Norman Mailer claimed that women cannot write good fiction because they “don’t have balls”, but the members of Sisters in Crime Australia (and I) beg to differ.
Women’s lack of that masculine equipment is precisely what gives us the edge when it comes to writing crime. And it’s also why we read it in vast numbers. Our books aren’t written from a position of gender privilege. We know what makes the world tick in big, small, and subtle ways. As women, we are all too aware of the violence that lurks within and outside the home, regardless of age, appearance, gender, and class.
When we walk down those mean streets at night, we clutch our keys in our hands and keep our ears peeled for any footsteps that follow us. You can be an internationally famous television figure, such as Nigella Lawson, but it doesn’t stop your husband from trying to choke you in a public restaurant.
But it’s once we’re inside the front door that we face the most danger. On average, at least one woman a week in Australia is murdered by her current or former partner. Thirty-one Australian women have been killed so far this year. Last year, we lost 103 women. We are now at 134 women killed in 18 months.
One in three women experiences physical violence from the age of 15. So, what women know about the world is that the domestic sphere is where politics begin. Crime begins at home. Saturday nights are the worst. In Victoria, family violence incidents recorded by police statewide reached a new high of 98,816 incidents in 2023-24.
The Australian Institute of Family Studies has just published a report showing that one in three Australian men admits to committing domestic violence. Apparently, it’s world-first research and was published in The Guardian yesterday (3 June 2025).
Margaret Atwood says, “Men fear women will laugh at them, women fear men will kill them” – and the stats show that this is with good reason.
Jane Caro commented on this when talking about her latest novel, Lyrebird, which, incidentally, I highly recommend. All women, she says, live with some degree of fear. “It might be buried deep, you might not think about it a lot,” she says. “Crime fiction, especially when crimes are committed against women by men, is a safe way of rehearsing that scenario in your head. I don’t condemn the attraction, I don’t think it’s ghoulish or bizarre. Women feel more defenceless in the face of male violence, and rage, and hate. One of the reasons for this upswing in brutal jocularity (and here she is referring to the rise in verbal attacks on women) is to drive home to us how vulnerable we are, it’s an intimidatory tactic. And that has to be resisted.”
True crime books and podcasts attract a large female audience. In Australia, true crime is the most popular podcast category. True crime podcasts garner some four million listeners a month – and that’s probably rocketed with all the mushroom poisoning podcasts. On the latest count, there were at least six. Research indicates that women are twice as likely to listen to true crime podcasts.
In an article for Psychology Today, American criminologist Scott Bonn, the author of “Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers”, said that female consumers often empathize with the victims in true crime stories and can easily imagine themselves in the role of the victim in true crime cases.
According to Bonn, women also strongly empathise with and seek to understand the motivations of the perpetrators—especially male perpetrators—in true crime stories.
“I believe this has to do with a female desire to feel safe and secure,” Bonn writes. “Many female true crime fans have told me that their greatest fear is being attacked by an unknown assailant. Single women have told me that they look to true crime TV shows and podcasts for tips on how to protect themselves from attacks by strangers, as well as how to detect sociopathic ‘red flags’ in the personalities and demeanour of single men they encounter.”
Of course, in reality women are much more likely to suffer violence at the hands of their intimate male partners, rather than strangers.
Back to crime writing. Crime is currently Australia’s most popular literary genre – though you’d never know from the latest Melbourne Writers’ Festival, which was promoted as covering all genres but surprisingly had not one session on crime. Women are the majority of crime readers and buyers.
I’d now like to explore why crime fiction has such an enduring appeal and also talk about what women are bringing to it.
Lucy Sussex outlines in Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth Century Crime Fiction how women’s traditional role in the domestic sphere made them more observant than men, and hence more skilled at reading subtle clues. Anna Katharine Green, author of the path-breaking novel The Leavenworth Case, and sometimes mistakenly dubbed the first American detective novelist, also invented the spinster sleuth, Amelia Butterworth, who, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple a couple of generations on, solves cases thanks to acute powers of observation and her social invisibility.
Crime fiction, according to Mel McGrath, the author of the Arctic crime series, “has moved on from the common tropes established mostly by male writers in the last century, where a woman dies in order that the men who investigate her death can be heroes. The blonde femmes fatales with their hourglass figures and rapier nails who populate the novels of Raymond Chandler and Micky Spillane exist only as historical souvenirs or else in heavily ironic contemporary parodies.”
She also observes: “Women have long turned to crime fiction, both as readers and writers, because it explores the place male writers and readers often fear to tread — where female power, terror, and rage intersect. In women’s crime fiction, what might seem on the surface to be a story about women aggressed by men is often a cover for a deeper more disturbing truth.
“Take Gillian Flynn’s 2012 international blockbuster Gone Girl, the book that kick-started the current popularity of psychological thrillers in domestic settings. On the surface it’s a revenge thriller of a scorned woman against her feckless husband but look a bit deeper and you’ll see that the protagonist Amy’s real rebellion is against the parents who ruthlessly pressured their little girl into becoming the ‘perfect’ daughter, then exploited their confection for financial gain in a series of ‘Amazing Amy’ children’s books.”
What is now dubbed ‘domestic noir’ has proved very popular in Australia. Think of Big Little Lies or books by Wendy James, Candice Fox, Petronella McGovern, Felicity McLean, Kylie Kaden, Kelli Hawkins, Sara Foster, Christine Keighery, B M Carroll, and many more.
As Terrance Rafferty writes in The Atlantic: “This is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized. On the streets his people walked, motives were more basic—money, sex—and means were more direct. ‘When in doubt,’ he once told his genre brethren, ‘have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’ When today’s crime writers are in doubt, they have a woman come through the door with a passive-aggressive zinger on her lips.”
Rafferty argues that “Male crime writers seem never to have fully recovered from the loss of the private eye as a viable protagonist, and men, for whatever reason (sports?), appear to need a hero of some kind to organize their stories around. Cops and lawyers and the odd freelance avenger (Lee Child’s Jack Reacher) are about all that’s left.
“The female writers, for whatever reason, don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence.”
Sulari Gentill, the author of the Roland Sinclair historical mysteries amongst other things, told Sisters in Crime’s thirtieth anniversary party: “Crime fiction is undeniably having a moment. That moment started before the pandemic and has not yet flagged. And within that moment, the Australian Crime Wave is surging. Australian crime writers are winning readerships and appearing on bestsellers lists in the US and the UK, they are being translated into German, French, Japanese, and Arabic . . . they are taking an Australian sense of justice and an Australian sense of humour to the world . . .
“Australian crime writers have demonstrated that stories do not need to be set in London or New York in order to capture the imaginations of readers. Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, and a countless number of Australian rural towns are very well prepared to host a murder.
“Australian crime writers are increasingly becoming international crime writers. Cracking America and the UK are no longer rare feats, and every one of us that breaks though and out is an advertisement for the work of the rest of us. Liane Moriarty, Jane Harper, Candice Fox, and Kerry Greenwood have opened the minds of readers abroad to Australian crime novels. Emma Viskic, Aoife Clifford, Dervla McTiernan, Ellie Marney, and many others have followed, each making the path a little wider and easier to traverse. Like the Scandi writers before us, we have made the landscape of our country recognisable and pervading in our work; we have cast the unforgiving Australian bush as a character and reflected it in our human cast. While our detectives have pursued a specific justice, we have shone a light on general injustice.”
Incidentally, the ALP wasn’t the only one to win on 3 May. Sulari won the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award for The Mystery Writer, a metafiction set in Kansas, at the 2025 Edgar Allan Poe Awards. Sulari’s win is part of a long tradition. The inaugural Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1954 was won by the Australian Charlotte Jay (pseudonym of Geraldine Halls) for her novel, Beat Not the Bones, set in PNG.
For me, a key appeal of women’s crime fiction is the agency – and power – it gives to women.
In the 1980s, I was one of many readers who were swept away by the explosion in women’s crime writing driven by Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton in the United States, Val McDermid in the United Kingdom and, in Australia, by the late Kerry Greenwood and her now world-famous Miss Fisher Murder Mystery series.
Some of us had been crime fans since we’d cut our teeth on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. The very first book I bought was the second in the series, Five Go Adventuring Again, which cost 9/6 at Doran’s Newsagency and Bookshop in Gympie. I had saved up the money by getting letters published in the children’s pages of the Gympie Times. (It might even be said that this set the trajectory for my life – spending all my money on books, an obsession with crime novels and the Second World War, and earning my living by writing.)
Enid Blyton was conservative and intensely patriotic. She published the first book, Five on a Treasure Island, in her Famous Five series in 1942, during the Second World War. Her main characters are pre-teen or just beginning puberty and discover particularly challenging puzzles to solve during their holidays—before they are transported back to the security of their private schools. The series has the same five ‘agents’— George (Georgina), her cousins, Anne, Dick, Julian, and Timmy, George’s dog. George is the leader of the gang, a tomboy whom Blyton described as “short-haired, freckled, sturdy, and snub-nosed” and “bold and daring, hot-tempered and loyal”, a character who was based on herself.
The other female character, Anne, generally adopts a ‘domestic’ role and sees to their daily needs. I identified wildly with George – like me back then, she had short curly hair, wore shorts (albeit somewhat longer), and was very spirited. Anne, I always thought, would grow up into one of those women with wet fish handshakes.
Blyton’s series had huge sales: six million by 1953 and still massively growing, along with many adaptations for television and film. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders created three wonderful spoofs in the 1980s – Five Go Mad on Mescalin, Five Go Mad in Dorset, and Five Go to Rehab. In 2023, the BBC produced four telemovie-length shows – this time with a black George.
As adults, we might have dipped into Agatha Christie’s huge oeuvre, but many of us despaired of her snobbish, bourgeois class politics and the narrow worlds she portrayed. We might have admired Miss Marple’s powers of observation, but she was not a role model, even if some of us did like knitting.
The new breed of women crime writers from the late seventies offered us kick-arse heroes who simultaneously thrilled, entertained, subverted, and inspired. They were physically capable, smart, and stood up to men. They spoke to us about the big issues confronting us as women and citizens, whether it was violence, sexual assault, or simply going about our lives in a male-dominated world. Themes often went to the heart of many aspects of contemporary politics.
One Japanese woman wrote to Sara Paretsky, the founder of Sisters in Crime, that she dipped into one of her V I Warshawski novels every morning before work – it gave her the courage to face her male-dominated workplace.
For me, crime fiction is also a genre that allows writers to explore so many different issues and so many different time periods, ‘a broad church’, as many are wont to joke. When a lot of fiction has literally lost the plot (and a large readership), crime writing stands tall with compelling narratives, a keen sense of place, strong female characters, and an acute sense of justice. And it’s not all deadly serious – there is lots of fun, lots of humour, and lots of irony. It’s just that the outcome is often deadly.
Thanks to women crime writers, we know about all sorts of things about our society that we previously didn’t. Women crime writers often end up as being part of the conscience of society, exposing a lot of what goes on in an undercurrent of denial and selective ignorance, whether that is of sexual abuse, violence, psychological abuse, or the abuse and protection of power.
Women’s crime books can effect actual change. Dr Kathryn Fox, who writes the Anya Crichton’s forensic physician series, says that her books have encouraged sexual assault victims to come forward and report abuse, because they read about the specialist sexual assault centres. A forensic physician in the UK read one of her books and learnt that in New South Wales, three stages of consent for victims of sexual assault are more empowering for victims and lets them have a say in how their case progressed, if at all. She changed the way her sexual assault unit performed examinations in England, to better empower victims.
Death Mask, a book she wrote about concussions and violent crimes by footballers, helped launch discussions of concussions amongst Australian footballers. The book prompted a number of media discussions, even in the sports pages of the Telegraph. Dr Fox ended up advising the NFL.
Thanks to women’s crime books, we even have a few hints for what to do if there is a tsunami. In 2004, as a tsunami swept through parts of South East Asia, I was holidaying on the Gold Coast and reading Fault Line, a novel by Sarah Andrews about her geologist sleuth Em Hansen. At the beginning of Chapter 25, it included a passage from the Roman historian, Marcellinus, in 365, describing in graphic detail the effect of an earthquake and tsunami in Alexandria which saw the waves rush backwards leaving the fish and sea creatures exposed and then roaring back in, killing many thousands and destroying ships and all before it. If I were to be on a beach and the sea began to retreat, I would know what to do: run and shout warnings.
Increasingly, women in crime novels are taking justice into their own hands, reflecting the despair felt by so many at the failure of the legal system to deliver justice for women who are sexually assaulted or raped. Some of the recent novels that explore this theme include: Sarah Barrie’s Lexi Winter series; N.D. Campbell’s Daughters of Eve; Jane Caro’s The Mother; Margaret Hickey’s Stone Town; Petronella McGovern’s The Liars; and Debra Oswald’s The Family Doctor.
In 1990, Paretsky said what she was most interested in was “white collar crime”: “. . . in the way that ordinary people’s lives are affected, even destroyed, by large institutions. White collar criminals do extraordinary damage to people’s lives and are seldom either prosecuted or convicted. You get a man like Charles Keating who’s at the centre of one of the big savings and loans cases here . . . Now the bank is bankrupt, people have lost all their money, and we have no idea how many people are homeless, how many people have committed suicide, how many people have starved to death, how many people may have turned to crime. We do know if those elderly people have had to shoplift or steal or do anything else illegal, that they will be arrested and prosecuted and serve heavy sentences but we don’t know that Charles Keating ever will.” [Note: Keating was eventually jailed for four-and-a-half years.]
The first protagonists of the new wave were often private investigators but they differed both from the hard-boiled private eyes of Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie’s female sleuths.
According to Paretsky, sexuality is essentially the key difference with all these writers. In the hard-boiled novel, a woman who is sexually active is by definition a villain. “When you look at someone like Agatha Christie, the female characters are really asexual, no one more so than Miss Marple who really stands outside the normal passions that people have. . . What you have in common between writers like Agatha Christie or Marjorie Allingham is that their virtuous women always have the figures of boys.”
A strong narrative has also been part of the appeal of crime novels. As Paretsky remarked, “We’re the last vestiges of Victorian storytellers, we crime writers. But also we’re concerned with some . . . fundamental issues, law, justice, those sorts of things.”
While a lot of fiction literally lost the plot under the influence of post-modernism over the past three decades, women’s crime writing has gone from strength to strength, exposing the underbelly of our surrounding society in unexpected ways.
Sisters in Crime Australia has now been going for nearly 34 years. Our organisation now has over 600 members, 3500 followers, and chapters in all states. In Victoria, where the majority of the members are based, we have a very busy calendar of events, usually featuring author panels, wonderful meals, and lashings of wine. The pleasure principle has been the modus operandi for Sisters in Crime.
Men – or ‘brothers-in-law’ – have always been welcome as members and supporters, but with a few exceptions, Sisters in Crime has always been able to rely on the expertise of women for events. One exception is the fairly regular, Dicks Versus Dames debates. (They are judged by the clapometer and surprisingly the women always win . . . ).
Dozens of overseas crime writers, including Paretsky, have spoken at Sisters in Crime Australia events and we’ve partnered with literary festivals, bookshops, libraries, universities, the Radio National Quiz Show and Big Ideas, and institutions including the Victoria Police Museum, the Melbourne Museum, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, the National Trust, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Our Scarlet Stiletto short story competition (now in its 32nd year) and the Davitt Awards for best crime books (now in its 25th year) have launched literary careers and helped build the reputation of Australian women’s crime writing. We have a busy presence on social media and now a YouTube channel. Some 34 winners of Scarlet Stiletto Awards – including category awards – have gone on to have novels published. They include Cate Kennedy, Tara Moss, Angela Savage, Ellie Marney, and Aoife Clifford.
The Davitts (named after Ellen Davitt, who wrote Australia’s first full-length murder mystery, Force and Fraud, in 1856) were launched at SheKilda, Sisters in Crime’s 10th anniversary convention in 2001. Women, at that stage, barely got a look in at the Ned Kelly Awards presented by the Australian Crime Writers’ Association. Back in 2001, there were seven books in contention, though admittedly the awards did not then extend to true crime. This year, there are 150 books in contention, a feat for which Sisters in Crime claims some credit.
Australian women’s crime writing is now globally recognized and taking out International Awards such as the Gold Dagger and the Barry Awards and also translated to the screen. There’s Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries; Liane Moriarty ‘s Big Little Lies, and Nine Perfect Strangers; Jane Harper’s The Dry, Force of Nature, and The Survivors; Candice Fox’s Troppo (a 3rd series coming); and soon, Sarah Bailey’s The Dark Lake, and Vikki Petraitis’s The Unbelieved.
Sisters in Crime has become a critical forum for furthering readers’ knowledge of the world and trying to come to grips with what exactly justice means – but, in some ways, its most notable achievement is the sheer amount of pleasure and fun we engender in its wake.
Thank you.