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Crime and romance with Jane Austen: Toni Jordan

‘You’re in love with love,’ my mother told me once. I must have been all of fourteen: flat-chested, grinning in shiny braces, complete with frightening, jutting headgear I wore at night. I went to girls’ school and I had no brothers. No men in the house at all. When my mother said that, about being …

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Mountain mystery: Q&A with Sandi Wallace

Robyn Walton, Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President, spoke to long-term member, Sandi Wallace, about her latest rural crime novel, Into the Fog (Taut Press, 2018).  Sandi, congratulations on the third novel in your Georgie Harvey and John Franklin series. For your setting you chose the Dandenong Ranges, about an hour’s drive east of Melbourne CBD. And …

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CSI: Crime Story Investigations with Writers Victoria – Feb-June

In this season’s Reading for Writers, Writers Victoria gets forensic with CSI: Crime Story Investigations. The best crime fiction is renowned for its tight plotting, compelling narrative, quick pace, and morally ambivalent characters. Writers across all genres can learn from the classics. Featuring five of Australia’s best crime writers speaking about the crime stories that influenced …

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The past is never past: New mysteries with history

Toni Jordan, M J Tjia and Kirsten Alexander talk to Alison Goodman about why digging into the past provides such fertile themes and characters for crime writing. Award-winning Melbourne author Toni Jordan is the author of five novels. Her latest, The Fragments, is her first foray into the mystery world. Set in 1930s’ New York …

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Learned Crime with Dervla McTiernan

The Melbourne Athenaeum Library and Sisters in Crime Australia take pleasure in presenting Dervla McTiernan in conversation with Robyn Walton re Dervla’s latest book, The Scholar (out February). After several hotly contested publishing auctions, Dervla McTiernan’s debut novel, The Rúin (Harper Collins, 2018), became an instant bestseller which soared up the Australian charts and became …

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Crossing the Thin Blue Line:  Q&A with Leigh Straw

Robyn Walton. Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President, spoke to Perth author Leigh Straw about her latest book, Lillian Armfield: How Australia’s First Female Detective took on Tilly Devine and the Razor Gangs and Changed the Face of the Force (Hachette, 2018) Hi, Leigh. Most Australians would not be able to name this country’s first woman police …

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Philomena Horsley takes out the 25th Scarlet Stiletto Award

Philomena Horsley (Northcote, Vic), a medical anthropologist who specialises in autopsies, took out the 25th Scarlet Stiletto Short Story Award presented on Saturday night (24 November). Actor Kate Atkinson and author Cate Kennedy presented the awards before a hundred crime fans at a gala ceremony at Melbourne’s Thornbury Theatre. “It was a night of magic and …

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BOOKED OUT – A Black Saturday Crime

Sisters in Crime Australia and the Port Phillip Library  Service present… 6 for 6.30pm, Thursday 14 February: A Black Saturday Crime Award-winning author Chloe Hooper talks to Robin Bowles about her latest book, The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire ( (Hamish Hamilton). What kind of person would deliberately set a firestorm? Hooper asks. What kind of …

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A mug’s game? Janice Simpson on the profession of writing

A Body of Work, my second crime novel, is a police procedural with social twists, although there is scant in-depth detail about police methods. Rather, the novel focuses on the interactions of the people in the investigating team. Social themes explored include secret adoption as a way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy; the personal …

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