Chopper 6: No tears for a tough guy

Chopper (Floradale/Macmillan) #6

by Mark Brandon Read

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read is Australia's most famous standover man and one of its most prolific authors. He has written eleven volumes of memoirs and a crime fiction bestseller. Now, from inside a maximum security jail where he is serving an indefinite sentence, comes his sixth book.He returns to the inner-city backstreets that were his stomping ground for twenty-five years. Only a man who lived where the law means nothing and problems are solved with a gun, knife or iron bar could take the reader into a criminal sub-culture of violence, death and betrayal. Most can only imagine what it would be like. Read doesn't imagine it. He was there.

Genres: True Crime

223 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read is an Australian ex-criminal who wrote a series of semi-autobiographical and fictional crime novels.
--from wikipedia

Reviews

[David Sarkies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tales of Collingwood
31 May 2020

I can just picture the conversation that occurred in Risdon Prison before Chopper became a famous author. No doubt he was well known for being about to tell some ripping yarns,

Prisoner: Hey Chopper, ever thought about writing a book?
Chopper: Me, hell, I didn’t even finish high school! How I could I ever compete with that Dostoy-bloody-ofski?
Prisoner: Nah, I reckon people would eat it up. Anyway, what have you got to lose? It isn’t as if you’re going anywhere.

A year Later
Chopper: F**k me dead with a corkscrew! Can you believe it!? I’m a f**king best selling author!

Canberra
Little Johnny Howard (Prime Minister of Australia): You say Mark Brandon Read has becoming a top-selling author?
Some Random Minister: Yeah, his books are at the top of the bestseller lists.
Howard: And who is he pray tell?
Minister: Well, he happens to be this guy serving a life sentence in Risdon Prison for basically being a standover man. Oh, and they plan on making a movie about him as well.
Howard: Well, we can’t have this, prisoners making money writing about their life of crime, that just isn’t right.
Minister: What, writing about a life of crime, or prisoners making money?
Howard: Ah, both I guess.

And this is where the problem lies, because it isn’t as if Chopper was actually writing the truth. Hardened Crims, especially those who are able to tell stories in the way that Chopper tells them, no doubt embellish a lot of facts, and tell quite a few porky pies as well. In fact, one of the sayings of the late Chopper Reid was ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn’.

Anyway, this book was written after he was told that he was no longer allowed to write about his own personal experiences. Mind you, that didn’t stop him from making a decent chunk of money from it either, namely because while these stories are said to be fiction, he is still writing based upon his experiences as a standover man. The other thing is that it wasn’t as if he kept the money, namely because a bulk of it went to paying for lawyers to get his sentence overturned. As others have suggested, this meant that the taxpayer wasn’t paying for his appeals. Then again, as the legal system goes, if you have a lot of money, then you can afford to pay for a good lawyer.

Another thing about this book is that it sort of does shed some light on what the inner North in Melbourne used to be like. Hell, it probably is still a bit like that, but it certainly has been gentrified somewhat, and the pubs that are mentioned in the book are certainly nothing like the pubs as they now are, having all been turned into hip and happening places full of young people who certainly aren’t connected with the Melbourne underworld. In fact, it is interesting reading about a number of pubs that I had visited over the years and realising that these pubs have certainly changed a lot.

This book seems to follow the story that he began writing about in the previous book, and we continue to follow these characters’ lives. However, as is probably the case in the real world, the names tend to change, and the characters certainly don’t last all that long. Yet, despite that, many of these characters are still talked about, literally becoming legends in their own right. Mind you, he does divert a couple of times, with one of the stories taking a step back to the 60s, and another one simply being set in prison, where one character is basically waiting for his release, which is pretty much the next day. Oh, and there is also an interesting one about how the makeup of the gangs had changed, where initially it was really only the Australians and the Italians, however as the nature of Australia changed, so did the makeup of the gangs. Yet, despite new nationalities coming in, a lot of the gangs would end up mixing with others literally becoming a melting pot of cultures.

Yeah, this book certainly was interesting, and Chopper clearly writes from experience, something that a lot of crime writers really do struggle to do. You can also see that he certainly isn’t restrained in the way that other writers tend to be restrained, namely due to his background, which also does tend to set these books apart from much of the other rubbish that tends to hit the shelves. Mind you, the one problem I do face though is trying to find some of his earlier works – they just don’t seem to be available in the second-hand bookshops, namely because they probably fly off the shelves as soon as they hit them (and the physical copies available on Amazon are pretty expensive – like in the hundreds of dollars in some cases).

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great. Really loved it. Didn't want to put it down. Gangsters in Australia is a new twist.