keefe is in stores now
Find out more at Fremantle Press
Follow David via his website or on Instagram