Saturday 31 January 2009

Novel references to Australia #1

John Corey of the New York Police Dept is on his way to interview a contact who lives on Staten Island. On the way, he thinks to himself:

I don’t know this outer borough very well, but when I was a young rookie, cops who screwed up were routinely threatened with being exiled to Staten Island. I used to have nightmares of me walking a beat through woods and mosquito swamps, twirling my nightstick and whistling in the dark. But like most places whose mere mention makes your blood run cold, like Siberia, Death Valley, or New Jersey, this borough of New York is an okay place […] It was also home to many city cops who may have been sent here originally as punishment, and who liked it and stayed—sort of like how Australia was settled.

Nelson DeMille, Night Fall (Time Warner Books, 2004): Page 161.

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