The Bondi Undertow is an anthology of eight standalone short stories set in post-war Bondi, 1946–48, each around 13,000 words: a complete tale in one sitting. Every entry is told by a different working observer — a promenade photographer, a milk bar owner, a pawnbroker, a night telephonist — and it is always the trade itself, the docket book or the pledge ledger or the switchboard, that surfaces the hidden current the story turns on.
These are not murder mysteries. There is no body and no detective; what looks like crime usually turns out to be kindness, grief or protection in disguise. Think Tales of the Unexpected with the sting softened to warmth: fair play all the way through, and a final page that sends you straight back to the first.
The Books
Book 1
The Beach Photographer
A woman in off-season gloves offers a week's earnings for one negative out of Saturday's roll. Not the print, the negative, and she never once asks what Stan's silence is worth.
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Book 2
The Milk Bar Tab
Five years Con has re-chalked a dead boy's tab behind the counter. Now a shilling arrives every Tuesday, wrapped in greaseproof paper, and his daughter's theory is very nearly right.
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Book 3
The Pawned Medals
Regular as the tide, a widow pawns a set of war medals at Bert's counter and redeems them on payday. The street has him down as a hard man. Then one month she does not come.
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Book 4
The Night Exchange
Every Thursday at eleven, the same call: no name, no charge, never a word spoken down the line. Dulcie listens to an hour of a quiet room and decides she knows what it is.
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Book 5
The Poison Book
Nineteen years old, eleven days until the inspector calls, and the poisons register Gwen keeps so carefully has begun telling her a story she does not want to be true.
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Book 6
The Scholarship Piece
Ronnie Hebden is wooden at the keys and pays double for the last lesson of the day, every day, before the scholarship exam. Leila dreads the Saturday she is being paid for.
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Book 7
The Bookie's Runner
Threepence a docket and the fastest legs in Bondi: Micky, twelve, sets out to save the bookie who taught him the trade from the crackdown, with every fact right and every reading wrong.
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Book 8
The Wireless Voice
Out of the parlour wireless comes her missing son's voice, playing a kindly doctor in a radio serial that is writing the character out on Friday week. Freda means to see the face it lives in.
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