But as for these creeps in Larry Writer’s (I know, ha ha) non-fiction book, Razor, these vicious pioneers of Sydney’s criminal underworld in the 1920s and 1930s! They gave organised crime a bad name. They had no respect. They had no manners. They had no style. And most of them had no money, something of a failing for a gangster, I would have thought. I wonder if they ever said to themselves, in those quiet moments when hosing the blood from their shoes: ‘Maybe I should try and get a real job.’ Personally, if I were going around murdering people, selling drugs, sly grog, and sex, I’d want to make it worth my while. I’d want to make a packet. Yet all these reprobates seemed to do was to get their faces slashed by their enemy’s cutthroat razor, or sentenced to a stretch in stir, or shot, or all three. The main players in Razor are Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh. To be fair, these two nasty battleaxes did make a quid most of the time and didn’t get whacked. Devine operated whorehouses, often using girls barely in their teens. Leigh sold sly grog – it was the six o’clock closing era. Their turf was Sydney’s inner-eastern suburbs: Darlinghurst, Kings Cross, Surry Hills. The area is much less slummy these days. Syringes are the weapons of choice, and you use them on yourself. But in the 1920s it was dubbed ‘Razorhurst’ because of the frequency of mobster razor fights.

The bit players in this book are the violent heavies Devine and Leigh employed. They had predictable gangster sobriquets – Frank ‘Razor Jack’ Hayes, Phil ‘The Jew’ Jeffs, Frank ‘The Little Gunman’ Green – and generally died young. Not that you have sympathy for them. The book doesn’t expect you to. It doesn’t attempt to explain away their behaviour, get inside their heads, make cute excuses for them with the usual ‘they came from broken homes’ spiel, or ‘they were poor and unloved’. Some people are just no damn good. They get a kick out of kicks and punches and stabbings and gunfire and theft. Sure, some of the crooks had a soft side. Devine was supposedly kind to children and a pillar of the Catholic Church. Some suckers will buy that as her saving grace. I don’t. ‘Hypocritical bitch!’ I snarled when I read it. That’s the thing about a lot of these organised crime types, they’re church mad.

Maybe they feel they have something in common with the clergy. Maybe they want an each-way bet in case there really is a hell. Even Perce fancied himself an impeccable Catholic and claimed to have been made a Knight of the Order of St John by the Pope. I’m serious. If you don’t believe me read David Hickie’s The Prince and the Premier (1985), which alleged dodgy dealings between Perce and former New South Wales Liberal Premier Bob Askin.

Thank heavens for Ray ‘The Blizzard’ Blissett’s atheism on page 143 of Razor. He was one of the tough-guy, honest cops credited with cleaning up Razorhurst. Now aged ninety-two, Blissett says: ‘I couldn’t be anything but irreligious … I don’t know how anyone can spend forty years among the crime in Sydney and believe in God. The bludging, graft, poverty … I’m no hypocrite.’

Razor has plenty in common with The Prince and the Premier. They’re both history lessons in villainy of a time and place. Their authors are journalists who finesse facts into a yarn using basic newspaper-feature style. That means the prose doesn’t grab you like the streetwise street-writing of crime fiction. You settle for a workaday, researched, trustworthy read and the social Hansard of quoted characters.

The thing I really like about Razor is how practical a document I’m going to find it. From now on, when some old codger starts banging on to me about how good things were ‘in the old days’, I’ll be able to say, ‘That’s not what I’ve read’, and open up to page 80 and read aloud: ‘There were more than twenty gang-related shootings in the lanes and alleys of east Sydney in 1928.’ When they claim there were no drugs, I’ll flip to page 34, clear my throat and inform them that, ‘In the late 1920s police estimated there were 5,000 drug addicts in Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo. People smoked marijuana and opium, injected heroin and morphine’. When they say that rape was unheard of, I’ll return to page 80 and the bit about the gangrape of Ida Maddocks in March 1928. And if they bring up our proud Anzac tradition, I’ll point to the tale about 5,000 Lighthorsemen going on a three-day, drunken rampage through Sydney in February 1916, stealing a train, looting shops, and assaulting citizens. I’ll then shut the book, lick my finger, and mark the air: Sherborne 1, Old Codger 0.