Showing results by narrator "Dino Marnika" in All Categories

All it took was a summer's day and a flat tire on his push-bike, and Les is out on bail and on the run from a gun-happy street gang intent on a drive-by. So, with Warren's help, Les Norton defendant, becomes Len Gordon film director, safely ensconced at the ultra-swish Opal Springs Health Resort till Eddie can sort things out back in Sydney.

Okay, so it looks like the Kelly Club is finally closing down - it had to happen sooner or later. And it isn’t as if Les Norton will starve. He has money snookered away, he owns his house, and his blue-chip investment - a block of flats in Randwick - must be worth a fortune by now. Except that the place is falling down, the council is reclaiming the land, there’s been a murder in Flat 5, and the tenants are the biggest bunch of misfits since the Manson family.

Just when everything was going so good, Les slips a disc in his back. He can't run, he can't train. He can't do anything much. But he can still drive his car. So it's down to Narooma for the South Coast Blues Festival and a bit of R&R: 30 bands and three days and nights of non-stop rock 'n' roll. Which would have been great, only Les has to have a slight altercation with four fishermen on his first night in town. Now the toughest, meanest, most horrible bloke on the south coast is after his blood.

Les is quite happy resting up after the flu when Warren has to tip him into an earn. Norton's mate from the Albanian Mafia, Bodene Menjou, is planning to make the most politically correct movie ever made in Australia, Gone With the Willy Willy, and has a script stolen. If Les can find it, a lazy $50,000 could fall in. How can Norton say no?

Norton's old friend turned out to be the biggest brothel owner in America. Madam to the stars. Through her, Les met Mitzi Moonkiss; he also met the Japanese Yakuza, lesbian geisha girls and every time he put his head out the door some boofhead US Marine was looking for a fight. And these were all the nice people. Somewhere in the middle a crazed serial killer was on the loose with a bayonet. Aloha, Les.

Cliff Hardy has his PI license back - but does he still have what it takes to cut it on the mean streets of Sydney? Cliff reckons the skills are still there, if a little rusty, and actor Bobby Forrest's case looks promising. Bobby's a nice enough guy, but why is he being stalked by a red-hot brunette? And why did he have to go online to find a date? When Bobby is murdered, it comes as a shock. Cliff's only solid lead is a white Commodore, the most ubiquitous car around.

Norton needed a holiday - anywhere - as long as it was out of Bondi. Price was only too willing to oblige - Les could have his house at Terrigal. All he had to do was look after George Brennan's nephew for a week while he was there. Sounded okay to Norton, and it was better than spending his own money. Jimmy Rosewater was young, cool and the original brown-eyed handsome man. He loved good wine, going to restaurants, going line-dancing, and the ladies loved him. This suited Les nicely.

There's no two ways about Les Norton - the carrot-topped country boy who works as a bouncer at Sydney's top illegal casino. He's tough and he's mean. He's got a granite jaw, fists like hams, and they say the last time he took a tenner from his wallet Henry Lawson blinked at the light. Lethal but loyal, he's always good for a laugh. In this, the third collection of Les Norton adventures, Les gets his boss off the hook. But not without the help of the boy from Binjiwunyawunya. Les then finds himself in a spot of bother in Long Bay Gaol then in a lot more bother on a St. Kilda tram in Melbourne.

They don't call him Lucky Les for nothing. A ticket in a raffle and Norton was off to the US of A, where it turned out hot, red hot, and it wasn't just the weather. Night club brawls, mafia hitmen, and too many girls called Lori, all in a sea of margaritas. Even for Les Norton, it was just too hot to handle. So it was off to the Caribbean, where Millwood Downie - schoolteacher, historian, and would-be stand-up comic - helps Les trace his family tree and possibly uncover the biggest earn ever.

Les thought that playing minder to Peregrine Normanhurst III sounded like a dead-set snack: Les would keep Peregrine out of trouble. So what if he was on the run from the IRA? They’d never follow him to Australia… But Les quickly finds himself thrust into an adventure that moves at breakneck speed from the corridors of power in Canberra to the grimy tenements of Belfast, to climax in a nerve-shattering, blood-spattered shoot out on a survivalist fortress in the Tweed Valley.

Les Norton, a big red-headed country boy from Queensland, has just arrived in the big smoke and is set to make his mark. Working as a bouncer at an illegal casino in the Cross, Les encounters a number of fascinating characters who make up the seamier side of one of the most exciting cities in the world – gamblers, conmen, bookies, bouncers, hookers and hit men, who ply their respective trades from the golden sands of Bondi to the tainted gutters of Kings Cross... usually on the wrong side of the law.

All Les Norton wanted was a quiet coffee and Sacher cake at the Hakoah Club in Bondi, and to be left alone to sort out his troubled love life. How he let notorious conman Kelvin Kramer talk him up to Surfers Paradise for five days, Les will never know. He went along expecting some relaxation in the sun, the chance to earn a little money, and possibly a little fresh romance. Les definitely got the earn. He certainly got the girl. But what Norton mainly got in Surfers Paradise was trouble. In a size 40 Double-D cup.

Will one man's loss be Hardy's gain? 'I'd read about it in the papers, heard the radio reports and seen the TV coverage and then forgotten about it, the way you do with news stories.' The police suspect the father, Gerard Fonteyn OA, a wealthy businessman. But he's hired Cliff to find his daughter, given him unlimited expenses and posted a $250,000 reward for information.

Sam is a skateboarder with a heart full of pain. He desperately misses Samantha, his beautiful girlfriend, who is no longer in this world. Or is she? On the anniversary of her murder, when Sam visits her old house in Love Street, does he really expect to find her again? Will he give her that final kiss he's dreamed about and set them both free?

Joe Hagarsson is seventeen. His father came back from the Vietnam War in a black hole and took his own life. Since then everything his mother has done seems a betrayal of his father's memory. Now Joe is in a black hole too. He meets a gang leader who calls himself Captain Ahab and demands absolute obedience from anyone who wants to join his crew. And the question of whether Joe will join that crew is partly answered by his meeting Elijah Greenface, a survivor of the death camp at Auschwitz....

English aristocrat Isabel de Rolland is sent to Australia to marry Marmaduke Gamble, the debts of her family being paid in exchange for the respectability her lineage gives the rich ex-convict Gamble family. Despite all odds, Isabel and Marmaduke develop a grudging friendship that over time blooms into something more. But the secrets of the past continue to haunt them and the madness in both their families threatens their hard-won happiness.

When Cliff Hardy signs on as a bodyguard for charismatic populist Rory O’Hara, who is about to embark on a campaign of social and political renewal, it looks like a tricky job; O’Hara has enemies. Sure enough, a murder and a kidnapping soon cause the campaign to fall apart. Hired to investigate the murder, Hardy uncovers hidden agendas among O’Hara’s staff and powerful political and commercial forces at work.

David Spiteri was a founding member and long-time president of one of Australia's first outlaw motorcycle clubs from its inception in the early 1960s through to the early 2000s. He has been uniquely placed to witness the clubs develop from loose affiliations of riders to the well-structured and well-connected groups we see today. In this never-before-told inside story, Spiteri puts himself at risk to reveal everything from the drug trafficking which funds the clubs' operations to the extreme violence that continues to make them infamous.