Non-fiction by Mark Dapin
Mark’s latest book, The First Murderer I Ever Met (Simon & Schuster), was released in August 2025.
For more than thirty years, Mark Dapin has been hanging out with crooks, and both types of cop. In this gripping, often funny and always surprising book, he sorts the tall stories from the truth about true crime, showing us what some of Australia’s most famous felons are really like.
Mark Dapin was still in school when he met his first murderer – a boy called Ian. In reporting the murder Ian eventually committed, newspapers used the cliché that it ‘shocked even those who knew him best’. But it didn’t shock Dapin, because he knew Ian in real life, not in clichés.
Criminals are sensationalised in the press and mythologised in their own stories. In describing criminals, police and prison officers he’s spent time with, Dapin searches for the real characters and events. How many of Chopper Read’s stories were actually true? What’s it like at home with former murder cop Gary Jubelin? Was the biggest art heist in Australian history carried out by one of Dapin’s neighbours, the mysterious Sky Blue? And what happens when you go to visit a prison with celebrated escapee John Killick? These encounters are better than a ring-side seat to the underworld: Dapin gets in the ring.
The First Murderer I Ever Met is the truest true crime – it’s what actually happened.
Lest (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
From Simpson’s donkey and the Emu War to Vietnam and Ben Roberts-Smith, Australian military history is full of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did. In his inimitable style, award-winning author Mark Dapin sets the record straight.
Australia’s war tales could be said to be the closest thing we have to sacred stories: ANZAC, Simpson and his donkey, Changi, the wronged diggers in Vietnam, Ben Roberts-Smith. Millions of dollars are spent enshrining these stories in the War Memorial in Canberra and the Australian National Memorial in France, amongst others.
But did what we’re celebrating actually happen?
In this book, award-winning author and historian Mark Dapin shows that often the reality was completely different from the myth – and that by celebrating the wrong people, we often forget about the real heroes. With deep research and a sharp wit, Lest reclaims the truth about our military history.
Carnage: A Succulent Chinese Meal, Mr Rent-a-Kill and the Australian Manson Murders (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
Millions have been entertained by the viral video of a man being arrested after a ‘succulent Chinese meal’. But when Mark Dapin investigated, it emerged that this man’s story went to the heart of the Australian underworld. A true crime cult classic in the making.
Whether you know it as the ‘succulent Chinese meal’ video, or ‘democracy manifest’, chances are you have seen the video of baritone larrikin Jack Karlson getting arrested outside a Brisbane Chinese restaurant in 1991. The Guardian called it ‘perhaps the pre-eminent Australian meme of the last 10 years’.
When Karlson called crime writer Mark Dapin out of the blue, though, Dapin hadn’t heard of him. But there was enough that intrigued him about this theatrical outlaw to continue the conversation. Over the following months emerged a dark and complex past. It turned out that Karlson had been in the background of many notorious incidents in late-twentieth-century Australian crime, from collaborating with infamous prison-playwright Jim McNeil to befriending hitman Christopher Dale Flannery (Mr Rent-a-Kill).
But most shockingly of all, Karlson’s life story led Dapin to shed new light on a number of unsolved murders, by two serial killers.
The result is an extraordinary, deeply revealing portrait of Australian crime from the 60s to the 2010s – a portrait of carnage.
Prison Break: Shantaram to the Bangkok Hilton, The World’s Most Wanted Australians (Allen & Unwin, 2021)
On a Sunday afternoon in 1980, armed robber Gregory David Roberts abseiled down the front wall of a maximum-security prison in broad daylight. He spent a decade on the run in West Asia before writing his own legend in the bestselling semi-autobiographical novel, Shantaram.
In the late nineties, Melbourne-based drug dealer and gangster David McMillan became the only Australian ever to escape from the so-called ‘Bangkok Hilton’ in Thailand.
And in 1999, armed robber John Killick was airlifted out of a maximum-security prison by his beautiful Russian-born girlfriend – after she hijacked a helicopter with a machine gun.
With unprecedented access to ex-prisoners, prison officers and police, as well as ASIO files and witnesses, Mark Dapin brings to life a hidden criminal world of prison brutality, courage and legend. Prison Break tells the real story behind Australia’s most audacious prison escapes and proves that sometimes the truth is even more compelling than the myth.
Public Enemies: Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, Ray Denning and the Golden Age of Armed Robbery (Allen & Unwin, 2020)
In the Australia of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, armed robbers were the top of the criminal food chain. Their dash and violence were celebrated, and men like Ray Denning and Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox were household names long before Underbelly established Melbourne’s gangland thugs as celebrities.
Both were handsome, charismatic bandits who refused to bow to authority. Both were classified as ‘intractable’ in prison, and both escaped. Cox was the only man to escape from Katingal, Australia’s only ‘escape-proof’ jail. Soon after he broke out, he tried to break in again and rescue his mates.
Their story is one of violence (both men killed at least once) and romance (both men had lovers on the run – Denning had many girlfriends; Cox married into a Painters & Dockers gangster family); and humour: Cox, whose real name was the distinctive Melville Schnitzerling, lived on the run under the noses of the police in Schnitznerling Road, Warwick – a street named after his great-grandfather.
It is also a story of the unimaginably horrible life of boys condemned to ‘institutions’ in the 1960s, and the terrible conditions in Australian jails in the ’70s and ’80s. These were the hells where a whole generation of armed robbers was forged.
Mark Dapin brings his brilliant research skills and distinctive, powerful narrative style to a book that explores the life of these infamous yet celebrated public enemies and the criminal world they inhabited. From armed robberies, shootings and bashings to prison barbarity and jail breaks, this is the gritty, page-turning reality behind the headlines.
Mark’s other fiction and non-fiction books include:
