City of Light by Dave Warner

Paperback:  Jesus Christ. I found one.'

These words are blurted over the phone to Constable Snowy Lane, who is preoccupied with no more than a ham sandwich and getting a game with the East Fremantle league side on Saturday.  They signal the beginning of a series of events that are to shake Perth to its foundations.

It is 1979, and Perth is jumping with pub bands and overnight millionaires.  'Mr Gruesome' has just taken another victim.  Snowy's life and career are to be forever changed by the grim deeds of a serial killer, and the dark bloom spreading across the City of Light.

City of Light (1995) is the Joint Winner of the 1996 WA Premier’s Book Award for Fiction and Winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award.

Author's Note:  What more perfect a backdrop, then, than crime?  For the tone of the book, I decided to use a similar aspect to that which I had used in my most successful and idiosyncratic songs like Half Time At The Football and Mugs Game, a dark slant of suburban Australia seen through the eyes of an “average” suburban bloke – my hero in the novel, Snowy Lane.

I wrote the manuscript as I toured Australia playing music and setting up karaoke shows in Sydney. The first draft was completed in late 1992.  I sent it to Fremantle Arts Centre Press and heard not a word from them for 6 months.

On the very week I had decided to call and ask for the manuscript back, they sent me a note saying they liked the manuscript but wanted a second draft.  The novel finally saw the light of day in the November of 1995.  Chillingly, the fiction of the novel has since been played out in Perth, albeit 20 years later.  A serial killer struck in the same area and under similar circumstances to what I wrote in City Of Light.

In an even more amazing twist, at one time the head of the police task force into the real killings (unsolved as of May 1998) was Richard Lane, the same name as my detective hero, Richard “Snowy” Lane.

About the author:  Dave Warner is an author, musician and screenwriter.  His first novel City of Light won the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Fiction and Before It Breaks (2015) the Ned Kelly Award for best Australian crime fiction.  Once nominated by Bob Dylan as his favourite Australian music artist, Dave Warner originally came to national prominence with his gold album Mug's Game.  

In 2017, he released his tenth album When.  He has been named a Western Australian State Living Treasure and has been inducted into the WAMi Rock'n'Roll of Renown.

Rating:  5/5