A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: N Is For Non-Fiction

 Non-fiction crime writing is usually called “true crime”. I’ve written some myself(see below). But I also read quite a lot of it while researching for my own book. 

True crime is very popular. People do want to know what really happened. Kids love it too; I had five copies of my book on my library shelves and it was borrowed so much that all of them were falling apart by the end of the year. 

One of the books I used in my research was Underbelly: The Gangland War by John Silvester and Andrew Rule. The two authors are both crime journalists. John Silvester is still writing a crime column for the Melbourne newspaper The Age. In fact, the book is based on a series of newspaper articles they wrote about Melbourne’s gangland wars, which were big news at the time. Everybody was talking about them, and the criminal families who were fighting and killing each other. One of them, drug trafficker Tony Mokbel, escaped to Greece by boat, but was caught in Greece and brought back. He has, at this writing, been in prison for 18 years, but is appealing and has been let out on bail. 

The book was fictionalised into a TV series, though that wasn’t shown in Victoria when it came out because the subjects were on trial at the time and showing it might have led to bias. A bit silly, really, as it was easy enough for Sydney people, for example, to record it for family and friends in Melbourne, but I suppose they didn’t want to take a chance. 

If interested, you can buy it in ebook, and I’m guessing you can still find it in print.

As I said above, I used it as part of my research for my children’s book Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly. Yes, I wrote a book about crime for kids, about 9 to 12. One of my Year 7 students told me that it had been withdrawn from the shelves at his primary school because kids in  Year 2, including himself, wanted to read it! I gave him a copy, signed to him with “You are now old enough to read this.” He read it in a weekend, bless him.

It includes the gangland wars, but historical stories from the Batavia incident (17th century mutiny off the coast of Western Australia) onwards. I made sure that there were the sort of gruesome stories kids love, but not written to create any nightmares for the young readers. Some, like the April Fool’s Day robbery, were written for fun. That was the story of two idiots who went to rob the Dandenongs restaurant the Cuckoo on April Fool’s Day and left with nothing but a bag of stale bread rolls the manager was taking home to feed his chickens.  

Here is the trailer made for YouTube. It was created by a teenager on work experience, but I thought he did a very good job. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aT12MtGyxoA&pp=ygUbQ3JpbWUgVGltZSBTdWUgQnVyc3p0eW5za2kg

I am still proud of this book, which was shortlisted for the Scarlet Stiletto Award. 

If you are interested, the publisher still has a few copies for  Australian readers, but I have some copies I can sell you if you want print. Or you can get it easily in ebook, both Apple Books and Kindle.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: M Is For Shane Maloney

 Shane Maloney is an Aussie author who lives in Melbourne. At one stage he was writing a column for the Age newspaper  but he has done other jobs, from director of the Melbourne Comedy Festival to a lifeguard.

His six-novel Murray Whelan series is set very distinctly in Melbourne. If you live there as I do, you recognise the places mentioned in the books. I’ve only read four of the series, I didn’t even know there were more till recently. 

Murray Whelan works for a Victorian Labor government, starting in the 1980s, when there was a Labor government in power. His politicians are fictional, though. 

His job isn’t investigating murders, but somehow he always ends up finding a dead body and finding out whodunnit. 

In Stiff, the first novel, a dead body is found in a freezer at a meat packing workshop. Murray is ordered to investigate, because there may be some embarrassment for the Labor party. Murray has no idea how to do it, but does his best. 

The second novel, The Brush-Off, has a dead body found in the pool of the National Gallery(the gallery is real, the victim isn’t). This novel won the prestigious Ned Kelly Award and was short listed for the Premier’s Literary award. 

In one novel, somebody is hit over the head with a mobile phone, in the days when not everyone had one and they were much heavier than they are now,

Murray is a klutz. He is, in fact, very lucky not to be killed in the course of the series. 

Eventually he becomes a politician himself. 

Only two of the books were filmed, the first two, Stiff and The Brush-Off, but in them the role of Murray was played by David Wenham, whom you have probably seen at least once, in Lord Of The Rings, as Faramir. If you live in Australia you may well have seen him in Sea Change, in which he played the very sexy Diver Dan. The films are worth chasing up, if you can. 

The books and TV show alike are great fun and the books are still available, both in print and ebook, Amazon, Dymocks and Apple Books. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: L Is For Lois McMaster Bujold

 

Okay, I’m cheating again, but you’ll soon see that I am thinking of mystery, despite the science fictional theme of the author’s book series. 

Lois McMaster Bujold is the author of a series of space operas about a man called Miles Vorkosigan, the son of Prime Minister Aral Vorkosigan on the planet Barrayar and his wife Captain Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony. 

Miles was born badly formed due to a murder attempt when his mother was pregnant. Despite his problems, he has managed to get medical treatment for his fragile bones, among other things, and is very bright. 

The first several books in the series show him as a space mercenary, working also for Impsec(Imperial Security), but eventually he loses his job due to lying to his boss, Simon Illyan, in a novel called Memory. However, he solves the mystery of why Simon has been behaving strangely and forgetting where he never did before - he has a chip in his brain that is supposed to keep everything in his memory. As a result, Miles is appointed an Imperial Auditor, with the job of finding out things that seem fishy on the planets of the Empire. So the novels from then on are mysteries, which Miles uses his brain to investigate. There are mystery elements in other books set in this universe, such as Cetaganda, in which Miles and his cousin Ivan represent Barrayar at an Imperial funeral on the title planet. There is a murder and the theft of a vital object. Miles investigates and, of course, finds out whodunnit. 

If you like an unusual mystery set in the far future, this series is a lot of fun. 

Alas, the author has ended the series and focused on secondary world fantasy, but there is still plenty to enjoy. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: K Is For Kerry Greenwood

 

I had planned to make this post K for Faye Kellerman, who writes stories about an ultra Orthodox Jewish couple who solve mysteries, but this week, we lost the wonderful Kerry Greenwood, the author of the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman novels, and I can’t leave her out. Kerry was sick for  a very long time, so maybe I should have expected it, but it was still a shock to hear about it on Wednesday. I’ll pop Faye Kellerman into X for Xtras.

I discovered Kerry Greenwood some years ago, when she was mentioned in the Age newspaper. I have always enjoyed historical crime fiction, and the thought of a 1920s woman detective who zips around Melbourne in a bright red Hispano Suiza car was utterly intriguing. I bought a copy of the first novel, Cocaine Blues, and started bingeing on all the books that were available at the time, and reading them all as they came out. 

There are twenty-two Phryne Fisher novels, with one more - the very last - to come out later this year, plus a volume of short stories. 

There will be no more Corinna Chapman books, alas. A pity because Corinna Chapman, that enthusiastic baker, was a lot more like Kerry than Phryne. 

Kerry described her heroine as Simon Templar’s younger sister. She decided to set the whole series in 1928, because she had researched that year, including the 1928 wharfie strike. She hadn’t expected it to be so popular and last so long, so while Cocaine Blues started in May of 1928, most of the novels were somehow crammed into the rest of 1928, though she seems to have given up, and the last few books were set in early 1929, before the Depression began. She made Phryne smart enough to invest in businesses that would always be needed - basic foods and land. So if it did get as far as the Depression, Phryne would still be rich.

The TV series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, didn’t cover all the books, and the third season was was made up of original stories. I quite enjoyed the later shows, because they were able to fit stories into the time available. The episodes based on the novels can’t cram everything into an hour. Phryne’s boyfriend Lin Chung, so much a part of the books, barely appears at all, and instead of being a silk merchant, his grandmother runs a Chinese restaurant. 

Essie Davis, who played Phryne Fisher, was perfectly cast. She looked like Phryne. They implied a romance between her and Inspector Jack Robinson, who was happily married with children in the books.

The series was historically accurate, from the scenery to the costumes. They had Kerry to advise on that. The costumes included some that were very old. I saw an exhibition of them and they were breathtaking from close up. 

It’s sad to think there will be no more books - and even sadder that Kerry is gone. She was a delightful, cheery person everyone liked. 

RIP Kerry! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: J Is For P.D. James

 

I confess that I’ve only read one of the books of P.D. James and it wasn’t one of her better known novels, about Inspector Dalgliesh. After this challenge is over, I’ll download one. But I needed a J entry, so here it is. Hope you enjoy! 

These days a lot of people are writing sequels to Pride And Prejudice, or stories set during the novel. I remember one in which the story is seen from the viewpoint of the servants, one of whom is Mr Bennet’s illegitimate son! I quite liked the bit in that novel where the servant who has to wash the clothes thinks it’s all very well for Miss Elizabeth to take a nice long walk through muddy fields, but who has to get the mud off her dresses? And of course, there’s Pride And Prejudice And Zombies! 

But P.D James is a mystery writer, so her Pride And Prejudice sequel, Death Comes To Pemberley, is a murder mystery. A minor character from the original novel, Captain Denny, is murdered in the woods just before a ball at Pemberley. Guess who is accused of the murder? Mr Wickham, Lydia Bennet’s husband. Of course, he didn’t do it, but that’s not a spoiler, as the first person ever to be accused of murder in a mystery story is almost never the one who did it. I did recently read a novel in which the killer was the first one accused, though she had good reason for doing it and the people who figure it out don’t tell. But that’s very rare. And in Death Comes To Pemberley, Wickham did do something horrible. Sigh! I’ve only seen one story in which Wickham was presented sympathetically, the TV miniseries Lost In Austen.

There is a TV series based on Death comes To Pemberley, which you can watch on Prime. It’s beautifully done, and even the food for the banquet was carefully prepared by a big name Regency food chef. 

It’s been a while since I read the novel, but I do recommend it. It’s not Pride And Prejudice, obviously, but it’s well worth a read. Available in ebook and print, from any good web site or bookshop.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: I Is For Ira Levin

 Ira Levin is best known for his horror fiction - The Boys From Brazil, The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby. I’m not calling them anything else, but  books like these are mysteries in that the main character has to find out what’s going on, in order to stop the villain. Think about it. In The Boys From Brazil, the pursuit is of Nazi Josef Mengele, who used to experiment on twins and now has used this knowledge to create 94 Hitler clones and is making their lives resemble that of Adolf Hitler, for example, by killing their fathers at the right age. He does get his comeuppance, but the novel is a mystery anyway, as Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann(based on real life Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal) tries to work out why these older men are being killed and attempting to stop it when he works it out.  

The Stepford Wives starts off with the common trope that has a young couple moving to a small town where mysterious things are happening. The mystery in this one is, why are all the women turning into perfect housewives, after going on a romantic weekend trip with their husbands?

Joanna Eberhart, the heroine, needs to know, because her two friends, who started as strong, independent women turn into housewives with no interest in anything else, and her husband is spending a lot of   time with the local men. She might be next. Will she work it out in time to save herself or is it too late? This novel and the films based on it are well known enough that most people know the answer to that question, but when it first came out, it was very new, and the term “Stepford wife” was not yet a thing. 

The script for the first film version(1975) was written by William Goldman, who also wrote The Princess Bride! It was the most faithful to the novel. 

Rosemary’s Baby features a woman, Rosemary Woodhouse, who moves with her husband, Guy, into an apartment in New York City. If you think about it, it’s pretty much the same trope as “young couple moves to a small town where strange things are happening”, though as an introduction to my copy says, it may have been the first horror story set in the big city, close to home, instead of far-off Transylvania or wherever. 

Guy is an actor who hasn’t had much work. He gets on very well with their older  neighbours, the Castavets. When Rosemary becomes pregnant after a weird sexual encounter(Guy claims that was him and sorry about the long nails) suddenly Guy starts getting work - lots of it. Mrs Castavet seems to be looking after Rosemary and gives her a necklace with a herb in it that she claims will help with the pregnancy. When Rosemary finds out it’s nothing of the kind, she starts to investigate. What she finds out is horrifying. 

This novel was the closest to actual horror fiction of the three, but it’s still a mystery, which the heroine has to solve.

There was a film with Mia Farrow as Rosemary. I think it’s nearly as much of a classic as the book. Either will do to start with if you are interested.

So, who knew horror fiction can also be mystery and thriller?

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: H Is For Sherlock Holmes

 How could I not include Sherlock Holmes in a mystery-themed blog series? I first discovered Holmes when I was a child. My sister also read and loved them, and was heart broken when she had run out of them. 

Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the detective, also wrote historical fiction and several pieces of speculative fiction, the Professor Challenger series. You’d be familiar with at least one of those, The Lost World, which had dinosaurs in it, seen from the viewpoint of a young journalist who is on the expedition because his girlfriend thinks he’s boring and needs to do something exciting. It’s a lot of fun, as are the short stories.

Holmes, who works out his mysteries through sheer logic, was inspired by surgeon Joseph Bell, who was in Edinburgh and for who. Doyle worked as a clerk at one time. Bell had the same logical way of working out things. He did later write to Doyle, saying that it was not him, but Doyle who was really Holmes. 

There were other fictional detectives before Sherlock Holmes, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. But we know who is the character most used, don’t we? The stories inspired a lot of plays, films, radio plays and TV shows. I read that the character was in the Guinness Book of Records in 2012, as the most adapted, with 75 actors having played the role in 250 productions. And that was in 2012!

Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played Holmes and Watson in films of the 1940s. There were stories updated to what was then the present day, with Holmes fighting Nazis. 

These days, of course, we have the TV series Sherlock, with stories updated to the present day, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson.

My personal favourite adaptation is the one with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke, produced in the 1980s. Brett was, in my opinion, born to play Holmes.

Fun fact I have just learned: Gregory House, in the medical TV series House was based on Sherlock Holmes and even his name was House because - Holmes! 

Sherlock Holmes is a highly logical person, who tells his new housemate John Watson that there are things he didn’t know and will now try to forget, such as the Earth orbiting the sun, because he only has so much space in his head and doesn’t want to waste any of it with information he doesn’t need. Holmes and Watson share a flat at 221B Baker Street in London, and are looked after by their landlady Mrs Hudson. She must be very patient, because Holmes makes a lot of noise with his violin and does target practice.   

Characters based on Holmes and Watson are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings. Like Watson, Hastings has returned from war at the start of the first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, only it’s the Great War and he was fighting in France. Like Watson, he marries, but somehow always finds excuses to return for another adventure with his detective friend. Poirot has his “Irene Adler”, whom he admires for her cleverness, Countess Vera Rossakoff. 

There is quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes - fan fiction, can we call it? They are mostly short stories published in anthologies. Barbara Hambly has even written a novelette “The Adventure Of The Antiquarian’s Niece” in which Holmes and Watson encounter the characters from the Cthulhu mythos! 

Given that a lot of Holmes fiction is in the public domain now, there is likely to be more.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: G Is For Gordianus the Finder

 I said I’d tell you about another mystery series set in Ancient Rome and here it is!

Gordianus the Finder is a private detective in a series written by Steven Saylor, Roma Sub Roma. He lives in an earlier era than Falco, the time of the Roman Republic and while the Falco novels have some historical figures in them, the Gordianus books have a lot of them, and they are set during actual historical events. The first novel, Roman Blood, involves an early legal case actually conducted by Cicero in 80 BCE. Cicero hires Gordianus to help his case. 

Gordianus lives with his slave/housekeeper Bethesda. She is his lover, the only woman in his life, and they eventually marry. In the first book, he adopts a boy, Eco, whose mother is gone. He has lost his speech, though he does get it back in the second novel, Arms of Nemesis, set during the Spartacus slave uprising, when we meet the Roman millionaire Marcus Crassus. In between, there is the short story collection House Of The Vestals, which includes a “Christmas” story, “The Saturnalia Silver”, in which Bethesda solves the mystery of the missing silver and goes with Gordianus to the Roman version of Carols by Candlelight. (Who knew?) It was written for a Christmas anthology and reprinted in this collection. 

The novels are spread out over the years with historical events, unlike the Falco stories which are crowded together within a few years. 

They are not humorous like the Falco series - in fact, they’re often terribly serious. To be honest, I prefer the Lindsey Davis books.  But they are well worth a read if you want to read something that is as much history as mystery, and Gordianus’s children have time to grow up. 

I recently bought the first four books in ebook, in one volume. It wasn’t too expensive either. Or you can buy them in print, if you prefer, from your favourite online bookseller.