IAIN RYAN The Dream. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith

Iain Ryan’s latest novel continues his fascination with 1980s Queensland and the tentacles of corruption that captured police and politicians.

The Gold Coast, 1982: Queensland is deep in recession and mired in corruption reaching from the premier all the way down to the beat cops strolling through Southport. The real estate boom planted a string of skyscrapers along the foreshore and flooded the city’s elite with dirty money, but things are drying up. A new theme park, Fantasyland, is stalled mid-build, sending shockwaves of alarm through its underworld investors, and a series of violent bank robberies is terrorising the city. Victor Owens, a dying property magnate, refuses to let go of the world he created:

When I carved this land from the sea, I sold it as Venice-by-way-of-Miami, but it’s better than that. Venice is a toilet, and while the Americans may have invented our way of life, they didn’t perfect it … A place endowed with nature’s blessings and owned by men who can harness such things.

Ryan’s new crime novel is a sequel to his earlier 2024 release, The Strip, set two years after the conclusion of that book’s Diablo murders. Returning to the series is Bruno Karras, a young and uncharacteristically incorruptible Queensland police officer, drawn into the swirling net of crime and corruption surrounding Fantasyland and its investors. Assigned to look into the disappearance of magistrate Phillip O’Grady’s entire family, Karras’ investigation runs head-first into the shadowy system of corruption known by police as ‘the Joke’. Getting caught up in a blood-soaked bank robbery seems like a stroke of very bad luck until Karras realises that the robbers didn’t shoot indiscriminately and didn’t take cash. A ransacked security box belonging to the O’Gradys points to further connections between Queensland’s corrupt systems and the Fantasyland development.

Meanwhile, Amy Owens is a private investigator kept on a tight rein by Colleen Vincent, the most dangerous criminal figure on the Gold Coast. The embittered daughter of a powerful real-estate mogul, Owens is tasked with surveilling Bill Webber, a policeman in trouble for poking around where he’s not wanted. Tailing Bill, she sees him pay violent visits to men connected with the Joke, all of them crooked and all of them perverts. These investigations lead her to our third protagonist, Mike Nicholls, a back-room deal-broker for the National Party who is looking into Fantasyland on behalf of the ‘God Minister’. Unfortunately for Nicholls, he’s just started sleeping with Colleen Vincent.

The Dream follows The Strip both in style and content. This isn’t a bad thing: the plot barrels along, Ryan’s hyper-taut prose dropping just enough details to keep scenes vivid and events as clear as such murky goings-on can be. His recent fiction is pleasingly bewildering, with strange connections between characters surfacing in unlikely places; nobody in Ryan’s Gold Coast fiction is isolated, much like the Joke itself, and these links emerge along with the dawning fear that no world exists outside this bubble of corruption and murder, sudden betrayals and sexual violence.

If anything, Ryan has intensified what he started with The Strip. The Dream is bloodier, more convoluted, and more disturbing than its predecessor, but it also takes us deeper into its characters’ psyches, draws their emotional stakes closer to the bone. Ryan has succeeded in creating three equally compelling protagonists, each of their short, alternating chapters illuminating some dark crevice of the central mystery they are uncovering:

There were a thousand sins, a thousand more. Sins giving way to deals, giving way to other deals, all nested within even bigger crimes. No one could see the whole thing … you can get so dirty, you stop wanting to be clean.

Several key Queensland figures make appearances in The Dream, a treat for anyone with an interest in the era. Disgraced former police commissioner Terry Lewis appears as himself, an appropriately polite and reserved figure rubbing shoulders with Queensland’s criminal elite. Lewis maintained his innocence until the end of his life, last year; his passing may have permitted this cameo. Similarly, Mike Nicholls’ boss, the ‘God Minister’, bears a striking resemblance (in both his political power and physical proportions) to Russ Hinze, Lewis’ favoured police minister dubbed the ‘Minister for Everything’. More references abound.

Australian crime fiction has enjoyed widening readerships over the last ten years, bearing literary sensibilities and rural settings evoking the country’s harsh and beautiful landscapes. Ryan’s fiction pukes all over this image of Australia. Unashamedly rough, mercilessly gritty, and dirtier than a Queensland cop staggering out of the Roxy, The Dream is a uniquely Australian slice of noir – and, quite possibly, a vision of Australia more familiar to its city-dwelling readers.

Iain Ryan The Dream Ultimo Press 2024 PB 336pp $34.99

Ben Ford Smith is an Adelaide-based writer and the co-author of Drugs, Guns & Lies (2020, Allen & Unwin). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Flinders University, South Australia.

You can buy The Dream from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: 1980s, Australian crime fiction, Gold Coast, Iain | Ryan, police corruption, political corruption, Queensland, Russ Hinze, Terry Lewis, The Strip