The Rules of Backyard Cricket is the story of two cricketing prodigies from the wrong side of the tracks. Darren, the narrator, is a gifted tearaway with scant regard for the rules, whereas his older brother Wally is a gimlet-eyed disciplinarian dedicated to his career.

The novel starts with Darren bound and gagged in the boot of a car, heading up the Geelong Road to Melbourne. In each chapter, he reveals a little more of his and Wally's backstory, and how things led up to his current predicament.

This book is best thought of as a "ripping yarn" style of novel rather than a whodunit, as there are few surprises. On that level it's very good, with a pacy plot told in a very engaging style.

Fans of cricket are going to have fun spotting character traits and incidents that Serong borrows; people acquainted with Melbourne's true crime stories are also going to recognise a few allusions. I think this is overdone though, to the point where I really wouldn't recommend this book to people not au fait with, or interested in, cricket.

Whoever designed the cover of this book should be fired; it pretty much gives away the ending ( )

What an unusual book! It starts off with a bang - a guy tied up in the trunk of a car with a gunshot hole in his knee on the way to some place, presumably his death - calmly telling the story of his life, and hopefully how he ended up where he is. That got my attention, but it was downhill for me for over half the book. It was a lot about cricket, a sport I know absolutely nothing about and thought was much tamer than it appears to be in this book. I skimmed over a lot of it, trying to gleam as much as I could about the characters, but I was tempted to give up at times. But my darn curiosity about how he ended up in the trunk won out, although it was hard to continue for so long to get there. I will admit, though, that the conclusion was a surprise. It wasn't a happy ending, people died that I had trouble feeling sorry for, and I felt some pity for the main survivor although he may have been the worst of all in many ways. ( )

Darren Keefe and his older brother Wally had been keen cricketers from a very young age. Hitting the ball backward and forward in their back yard, they learned everything they could while the competition between them was fierce. Their mum was a constant support; a single mother she worked hard to supply them with all they needed to have a happy life growing up.

As the boys grew into men, their propensity for cricket continued. Wally and Darren both ended up in senior teams and while Wally went on to greater heights, Darren became involved in trouble. One of the bad boys of sporting history, Darren got away with a lot. Until the day he didn’t…

What would be the result of that bad-boy life? The bound and gagged body in the boot of the car had a story to tell…and what a story it was!

The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Aussie author Jock Serong was a suspenseful mystery with a fair amount of cricket reference.
And there lay my trouble – I’m not a fan of cricket at the best of times! The actual mystery was relayed in short bursts – the cricketers’ story was much more detailed. But I’m happy to recommend it to mystery fans as I’m sure others will appreciate it more than I did. ( )

A great story, but also read it for the wonderful writing - Jock Serong composes beautiful phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and ultimately this fabulous book. ( )

I loved this book.

We start with Darren, Daz, Keefe tied up in a car boot, knee cap shot, lying on a shovel with a bag of quicklime for company, contemplating his predicament and how on earth it should happen that he end up here.

Darren starts his journey to the boot from memories of playing cricket in the back yard against his big brother Wally. Its 1976 and Darren is in grade two and Wally in grade four, 19 months older. Serong perfectly captures the adhoc rules of any backyard cricket game.

"And in the current memory, the stump is an arm’s length behind me as I stare down my brother. The bat in my hands is an SP, as used in Tests by England captain Tony Greig. He’s tall, implacable, patient. All the things I’m not. The dog at our feet is Sam, a grossly obese staffy. The lawn’s kept down by an ancient handmower that’s always been there. Razor sharp blades made to look innocuous by rust. It didn’t come from anywhere and it’ll never go anywhere.
Those deep shades of autumn are last year now, when we were smaller. Here in high summer, where my memories crowd more, sunlight is a scatter of bleaches and reflections. At backward point there’s a banksia. At extra cover, a holly bush where Sam likes to shit. At mid-off, a bare patch where nothing, not even grass, grows. It’s lightning fast if you send a drive through there. Off drive I mean. I assume you’re keeping up. I’m a lefty.
Mid-on’s the vegie patch, never grows anything but tomatoes this time of year, stinging nettles along the back. Dirty bare feet in there come out red-welted. Midwicket is the shortest boundary, formed by the Apostouloses’ fence. Directly behind those palings, separated by a spindly pittosporum, is their kitchen. If you really middle a pull shot—wrap the handle around your ribs and smack that ball sweet off the end of the blade—it makes the finest sound hitting the timbers out there. I can only imagine how it sounds at the Apostas’ kitchen sink.
Fine leg is into the corner, towards the crappy asbestos outhouse that contains the second dunny and the laundry. Something about the plumbing in there; there’s a smell even when no one’s been.
Keeper and slips are automatic: the big sheet of trellis that Mum put up to grow climbing roses. Snick it onto the trellis on the full and you’re gone. Hit the dog and it makes a hollow thud.
Sam’s a random element in all this, wandering around sniffing the air. Occasionally he lies on his back and does that thing fat dogs do when they wriggle around just scratching the bejesus out of their backs. You can’t shoo him away. You have to get on with it no matter where Sam is located, and you can’t hit him. Hit him and you’re gone. If Sam decides he wants to stop and eat a bee off a clover flower right in the middle of the pitch, you play around him. In future years, under greater pressures, I sometimes wonder if Wally and I learned to stare through distraction because we had to play around a fat dog."

Cricket is meant to be played with two teams of 11 players, but to be honest is flexible enough to accommodate any number with the minimum being two, batsman and bowler. Backyard cricket between siblings is fierce, uncompromising and not for the faint hearted. Many a hotly disputed decision is decided by physical combat.
"Voices would be raised, equipment thrown. Unless Mum intervened, it would end in a red-faced tangle with fingers in eyes and gappy milk teeth sunk into soft flesh: an itchy, grunting wrestle that never produced a clear winner."

In the playing of cricket ;ironically a game for 'gentlemen' where the saying "that's not cricket' would mean having something that is unjust or just plain wrong done to someone or something, we learn all we need of the character of Darren and Wally. The boys used to wait outside the local tennis courts, waiting for an errant lob to clear the fence and they'd be off on their Malvern Stars with a new ball for their next game.
"And right there you have an essential distinction between the Keefe brothers. I would do these things for the sheer joy of it. Busting free, sending my blood roaring in the knowledge I’d flouted the rules and disappointed expectations. The problem for me is that the more times you do it and the more you get caught, the lower the expectations become. Correspondingly, the lesser the thrill."

We alternate between Darren's attempts to extricate himself from the boot and the continuing story of the two brothers and their rise through the grades to higher and higher levels of cricket. Serong covers all the highs and lows of the professional sportsman, contrasting the dour buttoned up Wally with the flamboyant, larrikin that Darren became.Serong uses the contrasts between Darren and Wally to illustrate the rise of the celebrity sportsman as a product to be sold, torn between the purity of the game and the ugliness of the corporatisation of sport and the pressure to entertain.

Darren keeps chasing the next high, sporting or drug induced it doesn't seem to matter to him, Wally winds himself tighter and tighter, paring away all spontaneity in order to fulfill his idea of how a top sportsman should behave.

For both men there are consequences.

I did not see this ending the way it did. Serong does a brilliant job keeping the suspense of Darren's predicament going while we inexorably follow his story to the surprising denouement.

For those of who have no idea what cricket is or what any of the aussie lingo means, you'll have to find a friendly interpreter from a cricket playing nation to assist. It will be well worth the discussion. ( )