Review of Drive By by former SMH crime reporter Michael Duffy Street wise ... Michael Duffy's Drive By focuses on Lebanese crime gangs in Sydney. It's not often you hear crime fiction compared to the Bible, but Michael Duffy believes both provide readers with a similar sense of catharsis. It's a theory he's honed through years as a crime reporter (for The Sydney Morning Herald), publisher of crime fiction (as founder of Duffy & Snellgrove with his partner, Alex) and the author of two previous crime novels (The Tower and The Simple Death). "Whether it's the Bible, which is full of violence, or crime novels, both help us deal with our fears," he says. You get the same story over and over again of murder and revenge; it must have a cleansing effect. The rise in the popularity of crime fiction is a very late 20th-century phenomenon. I think it is filling the gap of organised religion, which was all about listening to stories of punishment and retribution. Duffy confesses that reading has had little influence on his latest novel, Drive By. Instead, he has been drawn increasingly to American cable TV shows such as The Wire, The Shield and Breaking Bad. "I love the way they don't tell you everything so at first you feel a bit lost but it makes you pay attention," he says. You have to become a detective and help solve the crime. I also like the technique of telling the story from the bad guy's point of view, but making that person sympathetic to some degree, and of making a broader social comment, whether it's about race, or drugs, or politics. Drive By, by Michael Duffy. Duffy has deployed all these techniques to great effect in Drive By, a gritty fictional account of the trial of a Lebanese gang member from western Sydney accused of murder. He came face-to-face with key players in a similar trial when he was mistakenly called as an alibi witness. "The police did a Google search on my name and came up with the wrong Michael Duffy," he says. But the error was not a waste of time - on the contrary. "I spent several hours waiting outside a courtroom in Burwood, which is the epicentre of the justice system in south-west Sydney," he says. I listened for hours to large Lebanese families. I was looking for an insight into the culture, the language, which was a mixture of English and Arabic, the tattoos, the clannish way they would gather for court appearances, with the parents of the accused and all their siblings showing up. That's how I got the voice I needed. That distinctive voice belongs to John Habib, known as Honest John, a skilled mechanic at a Toyota showroom, who provides a naive and often unintentionally comic commentary on his family's criminal activities and domestic life. Duffy is understandably circumspect about acknowledging the real-life inspiration for the book, "but it is well known that there was a war between two big rival clans in Sydney, the Darwiches and the Razzaks, and, more recently, you've had the Ibrahims ... The recent spate of drive-by shootings seemed so casual, so random. Killing an innocent family member or the neighbour of your real target struck me as a significant change. It appalled me because it changed the nature of that part of the city. Traditional Sydney criminals would view that approach with contempt. But it's become an epidemic, with more than 200 shootings in the past year. The Lebanese gangs have a strong code around honour and bringing shame to the family name. When they come to court they are quite passionately antagonistic towards the police, the prosecutor and the justice system. It's not unusual to see riot squads waiting outside the court. I'm not sure people in other suburbs realise what's going on and I wanted to use the novel to show what's happening right now, the way writers like George Pelecanos and Richard Price are doing in the US. I also wanted to reinvigorate the genre by writing about the grief of the people left behind by these crimes, which is what really strikes you when you attend a lot of trials. At Duffy & Snellgrove (which closed in 2005), Duffy reissued the long-forgotten and politically sensitive novels of Arthur Upfield, written in the 1930s and '40s, featuring a so-called "half-caste" Aboriginal detective known as Bony. In Drive By, he's created his own part-Aboriginal detective. "I thought Upfield was really on to something," he says. His detective, Bec, is a young woman from a housing estate in Dubbo fleeing an unhappy home. "She needs structure and the safety of institutions, but has not found it in the navy, where she experienced a sex scandal," Duffy says. Now the police are about to let her down, too. One of her superiors is a cop with a heart of darkness who has got carried away in his crusading vigour. The police have covered up for him. It's a perfect example of what is known as 'noble cause corruption', when people do bad things for good reasons, such as framing a crim when you don't have enough evidence to charge him. It's the ideal grey area for a writer. Duffy has become so attached to Bec that he intends to write about her again. I want to send her out into Bony country, somewhere in central Australia, to the place that makes us unique. For a long time I felt that someone indigenous should do that but, more recently, through my friendships with Aboriginal people, I've given myself permission to do it. This will allow him to develop her endearing habit of using an unusual, wide and sometimes flamboyant vocabulary to startling effect with her police and legal colleagues. I wanted to introduce a bit of poetry into the text, because the language of police work is so banal. Words are aspirational for Bec; they give her a chance to be different, but they also provide an escape. Resisting the temptation to provide too much exposition, Duffy has peppered his plot with plenty of twists to keep the reader guessing until the end. "I don't know how many is too many because I'm too close to it, but I have to be as surprised as the reader," he says. I don't know how things are going to end. If I did, I would not want to write it. Not all of them are big turning points in the plot, like a man coming through the door with a gun. Sometimes they are about a character's private life. Before turning his hand to fiction, Duffy wrote two true crime books: Bad, about Australia's biggest murder investigation into the death of drug manufacturer and police informant Terry Falconer (subject of the fifth Underbelly TV series), and Call Me Cruel, about the killing of Kylie Labouchardiere. "Fiction has trouble with the everyday aspect of crime, but not with the macabre," he says. In the Labouchardiere case, the killer sent police to five different locations but her body was never found. It destroyed her family's life. I couldn't write that as fiction; it's just too painful. I feel a residue of guilt for writing that book at all. Duffy says his years as a crime reporter gave him "a valuable apprenticeship and acquaintances among the police and petty crims. Going to trials also showed me how much editing the prosecutors do to shape the story they are telling the jury in order to make sense of the facts. A fan of Peter Temple ("our finest crime writer"), Duffy says he has learned from Temple's elusive dialogue and also admires local TV crime series such as the ABC's Phoenix and the Underbelly franchise. "I don't think it glamourised crime," he says. I think it made it clear that the good life ends badly fairly soon for most crims. While acknowledging there are some bad apples left in the NSW Police after the royal commission on corruption in the 1990s, his regard for the police and prosecutors is unequivocal: "What sticks with me is meeting a suburban solicitor working for the DPP who has seen 10,000 images of child porn and told me about the impact it had on her relationship to her husband and kids ... I feel such gratitude and respect for people who do that kind of work." Duffy refrains from expressing personal opinions in his fiction (as opposed to his role as a columnist and his years as a conservative pundit on Radio National), but Drive By suggests he is less than impressed with the war on drugs as a policy. "All this horror, these shootings, are the result of a choice we have made as a society to make drugs illegal," he says. A lot of things flow from that about our culture, about prisons, about deaths in the community. We could make a different choice. Drive By is published by Allen & Unwin, $29.99.