Sisters in Crime national co-convenor, Karina Kilmore, dug deep for this week’s Murder Mondays interview with J. P. Powell.
(Click on the image below to go to the YouTube recording.)
J. P. (otherwise known as Judy) lives in the Sunshine Coast hinterland and had a circuitous route to the deadly world of crime writing. She is an archaeologist and historian by trade. She has worked as a high school teacher, an academic, a National Parks officer, a museum administrator as well as excavating sites in Jordan, Cyprus and Greece. And she has led various historical archaeology projects in Australia.
Judy has written a hell of a lot – school textbooks, academic publications, government reports and a biography of Jim Stewart, the first person to teach archaeology in Australia.
And then came a wonderful break – in 2017 she was awarded a QANZAC Fellowship by the State Library of Queensland to pursue research into, and writing of, a series of crime novels set in Brisbane during World War II.
The first is the appropriately The Brisbane Line (Brio Books). (The ‘Brisbane Line’ was a defence proposal supposedly formulated during World War II to concede the northern portion of the Australian continent in the event of an invasion by the Japanese.)
Murders Mondays are available on Sisters in Crime YouTube channel at 6pm on Mondays. Previous guests include Kerry Greenwood, Lili Wilkinson, Petronella McGovern, Heather Rose, Malla Nunn, Sara Paretsky, Judith Rossell, Sulari Gentill, Sarah Epstein, Mirandi Riwoe, Kerry McGinnis, Kathy Reichs, Ellie Marney, Katherine Kovacic, Candice Fox, Anne Buist, Dervla McTiernan and Val McDermid.