Anybody with a passing interest in notorious Australian "identities" in the not so distant past isn't going to take too long to twig on whom Mendoza is based, and that same reader probably is going to be excused for any guesses about the writer who narrates this fictional book.
Basically the story is that a journalist working for The Australian Jewish Times makes a complete hash of a story and ends up being fired by the editor. Circumstances intervene, things happen, he finds himself interviewing / writing the life story of Sydney gangster Jacob Mendoza. Mendoza is what he is, although he does try to wrap it up in a lot of long-winded justification. Klein, the writer, isn't what he says he is. He wraps that up in a bit of a story as well.
Most of Mendoza's story is told in a series of long interviews or monologues, whilst most of Klein's story is narrated by him - aiming obviously for an unreliable narrator scenario Undoubtedly the author has a fine eye and understanding of the characters that inhabit Kings Cross, but that fine eye seems somehow to fall sort when it comes to his two central characters. Mendoza's story is, I suppose, supposed to be hilariously funny - and there were some lines that absolutely raised a smile. It was also seemingly supposed to be confrontational - crude, rude and more than a bit risqué. Which has, after all, been done before and whilst I'm a big fan of writers doing this in our own voice, it has to be a more complete package.
Unfortunately I found KING OF THE CROSS a little too tedious, a little too forced and the few good touches didn't quite compensate.
King of the Cross
Violently funny, brutally incorrect, sly and subversive and addictive... A killer read from a writer who punches both hands and winks at the crowd while he's at it. His protagonist is part punk, part pug, part poet – an anti-hero who reveals his own back story as he gets the King of the Cross to unravel the eerily familiar tale of his unlikely rise from schoolboy pornographer to millionaire philanthropist. Truth might be stranger than fiction but in the hardened artery of Dapin's King's Cross , alleged fiction rings truer than the alleged facts. A cunning stunt that could get him knee-capped. (Andrew Rule, author of Underbelly)King of the Cross is a dazzling novel that explores the criminal world of Jacob legendary Godfather of Kings Cross and for more than four decades, Australia's most powerful and notorious crime figure. To record his epic life story he employs a hapless young reporter from the Australian Jewish Times . As Mendoza unfolds his seductive story of thugs and drugs, murders and mysteries, bikers, bent cops and girls, girls, girls, it emerges that he's not the only one with a past. And as the memoir takes shape, other more terrifying criminals are circling the kingdom that Mendoza built.This is crime fiction as it's never been written before. Funny, edgy, violent, subversive and utterly compelling, King of the Cross is wickedly entertaining.
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