Crime across the ditch: Lucy Sussex reports on Rotorua Noir

New Zealand is a country of firsts, and Rotorua Noir was its debut crime fiction convention, held over the Australia Day weekend, 2019. The venue, appropriately the Shambles Theatre, was small, but a perfect confab resulted. Writers appeared from NZ, but also Australia (Michael Rowbotham), Iceland, Finland and the North of the British Isles. Rotorua …

Read more

Toni Jordan headshot

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

Headshot Anna Snoekstra

Revenge is a dish best served cold:Q&A with Anna Snoekstra

Melbourne crime writer, Anna Snoekstra, spoke to Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President, Robyn Walton, about her latest thriller, The Spite Game (HQ Fiction, 2018). Hi, Anna. You sold the film rights to your first novel, Only Daughter. How’s that all going? Great! I’ve just gotten back from LA, where I was catching up with everything that …

Read more