Book Review – 7 Short Crime Stories by ANZ Women Writers

I have this big giant book called ‘Deadlier : 100 of the Best Crime Stories Written by Women‘. I decided to look through this book and identify ANZ writers and read their stories for ‘Southern Cross Crime Month‘ hosted by Kim from ‘Reading Matters’.

It was fun browsing through the book, discovering new writers and reading about them. I spent a whole pleasurable afternoon doing this. The book is edited by Sophie Hannah and so I was expecting to find a lot of British writers there, but I also hoped that she had squeezed in a few ANZ writers. I was hoping that there would be somewhere between five and ten ANZ writers / stories. There were six ANZ writers featured and seven stories by them. I was happy.

Out of the six ANZ writers featured, one was from New Zealand. As expected, it was the legendary Ngaio Marsh. Her story ‘I Can Find My Way Out‘ featured her famous detective Roderick Alleyn and is a classic mystery story marrying her twin passions of mystery writing and theatre with an interesting surprise in the end.

Out of the five Australian authors featured, two were 19th century authors. Ellen Davitt, whose story ‘The Highlander’s Revenge‘ was featured here, is regarded as the mother of Australian crime fiction. Her crime mystery ‘Force and Fraud : A Tale of the Bush‘ was first published in 1865. It pre-dated Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel ‘A Study in Scarlet’ (published in 1887) by more than two decades. More interestingly, it pre-dated Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Moonstone’ (published in 1868) by a few years. ‘The Moonstone’ is regarded by many as the first detective crime mystery published. I don’t know why, because Ellen Davitt’s book came  before that. Out of the famous detective crime mysteries, only Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin mysteries pre-date Ellen Davitt’s book. Ellen Davitt was a pioneer and she broke new ground. She needs to be celebrated not just in Australia but across the world.

Davitt’s story ‘The Highlander’s Revenge’ featured in this book wasn’t much to read. It was about settlers and aborigines killing each other and I didn’t like it much. But I’m happy to have read a story by Australia’s first ever crime fiction writer. Her novel looks more promising and I hope to read it soon.

The second 19th century writer featured in the book was Mary Helena Fortune. Two of her stories were featured in the book – ‘The White Maniac : A Doctor’s Tale‘ and ‘Traces of Crime‘. The first story was one of my favourite stories out of the seven, but it was not exactly a crime story, it was more a mystery and a scary story. Mary Helena Fortune was one of the earliest writers to feature a female detective in her stories, and she wrote more than 500 stories between the 1860s and the early 1900s.

The three contemporary writers featured were Kerry Greenwood, Angela Savage and Emma Viskic. Kerry Greenwood has said some nice things about Ellen Davitt’s novel and so I have a soft corner for her. Her story ‘The Voice is Jacob’s Voice‘ is about a themed party in which everyone is dressed as a historical character, but then soon bad things happen. Angela Savage’s ‘The Odds‘ was my most favourite story out of the seven. In the beginning the narrator describes a doctor that she is following or rather stalking and slowly all is revealed. The story had a beautiful, satisfying ending. Emma Viskic’s ‘Web Design‘ was the shortest story in the book at four pages. I liked it very much. It had a lot of potential of being spun into a novel because we are curious about what happened before and what happened after.

I enjoyed reading these seven crime stories by women ANZ writers. More than the stories themselves it was lots of fun discovering new writers. I want to read Ellen Davitt’s novel now and explore more of Angela Savage’s work.

Have you read stories by any of these writers? Which ones are your favourites? Have you read this collection?