Many years ago, fuelled by watching too many soaps that were in turn fuelled by too many watchings of The Godfather, I wrote what is best described as an utterly unrealistic melodramatic novel about a mobster with a heart of gold.

While it�s still very dear to my heart, I was always of the view that the organised crime elements were completely beyond the realms of possibility. The gun-play, illegal gambling, drugs and the constant police surveillance were, I am happy to admit, pulled straight from the TV (pre-Sopranos, I might add).

But given the organised crime war, including increasingly public tit-for-tat murders, going on in this city at the moment, I�m starting to rethink the possibilities of my crappy-but-beloved pulp romance.

I�m also starting to think more carefully about where I eat lunch.

Welcome to the World�s Most Liveable City!

Melbourne, a city where people used to get shot in their driveways. Then in their cars on the street in the early evening. Then in their cars at football clinics with their young children in the back seat. Then eating lunch at an Italian restaurant in the middle of a busy restaurant strip in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

Now drinking beer in a pokies club on a weekday evening. After being chased around the bar by two guys in balaclavas, the whole thing caught on security camera.

A city where everyone knows who is next on the hit list. And I mean everyone. It�s on the front page of the papers, discussed on talk-back radio. A city where the person who is next on the hit list has been summoned to give evidence in Court and there are office pools running to see if he makes it.

It�s one of those things that�s both scary and fascinating. It�s happening here, two suburbs for my house in the next-to-last case, on a street that I regularly visit to eat, shop and go to the movies. Around the corner, literally, from the best bookshop in the city. And yet it still feels somewhat far away. Perhaps because, despite the media frenzy that it�s inevitable and the increasingly brash nature of the killings, no �innocent bystanders� have actually been hurt. Yet. So the danger remains close but abstract.

The police are frustrated, the government is trying not to panic (though it�s not that clear what they could do about it anyway), the media is in said frenzy. On the radio yesterday I actually heard one announcer compare the city to Capone-era Chicago. Though I guess that was only a matter of time.

And in true Aussie fashion, the criminals are minor celebrities simply because we now all know their names, even if only for the purposes of taking bets on how long until the next one dies.

I, like the rest of the city, am awaiting the next breaking news story advising that someone�s been shot in more brazen circumstances than the last victim. And in the meantime I�m reworking the newspaper articles with the names of the characters in my pulp novel just to see how far removed my completely unrealistic soap opera is from current events. Not very, as it turns out. In fact, it�s starting to look very much like a case of truth being stranger than bad fiction.