Australia's colonial history began with the arrival of criminals, so perhaps it's not surprising that true crime is a flourishing genre. Whether through books (printed or audio), films, TV shows or podcasts, as well as contemporary media reports, true crime does pay for many.
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Australian National University English professor Ros Smith says people's fascination with true crime has been around for a long time, from 16th-century murder plays based on contemporary news accounts to the Police Gazettes of the 19th century.
"People love crime, the extremity of behaviour, the extremity of the act."
Australia has had no shortage of notorious crimes and criminals - Ned Kelly, the Underbelly books and TV series, and more. But the appeal is international.
"A really influential text was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood," Smith says.
Capote's so-called non-fiction novel, published in 1966, detailed the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in Kansas by ex-cons Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.
Despite many questions about its veracity, the book was hugely popular, was adapted into a 1967 film, and showed the genre had life, even respectability.
Smith says true crime stories aren't just about the crimes themselves but deal with broader concerns. John Bryson's Evil Angels, about the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain and the investigative and legal processes that followed, dealt with people's discomfort with the Chamberlains' religion and "the vulnerability of childhood, the power of the mother".
Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation, the story of a Canberra woman who killed her boyfriend in 1997, is "about how intimate relationships can go badly wrong", Smith says.
In this case, a woman was the perpetrator but more often, Smith says, it's women who are the victims.
"The potential for violence and danger is part of women's everyday life ... It's part of their lived experience."
One recent example of a true crime narrative is Canberra resident and former journalist and public servant Sandi Logan's Betrayed: The incredible untold inside story of the two most unlikely drug-running grannies in Australian history.
The book won the award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting in the 2024 UK True Crime Awards. It's the story of the "drug grannies". Vera Hays, 59, and Florice Bessire, 61 were American women with no criminal history. In 1977 they became unwitting drug mules after Hays' nephew, Vern Todd, talked them into driving a camper van from Germany to India, then on to Australia. Secreted inside were nearly two tonnes of hashish.
When it arrived here in 1978, the van was searched by the police and the drugs were found. The women pleaded guilty to importing them and were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. After years of campaigning on their behalf, they were released in 1983 and deported.
Logan reported on the women's sentencing, interviewed them extensively, and was among those who campaigned for their early release. While the line between journalism and advocacy blurred at times, he's confident he did the right thing. He secured exclusive access to the women's diaries, correspondence, photographs and other papers and wrote the book as a COVID lockdown project since certain people who were involved had died.
He can't say too much at this point, but Betrayed is in the process of being adapted into a streaming series.
In terms of true crime readership, Logan says women far outnumber men in consuming it.
"They love it," he says. Part of this, he thinks, is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I feeling, but since women are often the victims of violent crime, they are mindful of lessons to be learned to increase their safety, a point also made by Smith.
Crime writer Wendy James came by much of her knowledge of crime through her husband.
"I was married to a cop for 15 years," she says. They're still married, but he's no longer a police officer.
Her husband's police journals helped provide inspiration for some of her work, which focuses particularly on domestic noir - "crime committed by people close to you". Trove provides access to old newspaper accounts, another fertile source.
Out of the Silence - which won the Ned Kelly Crime Award prize for best first crime novel - took place against the background of the women's suffrage movement. Six of her novels have been brought back into circulation by Ligature Publishing.
But interest in true crime, without the veil of fiction, shows no signs of waning.
James says, "Perhaps as our lives become progressively safer, and we're more and more risk averse - which means we're also restricted in certain ways too - we're more and more fascinated by the bad things, and people, who inevitably manage to get through the cracks."
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