Bill Robertson

It's hard not to have certain expectations of crime fiction when it's written by a former Victorian Assistant Police Commissioner, as unreasonable or unfair as that may seem.

The first expectation is that the plot should have a strong sense of realism about it. NO WITNESS, NO CASE explores Mafia activities in a way that seemed uncommon in crime fiction. Looking at the machinations behind a Mafia boss attempting to turn an illegal, and dangerous business, into a legitimate activity. That needs influence from the bottom of the chain - the workers in a company through the company management, right into the centre of Victorian politics. It also requires a high level of ruthlessness, hence the awful death of a truck driver that first brings attention to the illegal side of the operation. Drawing these elements together is cleverly done in this novel, with a high, and somewhat sobering level of believability.

The second expectation is that the characters be believable. Here NO WITNESS, NO CASE takes a couple of people from very different backgrounds - one an ex-military widower, farming quietly on his block in Central Victoria. The other the trusted confidant of the Mafia boss. Then he manoeuvres them onto the same side. Which, despite a horribly predictable romantic element, worked reasonably well. Helped by a great surrounding cast though - from the country cop and his wife, through to the Mafia plants in the company, and a particularly slimy politician. There's a bit of heavy lifting in some of these elements - the romantic predictability and the pairing of what's essentially an amateur investigation and some official police work. That lifting is helped by the occasional dare-doing hero type actions that you'd expect in a thriller.

The only minor quibble is by far the most common encountered - dialogue. Way too formal, and often too wordy, there's something about some of the exchanges between characters that clanged.

Around the time of the Underbelly saga in Victoria, somebody somewhere said that the biggest problem with the downfall of the well known crime gangs is that it left a big window open for more ruthless, less obvious players. Given that this story explores a turf war between the Mafia and the new kids on the block - Russian gangsters, there's enough here to make this reader stop and think about the ramifications of that observation.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-no-witness-no-case-bill-robertson… (meer)