Michael Duffy (Australian journalist)

Michael Duffy is an Australian writer and former editor and publisher. He edited The Independent Monthly, a general magazine owned by Max Suich and John B Fairfax, from 1993 to 1996. Then he and his wife Alex Snellgrove set up a publishing company, Duffy & Snellgrove, that published the first books by Peter Robb, John Birmingham and Rosalie Ham. Other authors included Les Murray, Mungo MacCallum and John Olsen.^[1] The company stopped publishing new titles in 2005.

Duffy presented ABC Radio National's Counterpoint with the late Paul Comrie-Thomson and wrote for News Limited publications and then the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald until June 2012.^[2]

He has written the true crime books Call Me Cruel and Bad, but is best known for the novels The Tower, The Simple Death and Drive By.^[3] The latter was described in the Adelaide Review as: "a brilliant mix of reportage drawn from life observation and the novelist’s dramatic touch, to paint a portrait of crime and its effects – grief, confusion, loss, multiple levels of complicity – amongst Sydney’s contemporary Lebanese community."^[4]

Books

• Man of Honour: John Macarthur: Duellist, Rebel, Founding Father (2003), history
• Latham and Abbott (2004), current politics
• The Tower (2009), crime fiction
• The Simple Death (2011), crime fiction
• Call Me Cruel: A Story about Murder and the Dangerous Power of Lies (2012), true crime
• Bad: The True Story of the Perish Brothers and Australia's Biggest Ever Murder Investigation (2012), true crime
• Drive By (2013), crime fiction

References