Author of The Matriarch: The Kathy Pettingill Story, published by Pan-Macmillan Australia (1996), Tame was born in Luton, England, in 1944.

He spent twenty-five years in journalism in the UK, North America and Australia.

Tame emigrated to Australia with his family in 1973, and has lived in Victoria since then.

After resigning as news editor of The Truth in 1986 he spent eight years, six of them as director, with IPR, Australia's largest public relations company.

Adrian Tame wrote a very interesting piece on the Beach Inquiry into police corruption of 1975-76 in the Sunday Herald-Sun in November 2001.

Below is a transcript of the ABC's Mick O'Regan interviewing Adrian about his book, The Matriarch.

Mick O'Regan: One person who knows exactly what it's like to write the life story of someone closely connected to crime is journalist Adrian Tame.

He wrote the life story of Kathy Pettingill, the mother of ten children, a number of whom pursued criminal careers. In fact her son, Victor Peirce, numbers among the victims of the current spate of killings.

Adrian Tame argues the public appetite for books about true crime exists irrespective of the media's interest, and that in strictly commercial terms, getting the story out while it's still in the public consciousness is crucial.

Adrian Tame: 'The Matriarch' came out in '96 and sold pretty steadily, then one of Kathy's more well known sons, Victor Pearce, was murdered in the streets of Melbourne as part of the underworld killings that are now going on, and within the next three or four months of his murder, the sales literally galloped ahead, put on another 4,000 or 5,000 in a very short period. So there is a public response to this sort of thing. At the moment obviously the newspapers in Melbourne are absolutely full of the underworld killings, so there's a pretty healthy appetite out there right now for what's going on.

Mick O'Regan: As a journalist and author, what do you do to ensure that the version you're getting from criminals and their associates, is a true story?

Adrian Tame: Well again, I think when you're dealing with criminals, a lot of true crime books are written from the point of view of the police, and I think the same argument or the same question should apply with those sort of books. I mean the police have an agenda the same as the underworld has an agenda, and the police, if they are the main source for a book, would obviously have a specific interest in the way it was presented.

And I guess when you're dealing with the underworld, there are areas that you can't go into. There are a couple of things that Kathy, only a couple of things, that Kathy Pettingill said she didn't want to discuss when we started the book. But very obviously, the same laws of defamation apply, and very obviously for that reason, if for no other, one must check one's facts; purely because you've been told something by the subject of your biography, it would be very dangerous to take that as read.

Very certainly there was a great deal of checking done. I found that Kathy had the most amazing recall and was quite, utterly accurate in virtually everything she told me. There were a couple of things that had to be double-checked, but the vast majority of it checked out perfectly.

Mick O'Regan: What about the notion that John Thwaites, the Deputy Premier of Victoria has put forward, that it's distasteful for someone like Judy Moran to profit from the sorts of activities that have caused such grief, not only in her own family but in a whole string of other families; do you have a view on that political assessment of the morality of this case?

Adrian Tame: Well for a politician to talk about something being distasteful is a little odd given how much of politics is distasteful. I don't know quite what he means by that. There is obviously a public taste for it. I find that view just a little hard to understand. So he's a mentor of what is good and bad taste, is he an arbiter of what we do and don't read? Obviously the victims of the Moran family would not be rushing out to buy a copy of a book by Judy Moran. It's the same as a television set, if you don't like it, you turn it off, if you don't like the subject of a book, you don't buy it and you don't read it.

Mick O'Regan: Is it going to be ever a case that Judy Moran's story is going to shed real light onto what's happening within Melbourne's criminal underworld and in relation to these killings? It's basically just going to be a sort of self-justifying piece from her end, isn't it?

Adrian Tame: Well quite possibly, and I can't speak for Judy Moran because I don't know what sort of a deal Harry M. Miller's teeing up. I can certainly speak for my book: it was made very clear to Kathy right at the start, both by myself and by the publishers, that if what she had in mind was a whitewash of her life, presenting her as a saintly old lady who'd brought up this family that had misguidedly gone wrong, well she could forget it, we were going to tell the truth, warts and all. And that's very certainly what we did. And I don't think that there was any attempt to glamorise her life, or to portray her role in that life as a blameless heroine by any means. I mean some of the things she told me shocked me very, very deeply, and they were included in the book.

Mick O'Regan: Now was there ever a disparity between the things that were revealed to you in the process of interviewing Kathy Pettingill and what the general media coverage revealed? Is there a sense in which her story showed up either the failings or the successes of the general media coverage?

Adrian Tame: To an extent. Her elder son was a mass murderer, possibly responsible for 13 deaths, and some of the details of individual deaths certainly revealed or threw a new light on the circumstances of those people's lives, and I think there was quite a lot of new stuff, well I hope there was a lot of new stuff in the book, there's certainly very little point in rehashing a whole pile of newspaper clippings.

If Judy Moran's book is to be successful, it's going to have to say something that the public doesn't already know, and your point earlier, is it just going to be a whitewash, her view of what's been happening, or is it going to be a real revelation and an insight into the Moran family's role? Well obviously she's not going to give away any family secrets, Mick, she's not going to be talking about massive drug deals and how much money was made.

But if nothing else, she will probably as I hope I did with 'The Matriarch', be able to provide some sort of a portrait of what life is like within those families, and certainly in the case of Kathy Pettingill, her experience was so unique, ten children and a large number of them involved at a very high level in criminal activity, I just find that that is a social picture that is quite fascinating, and is probably not going to be repeated, and I think that having a look behind the closed doors of that family, it may be prurient certainly, but if the subjects are prepared to talk about it and open up about it, well again, if you don't want to read it, don't buy the book.

Mick O'Regan: Journalist and author, Adrian Tame.