_{Cover Image: Perth author David Whish-Wilson. Image courtesy Fremantle Press.}

Free World by David Whish-Wilson.

“Free world” is prison slang for everywhere beyond the wall. David Whish-Wilson’s latest novel spends two-thirds of its length inside a Perth remand prison, the rest finding out how little the phrase means outside. The epigraph, from Wilde’s De Profundis, sets the tone: in prison one learns “that things are what they are and will be what they will be.”

It’s December 1999. Farrell, a disgraced former premier, is on remand for leaning on a public servant on a developer’s behalf (a whiff of WA Inc there). His cellmate and paid minder, the old armed robber Gary Coleman, has died of methadone stirred into his Milo. Farrell’s wife hires Lee Southern to get himself arrested and take the dead man’s bunk. Lee’s real client is his father Daniel, Vietnam veteran, desert survivalist and dope grower. He did time with Coleman in Fremantle Prison and wants to know why his friend died.

Southern first appeared in True West (2019), a 17-year-old in 1988 Perth caught between bikies and neo-Nazis. I Am Already Dead (2023) made him a bouncer and apprentice investigator. His mentor is Frank Swann, the whistleblowing cop turned PI of Line of Sight (2010), Zero at the Bone (2013), Old Scores (2016) and Shore Leave (2020), an unofficial history of Perth from 1975 to 1989. Swann is here too, older, drafting contracts on his Fremantle veranda.

Whish-Wilson was born in Newcastle in 1966, grew up in Singapore, Victoria and WA, and spent his 20s in Europe, Africa and Asia, including four weeks in a Congolese jail. He taught creative writing at Casuarina Prison in his late 20s and now runs the writing program at Curtin University. There are also the historical novels The Coves and The Sawdust House, the undercover-cop thrillers Cutler (2024) and O’Keefe (2025), and three works of nonfiction, among them Perth for NewSouth’s city series.

The Casuarina years show. The pod’s built from small, exact things: velcro-strapped KT26s, electronic doors that open without the warning of keys, Farrell scraping the inside of a banana skin with his thumbnail. Daniel’s survival rules (tuck your shirt in, let no one touch you, wear a mask but remember it is a mask) become the book’s organising idea. The set pieces are superb. Tripping on acid beside Roy, an old lag with Ed Hardy’s Shiva across his back, Lee watches a boy tuck a razor blade under his tongue. Roy lays out the yard’s factions on a chessboard. A shower-room fight ends in a hooded beating in the punishment unit. Farrell, all comb-over, barbiturates and Wagner on the Statesman stereo, is a fine grotesque, his charm “a useful substitute for character”.

When Lee finally walks out of prison, the novel changes gear. Suffice to say things move fast – with coincidence possibly doing much of the work and Lee’s detective ex-girlfriend Lisa Malone squaring one crime scene too many.

The prose is punchy and plain, lyrical only about birds, rivers and easterlies. Dave Warner, whose City of Light (1995) worked 1970s Perth before his Broome-set Daniel Clement novels, writes with more pop-culture comedy. Alan Carter’s Cato Kwong procedurals, from Prime Cut (2011), turn a sardonic eye on the mining boom. Whish-Wilson cares less for procedure than either; his territory is criminal families and the institutions that shape them, closer to Garry Disher’s Wyatt novels than to Jane Harper’s rural noir.

Y2K passes quietly. At the close, three ravens lift off Lee’s ute and fly back over the prison fence. Free World is easily as good as its predecessors. But its prison chapters are as good as anything in recent Australian crime fiction.

Fremantle Press, $34.99, 272pp