Victorian upside for Underbelly

NINE Network executives, still choking on the banning of television crime drama Underbelly in Victoria, can only look on enviously as the tie-in book flies off the shelves there. Underbelly cannot be screened in Victoria because of a court ruling that it could influence a gangland murder trial. Yet the book Underbelly: The Gangland War, by crime reporting duo John Silvester and Andrew Rule, is available nationally and selling like hotcakes. One month after its mid-January release, it went into a third print run.

NINE Network executives, still choking on the banning of television crime drama Underbelly in Victoria, can only look on enviously as the tie-in book flies off the shelves there. Underbelly cannot be screened in Victoria because of a court ruling that it could influence a gangland murder trial. Yet the book Underbelly: The Gangland War, by crime reporting duo John Silvester and Andrew Rule, is available nationally and selling like hotcakes. One month after its mid-January release, it went into a third print run.

WHY has the book -- the 11th in Rule and Silvester's popular Underbelly series -- skirted the legal problems that have tripped up Nine's big-budget drama? Rule told Overflow that the books -- from which the TV drama was derived -- "are essentially works of journalism". As such, they are "very circumspect about the details of certain things and the names of certain people". The latest Underbelly instalment is published by Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, a homespun venture set up by Rule 20 years ago. Since then it has sold about 1.2 million books, most of them true crime, in Australia and Britain. Not bad for a business that Rule describes as "a big backyard publisher".

PETER Carey's latest novel, His Illegal Self, has attracted some lukewarm reviews at home. Although expatriate writers sometimes complain they are punished by Australian reviewers for staying away, the barbs here have been tame compared with those inflicted on the two-time Booker prize-winner by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani. Kakutani wrote that His Illegal Self, set in Manhattan and an Australian hippie commune, was burdened with "a jerry-built narrative". She concluded that its strengths do not, "in the end, compensate for this novel's ridiculous mise-en-scene or its longueurs and lazy, haphazard storytelling". That's gotta hurt.

IT has taken 23 years, but at last the Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection is up, running and online. The collection was officially launched this month at Perth's Curtin University of Technology, where the eminent novelist, who died last year, taught creative writing. Nothing if not eclectic, the collection includes a biography, short stories and novel extracts, braille adaptations, reviews, and print and broadcast interviews. Fans of Jolley can go to www.john.curtin.edu.au/jolley.

YOU'VE heard of the G-spot, even if you could never find it. Well, life in the bedroom is about to get tougher. Nearly 40 years after its release, a sexed-up, 21st-century version of The Joy of Sex will introduce lovers to their A and U spots, according to London's The Guardian newspaper. Talk about written on the body.

TEXT Publishing has acquired the rights to The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon. Out in July, the book tracks the authors' attempts to source their food within a 100-mile (161km) radius of their Vancouver home. Apparently these eco-sensitive hunter-gatherers went to a lot of trouble to procure locally made bread, separating mouse droppings from wheat grains with a credit card. Whatever floats your boat.

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