Dryly poetic evocation of human folly and violence

Wyatt By Garry Disher Text, 274pp, $32.95

Wyatt By Garry Disher Text, 274pp, $32.95

ELMORE Leonard, really a genre in his own right and a novelist of power and economy, once advised never to start a novel with something as bland as the weather. Garry Disher goes one better: he jumps right into his new Melbourne crime novel in the first sentence. "Wyatt was waiting to rob a man of $75,000."

Then he moves forward with almost alarming energy, his noirish narrative propelled in violent fits and starts, through reversals and false solutions, before coming to rest in an abrupt final shootout.

In Wyatt, Disher revives the series' character loosely borrowed from Richard Stark's famous hard-nosed thrillers about an American career criminal known as Parker. Parker defines amoral: he murders, robs, and extorts as the need takes him. Just as Wyatt does. And like Stark, Disher never invites us to judge Wyatt; just to watch him work. Motivated only by self-interest, the professional thief was without conscience, the success of his life measured only in birthdays. Robbery, sometimes murder, always betrayal; too many grievances and shot nerves, too many bolt holes with low ceilings, wiry carpets the consistency of a kitchen scourer and Aborigines on black velvet in wooden frames on the walls.

The last Wyatt book, The Fallout, appeared in 1997 and Wyatt was tired. For the first time, he was beginning to question his life. Disher left him to hide away while he developed his brilliant Detective Inspector Hal Challis in an ensemble procedural series set on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula.

Disher's police fiction is a kind of barometer of prevailing social forces and tensions in the community, especially in the outlying badlands of Australia's coastal towns, where he sets acts of deep, dark, destructive psychology.

With Wyatt, he's back in the big smoke. All we learn at the outset is that the thief has been away for some years. The rest is rumour, the kind that makes people apprehensive, and that's fine with Wyatt.

He needs money but technology has outstripped him. He's obliged to carry out small-scale robberies because he doesn't have the skills to bypass hi-tech security systems or intercept electronic transfers and is wary of going into partnership with those that do.

In this brilliant caper, he supervises a jewel heist, the target an international courier of stolen items, courtesy of inside information from Lydia Stark (her surname a nice touch), the smart ex-wife of small-time crim Eddie Oberin.

Disher's prose is as straightforward and effective as Wyatt himself. His narrative structure is less straightforward.

He works in the third person, initially, following Wyatt's point of view, then shifts, often unexpectedly, to the perspective of his various antagonists, always returning to Wyatt.

Sometimes events are seen more than once from those different perspectives, creating a sense of inevitability in the forward momentum of events.

Wyatt is presented to us largely through his own consciousness, and we come to understand and empathise with his illegal activities as a way of life and to share his pride in the combination of daring and skill with which he carries out his scores.

The seductive, epigrammatic monotone of Disher's writing is its greatest strength. This is prose you often stop to read aloud, though you may feel guilty for the enjoying dryly poetic evocations of paranoia, human folly and violence.

Like Stark's Parker, we are drawn to Wyatt because of his professionalism, his lack of hypocrisy and his willingness to risk everything to achieve his ends.

In this novel we also respond to his growing affection and loyalty to Lydia Stark.

While he can't offer her any satisfactory conclusions to their awkward, tentative relationship, he can see the inescapable truth in the old saying that you are bound forever to those you save.

Disher forces his reader to track the progress of his characters towards their almost certain deaths: deaths to which, at the book's beginning, they appear, unconsciously or even consciously, to assent.

Wyatt is so compelling it simply has to be read in one sitting.

Graeme Blundell writes Crime File on these pages.