Five generation ago, my forefather George Robotham, was transported from England to Tasmania for stealing a watch. He married a fellow convict, an Irishwoman, who had stolen a shawl – a harsh punishment for trying to stay warm.
My mother was horrified by these criminal links and refused to let anyone research our family tree in case her shame became public, but I was never worried about being a bad seed. Instead, have always leaned into it.
At eighteen, I became a cadet reporter on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney, a tabloid red-top that sold at every bus stop and train station to commuters on their way home from work. Sensation and titillation was the bread and butter of The Sydney Sun. There were page-three girls, newspaper bingo, horse racing guides, sport analysis and a daily diet of crime stories and celebrity gossip.
My very first front page read: CARAVAN KISS - BRIDE MURDER CHARGE and reported that a husband had punched his new bride of three weeks after seeing her kiss another man in a caravan. Forty-six years on and little has changed when it comes to men killing their partners.
As a cadet reporter I had to work in the radio room, monitoring the police, fire and ambulance radios. I learned the call-signs and codes. I knew which police division operated in which areas, and when an officer was in trouble, or a prisoner had escaped, or a child was missing, or a suspect was being chased.
I spent more than a year working the graveyard shift for The Sun. The Red-Light district became my regular haunt because it was the only place to get a coffee or something to eat at three in the morning. I befriended pimps, prostitutes, dealers, junkies, coppers, strippers, transvestites, tramps, and ‘colourful local identities’ – a euphemism for gangsters and nightclub owners.
I spent more than a year working the graveyard shift for The Sun. The Red-Light district became my regular haunt because it was the only place to get a coffee or something to eat at three in the morning. I befriended pimps, prostitutes, dealers, junkies, coppers, strippers, transvestites, tramps, and ‘colourful local identities’ – a euphemism for gangsters and nightclub owners.
Working in police rounds, my job was to report on crime. This meant befriending detectives, pathologists and paramedics, anyone who could tip me off about some new development in an ongoing investigation. I drank in the same pubs as the police. I bought them drinks. I attended barbecues. I was invited to weddings and attended christenings.
Sometimes, I ‘looked the other way’ when I saw evidence of police corruption because I didn’t want to burn a long-time contact who would later give me a more important story. It was a case weighing up the public good, letting a small fish escape the net, in the hope of catching a bigger one.
Ultimately, I became an investigative journalist working for ten years in London for a national newspaper. This brought me in contact with criminals both big and small. I tracked down rogue solicitors, paedophile judges, and East End gangsters who had fled to the Costa del Sol in Spain, (otherwise known as the Costa del Crime).
Sometimes it was dangerous. I once investigated an Irish gambler in Dublin who was notorious private. Local racing journalists had told me to drop the story but I carried on for one more day, knocking on doors and asking questions. That night in Dublin, I was visited by three men wearing balaclavas who bounced me around my hotel room and drove me to airport.
I phoned my editor from the departure lounge and said, ‘This gambler launders money for the IRA.’
‘Give it twenty minutes and go back,’ he said. ‘They’ll have gone by then.’
‘Give it twenty minutes and go back,’ he said. ‘They’ll have gone by then.’
I got on the flight. I might have been Australian and therefore ‘expendable’ but I wasn’t stupid.
On another investigation, I helped expose the UK’s booming telephone sex-line industry, where customers paid up to US$5 a minute to ‘talk dirty’ with no limits on age, time or the content discussed. Many of the sex-line operators had links with organised crime and the porn industry in Britain and abroad.
Our newspaper exposes so much pressure on the Government to regulate the industry, that the operators organised a crisis meeting at a hotel in Manchester. We gate-crashed the event, bursting through the doors, taking photographs and asking questions. The operators covered their faces and yelled threats and chased us out of the hotel. The revolving front door of that hotel is spinning today because I hit it with such speed.
The following day, we handed UK police photographic evidence that linked known crime figures to the sex-line services. Within weeks the laws had changed.
My latest novel, The White Crow, draws on experiences like this. It features a young, ambitious police officer, Philomena McCarthy, who has defied the odds to follow her dream, because she comes from a notorious family of East End gangsters.
It is a novel that has taken me back to my roots – to those days as a reporter and investigative journalist, when I befriended prostitutes, pimps, paramedics, police, and the colourful milieu of characters who inhabited the night.
These were my people and I’m still telling their stories.
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The White Crow by Michael Robotham will be published by Scribner on July 1, 2025. It's available for pre-order.
Michael Robotham is a former investigative journalist whose bestselling psychological thrillers have been translated into twenty-five languages. He has twice won a Ned Kelly Award for Australia’s best crime novel, for Lost in 2005 and Shatter in 2008. His recent novels include When She Was Good, winner of the UK’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller; The Secrets She Keeps; Good Girl, Bad Girl; When You Are Mine; Lying Beside You; Storm Child; and The White Crow. After living and writing all over the world, Robotham settled his family in Sydney, Australia.
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