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This page lists novels and non-fiction by Peter Doyle.

Cover images, when possible, are for an early Australian edition and a more recent paperback or digital edition.

By Peter Doyle
- novels & story collections
- non-fiction

Get Rich Quick

Peter Doyle

1996

"Sydney, 1957. Billy Glasheen is trying to make a living, whether running a gambling scam, shifting stolen jewels, or greasing the wheels during a hair-raising tour by Little Richard and his rock 'n' roll entourage. But Billy's schemes always cross with the plans of the city's big players, an unholy trinity of crooks, bent cops and politicians on the make. Now he's in the frame for murder and on the run from the cops, who'll happily send him down for it. Billy's no sleuth, but there's nowhere to turn for help. To prove it wasn't him, he'll have to find the real killer."

Amaze Your Friends

Peter Doyle

1998

"Billy Glasheen, lurk merchant and low-life, can't take a trick. The past has caught up with him in the form of Fred Slaney, Sydney's meanest, crookedest cop, who wants ten thousand pounds to keep quiet about Glasheen's involvement in the death of a fellow cop. Billy isn't the killer, but he's in it up to his neck and he's an easy target. He's given a simple choice: pay up in six months or take early retirement, six feet down, looking at the sky. But making quick money can be slow work. Billy's dodgy mail-order business selling betting systems and lucky monkey's paws to the mugs isn't going to cut it - he needs a real source of income. Increasingly desperate and with a dozen scams on the boil, he relieves his stress by sneaking off to an opium den in Chinatown. The trouble is, it isn't just Slaney who's on his back, and Billy's deadline faces a serious hurdle when he lands in jail on trumped up charges. Amaze Your Friends picks up where Get Rich Quick left off and is an hilarious romp through the underside of Sydney at the turn of the decade."

The Devil's Jump

Peter Doyle

2001

"August 1945: the Japanese have surrendered and there's dancing in the streets of Sydney. But Billy Glasheen has little time to celebrate; his black marketeer boss has disappeared, leaving Billy high and dry. Soon he's on the run from the criminals and the cops, not to mention a shady private army. They all think he has the thing they want, and they'll kill to get hold of it. Unfortunately for Billy, he doesn't know what it is . . . but he'd better find it fast. Set in Australia in the years following World War II, Peter Doyle's novels brilliantly explore the criminal underworld, political corruption, and the postwar explosion of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll."

City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs, 1912-1948

Peter Doyle with Caleb Williams

2005

"In the late 1980s a vast collection of forensic crime photography, created by the New South Wales Police between 1912 and 1960, was rescued by the Historic Houses Trust from a flooded warehouse. This book draws on Peter Doyles extensive research into these fascinating and often eerily beautiful images of everyday misadventure in Sydney between 1912 and 1948. Reproduced here to stunning effect, the reader is struck by the power of the photographs to transcend their provenance in police investigation and crime scene recording, to offer breathtaking historical revelation, and to come alive in their own right."

Echo and Reverb

Peter Doyle

2005

"Echo and Reverb is the first history of acoustically imagined space in popular music recording. The book documents how acoustic effects-reverberation, room ambience, and echo-have been used in recordings since the 1920s to create virtual sonic architectures and landscapes. Author Peter Doyle traces the development of these acoustically-created worlds from the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to the dramatic acoustic architectures of the medieval cathedral, the grand concert halls of the 19th century, and those created by the humble parlor phonograph of the early 20th century, and finally, the revolutionary age of rock 'n' roll. Citing recordings ranging from Gene Austin's 'My Blue Heaven' to Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train,' Doyle illustrates how non-musical sound constructs, with all their rich and contradictory baggage, became a central feature of recorded music. The book traces various imagined worlds created with synthetic echo and reverb-the heroic landscapes of the cowboy west, the twilight shores of south sea islands, the uncanny alleys of dark cityscapes, the weird mindspaces of horror movies, the private and collective spaces of teen experience, and the funky juke-joints of the mind."

Crooks Like Us

Peter Doyle

2009

"In the 1920s Sydney police began quietly assembling a gallery of the citys most light-fingered, fleet-footed, silver-tongued rogues con artists, magsmen, housebreakers, thugs, gunmen, shoplifters, drug dealers, pickpockets and hooligans. These extraordinary images resurfaced in the 1980s, long after the original paperwork had been lost and the crooks, the cops and all who remembered them had passed on. Based on years of research into police files, court records, newspapers and other sources, Crooks Like Us offers a glimpse into the difficult lives of these fugitive souls what they did, who they hurt, who hurt them, where they came from and, sometimes, where they ended up."