Junkie Pilgrim

Wayne Grogan

Crime thriller by wharfie turned writer Wayne Grogan

This is the very bowels of Sydney. A world of heroin, inhabited by junkies and run by corrupt cops and crims.

Junkie Pilgrim by one time wharfie, now writer, Wayne Grogan, does nothing to glorify heroin. His first novel is a grim account of one man's disintegrating body and soul. It is the Kafka-esque metamorphosis of an aspiring scholar into a morally bereft petty thief and drug addict, unable to control his most basic bodily functions.

From here it is but a short journey into the deepest recesses of the Sydney underworld.

Addiction is ugly.

Wayne Grogan tells the story from first hand experience. The writer lived to survive his own descent into hell. He spent some time, shook the habit, went back to university and became a writer.

But Chris Coates, his anti-hero, is not so lucky. He ends where the novel begins, the prey of a killer in an adrenaline charged pursuit through the steel chasms of container stacks at Darling Harbour to the dark alleys of Darlinghurst. Nor does the chase end cold turkey behind bars where caged men prey on each other.

Is it Grogan looking back on his life and realising how he could have ended up?

"True, I was at risk. I'd been to a lot of funerals. I'd overdosed. I was extremely vulnerable," says Grogan. "But the drive to write this novel was more philosophical. Within everyone there is the cry of the heart confounded by an inner drive to self destruct. Only out of fear do you try to stop. "

The story spins out at such breakneck speed that any philosophical undertones are easily bypassed.

A pacey crime thriller partly set on the Sydney wharves, this book strips crime of any glory, heroin of any high. It does not attempt to gloss over how low drugs take a man. Chris Coates is left rotting in his own stench, heartless, a moral and emotional vacuum.

Junkie Pilgram describes a man rendered unable to give or receive love from a woman or help from a comrade; a man who'd rob his mother and cheat his mates.

Chris Coates is already an addict and a thief with a prison record when, thanks to the good name his dad had on the wharves, family and friends are able to give him a second chance. They try setting him on the straight and narrow with a job as a tally clerk at Glebe Island Terminal. The union helps too.

But Coates is already well and truly bent. Before long he falls back under the control of smack and into the clutches of a Sydney underworld figure hoping to get some inside help with a heroin shipment.

This book shows no respect for any of its characters, for the wharves nor for the union. It is written through the glazed eyes of a junkie in frenzied pursuit of his next fix.

No one who reads this book would fail to be repelled by heroin. Nor the corruption, crime and human depravation that goes with it. And if for this reason alone, Junkie Pilgrim is an important work.

Junkie Pilgrim is now in all leading bookshops. Orders can also be placed with the publisher Brandl & Schlesinger by email:

books@brandl.com.au.

Real Literary Class

Wayne Grogan, 50, spent 16 years working on the waterfront in Sydney and Newcastle before obtaining an arts degree from Deakin University and completing Junkie Pilgrim. He left the waterfront in 1993.

Renowned author and critic Gerard Windsor says of the novel: "You won't get grittier. This is low life, full-on and distasteful, done with real literary class."

Sydney crime writer Peter Doyle has also praised the novel: "The everyday physical world here is drawn with meticulous exactitude - you'll recognise pubs, cafés, shops, streets, perhaps characters even, on every page. It becomes a Dante-esque trek through the landscapes of the soul."

Wayne Grogan won a Deakin University Vice-Chancellor's Prize for creative writing and has been a runner-up in the Henry Lawson Short Story Award. He has written articles for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Newcastle Herald. His short stories have appeared in Mattoid magazine and extracts of these have been chosen for Melbourne's Moving Words project. He lives with his wife and children in Sydney and sells antiquarian books.