Get Rich Quick by Peter Doyle

Publisher's Synopsis

Sydney, 1950s. The war is getting colder, the skirts are getting shorter. Time of the six o'clock swill and the big hangover. Home of the most corrupt police force money can buy. The unruly element is going mental for that low-down dirty bop.

Billy Glasheen Esquire, lurk merchant and milk bar cowboy, chases the big pay-day through a web of bent coppers, loose women and mad reffos fighting for causes no one remembers.

ASIO is looking under the bed for commos, Little Richard is looking to the skies for the Second Coming. But Billy's no mug - Big Money is the favourite and he's backed it for a win.

Good times, good sorts and bad luck have kept Billy poor, but hey, it's a new day, a new scam...another chance to GET RICH QUICK.

My Review of Get Rich Quick by Peter Doyle

The first point that should be stressed about this book is that it is a work of fiction, not a self help book that promises clues on how to make your fortune. Get Rich Quick is a hardboiled thriller that delivers a wild ride through the underworld of post-war Australia.

The setting is Sydney in the 1950s and the opportunities for making fast money seem to be limitless for people prepared to be imaginative enough to extort it. Billy Glasheen is just such a man, a self-confessed lurker, prepared to get into any dirty game if it looked like the pay-off would be worth it.

Peter Doyle is responsible for a wild ride through post-war Sydney as Billy sneaks along the fringes of the nasty underworld, taking little bites while carefully trying to stay out of the way of the big boys who would eat him alive. Rigged horseracing, drugs, the blossoming rock 'n' roll scene, political and police corruption are all on the agenda as Billy's trying to Get Rick Quick.

When the story starts it's Sydney 1952 and Billy Glasheen finds himself in a tight spot, set up for the murder of stand over merchant and all round despicable guy, Charlie Furner. Anonymous tip-offs, witnesses who heard Billy threaten Furner and a planted murder weapon all help to make things look pretty grim. Even more grim is the fact that the most feared copper Detective Sergeant Ray Waters is on his tail. You would think the most prudent course of action would be to get out of town as quickly as possible, wouldn't you, but that's not Billy Glasheen's style. What is his style is the coordination of a devious horseracing scam.

This is just the first of a many of money-making ventures Billy is involved in over a 6 year period, some legitimate but most decidedly not. He dabbles in a little bit of package delivery between the Federal Government and a sinister cell of Croatian separatists. he is left holding the take from a jewelry store heist with a group of stand-over bullies bearing down on him. He's not above extorting money from any or all of these situations because he has a knack for coming up with an ingenious plan that allows him to make the best of any situation and it's this reason that the story works so well.

Billy Glasheen is a very busy man, operating on a steady diet of whiskey, benzadrine and grass he is constantly on the move either keeping a step ahead of the law, international terrorists or standover merchants. The result is a busy story, always a scam cooking, always a dodge being played, always an angle being explored. Peter Doyle writes in a chatty colloquial style which is appropriate because he is speaking in the first person from the point of view of Billy Glasheen. It's a rough and tumble approach and mirrors very closely the style of speech used in Australia at the time. And this is where a warning is necessary, a lot of the dialogue both internal and external is heavy on Australian slang and contains many references to local events and landmarks which would be very difficult for an international reader to follow.

Doyle also did a great job of capturing the era in which he set the story, largely through the use of products or brand names that are now defunct. The dimly remembered past is immediately brought back when Billy stops his car to get petrol at a Golden Fleece service station, smokes his Craven A cigarettes and buys a couple of bottles of Flag Ale *shudder*. He also gave a smattering of cameo roles to some real people such as Little Richard, Eddie Cochrane, Johnny O'Keefe among others. There are some nice moments of by-play as Billy has an unexpectedly big influence on these now famous people.

Danger is a constant presence as one would expect when operating an endless string of small-time rackets. This is a humorous hardboiled novel mixing the old formula of gambling, drugs, music and politics in an original and thoroughly entertaining book. If you can track down a copy I can recommend it and then suggest you might like to try the sequel, Amaze Your Friends.