Crooks Like Us

In the 1920s Sydney police began assembling a gallery of the city's most light-fingered, fleet-footed, silver-tongued rogues. These images resurfaced in the 1980s, long after the original paperwork had been lost. This book offers a glimpse into the lives of these fugitive souls.

"Crooks Like Us, extraordinarily beautiful and utterly absorbing, is much more than a glimpse of the underside of Sydney in the early 20th century. It is a chance to gaze at length upon a selection of human beings, some of them monstrous but most just flawed like us... In their richness, the pictures and the text, set against the banality of the circumstances, declare that everyone is interesting and even beautiful, and that every story is worth telling." - Luc Sante, author of Evidence, and Kill All Your Darlings

Peter Doyle is the author of City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948 (with Caleb Williams), which, like this book, draws on the forensic photography archive at Sydney Living Museum's Justice & Police Museum. Peter lectures in Media at Macquarie University, and is the author of the novel The Devil's Jump.

Peter Doyle
Published 2009 
Softcover
320 pages
185mm x 245mm
ISBN 9781876991340