Kate Emery's new book is set at a family beach holiday in Western Australia. My Family and Other Suspects is a mystery where, you know how it happens, there's a murder and Ruth, the teenage murder mystery fan in the family, decides that she's the one to investigate. As Kate says, it owes a lot to Agatha Christie. Read more The post We Owe So Much to Agatha Christie first appeared on Sisters in Crime Australia ..read more

Think every re-working or re-imagining of the great Sherlock Holmes has already been done? Think again! Melbourne's Narelle M Harris brings us The She-Wolf of Baker Street. The simple question is: what if Mrs Hudson was a werewolf? And it's a wild ride. Read more The post 221B Baker Street, werewolves, and me: Narrelle M. Harris first appeared on Sisters in Crime Australia ..read more

Christine Gregory became attracted to New-Age ideas in her late teens. This largely involved visits to Bryon Bay to stay at the Arts Factory, late nights of drinking, and a full-throttle immersion into the alternative music scene of the noughties. Twenty-five years later, in an evening writing class the tutor tasks us with creating a scene incorporating all the five senses. I put pen to paper and like magic, the words flowed. Read more The post Why I turned to crime: Christine Gregory first appeared on Sisters in Crime Australia ..read more

Why self-publish? Despite some literary success, Bronwyn Rodden has self-published her work, including her three Blue Mountains mysteries, inspired by many visits and her time living in Katoomba. She outlines the various experiences (including knockbacks) that led her down this path. Read more The post Why Self-Publish? Bronwyn Rodden first appeared on Sisters in Crime Australia ..read more

Have you noticed a quiet revolution happening on your bookshelves and television screen? I’m talking about the rise and rise of the older woman amateur sleuth. Twenty years ago, I would have been pressed to name more than Miss Marple as an example, but now we have Elizabeth and Joyce from the Thursday Murder Club, the new Marlow Murders team in the books by Robert Thorogood, Agatha Raisin in the books by MC Beaton, and Susan Ryeland in the Magpie Murders series, to name just a few. Of course, the professional older woman police detective has graced our books and screens for a good fifty years ..read more

I first discovered FNQ – Far North Queensland – in 1994 when I came to do a locum in Cairns Hospital. The town had more of a frontier atmosphere then. The bitumen of the Bruce highway ran out not far along the only road to Cooktown, and the dirt road up to Cape York was impassable in the Wet season. As part of the locum job, I did clinics in the Aboriginal communities of Aurukun and Pormpuraaw, flying in a tiny Cessna with one pilot and one nurse. Leaving Cairns airport, we flew over thick virgin rainforest in a wide strip along the Coral Sea coast; tree ferns flourished beneath a canopy of oa ..read more

I’ve loved the novel, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier since I first read it as a teenager. I fell in love with the beautiful writing and the dark gothic story. But what I didn’t know, until I came across an article about du Maurier a few years ago, was that du Maurier was accused of plagiarism after Rebecca came out — and by not one, but two different authors. One of those two claims even went to trial in New York in the 1940s (The other author never brought a formal claim.) Du Maurier was ultimately cleared in the trial. I came across this article just after I’d finished writing my last novel ..read more

I’ve been writing seriously for about ten years now and almost every one of my plays, and now novels, has begun with something I’ve read in a newspaper or heard on ABC Radio National. In 2015 I came across an article in The Guardian’s ‘Experience’ column written by an interpreter in the criminal justice system and I was immediately intrigued and knew I was going to write about this fascinating and high-stakes profession. I’d never given any thought to the work of interpreters before. It had not occurred to me that they translate in the first person, ‘I’, and for interpreters in the justice sys ..read more

Nicole Morris, the Director of Australian Missing Persons Register, is the author of Vanished True stories from families of Australian missing persons. Here she explores how she got there. I love old second-hand bookshops. You know that smell? Old paper and dark corners, ink, and wooden shelves. There was one in the little seaside town I grew up in. Before we moved there, we went there on every holiday, and on the first day my sister and I would wait impatiently for our parents to drive us to the bookshop. We had a list of what we wanted to find. At the top of my list was as many Trixie Belden ..read more

They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own, that want is here a stranger and misery’s unknown. (Henry Lawson from the poem, “Faces in the Street”) Henry Lawson is considered one of Australia’s greatest poets and wrote at a time in Australian history when struggle, pain, and triumph went hand in hand with corruption, ignorance, and injustice. As a crime writer, I ask myself if the past can really be left behind and has anything essentially changed? To me, the Great Dividing Range is not merely a geographical feature, it is a legacy we have inherited; it is the divide in society betw ..read more