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How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling is sold as a crime novel, but this is a crude categorisation for an unusual book. Mr Big is more like a fictional memoir; the story of Nick Smart, a high-school graduate who signs up to work as a jackaroo at the remote Palmenter Station, but quickly discovers that it is a front for a people-smuggling outfit. He then kills the station’s murderous namesake and takes over the operation.
- Book 1 Title: How I Became the Mr Big of people smuggling
- Book 1 Biblio: Fremantle Press, $27.99 pb, 220 pp
If Mr Big has a weakness, it is Smart’s essential decency, which can feel exaggerated when contrasted with many of the other characters’ calculated brutality. Readers might find themselves wondering whether such a nice guy could really run a serious criminal organisation. Still, Smart displays confidence and power in his own way, even explaining his management techniques and expansion plans eagerly to the reader: he is a perfectly believable businessman manqué.
Insofar as Smart is also an ethically ambiguous criminal, one both capable of reflecting on the implications of his work and willing to do so, Chambers has his biggest success. It is rare for a book to challenge Australians’ thinking on the ethics of people smuggling, but even rarer for such a book to assume the form of a novel.
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