Readers loved discovering pioneering policewoman Kate Cocks, a real-life detective working in early 1900s Adelaide, in The Death of Dora Black. Photo: Canberra Writers Festival.
Readers loved discovering pioneering policewoman Kate Cocks, a real-life detective working in early 1900s Adelaide, in The Death of Dora Black.
Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks, unmarried, aged 40, became the first policewoman in the British Empire to hold the same salary and have the same powers of arrest as her male colleagues.
Now author Lainie Anderson brings Kate Cocks back, in the recently released Murder on North Terrace.
Cocks’ real history of forcing abusive husbands to their knees to repent and busting out jujitsu moves on baddies, merges seamlessly into taut crime fiction in Lainie Anderson’s world.
Adelaide has never been this tense or exciting! Lainie is in conversation with Susan Wyndham, writer, journalist and former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.
Lainie Anderson scored her first newsroom job by listing her hobbies as beer and pasta.
Her 35-year journalism career included stints at Melbourne’s Herald Sun, London’s The Times, and 17 years as a columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail.
Lainie’s PhD with the University of South Australia studied the life of pioneering policewoman Kate Cocks and inspired her Petticoat Police mysteries, The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace.
The details
What: Policewoman Kate Cocks Turned Fiction
When: Sunday 26 October, 10.30am
Where: National Library of Australia
Cost: $28 per person. Tickets are available via Canberra Writers Festival.
