Lainie Anderson’s novels about a real pioneering policewoman invite us to play historical detective |
It’s 1917 and policewoman Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks is patrolling the parks of Adelaide, armed with a five-foot cane. She’s there to protect women from harm by enforcing a “three foot rule” to keep amorous couples at a safe distance from each other.
When not on morality police duties, she likes to shop in the recently opened Moore’s department store on Victoria Square, with its grand marble staircase, and its piano serenading the well-heeled clientele with cheery wartime songs.
This might seem like a fanciful premise for a historical crime fiction series. But Miss Kate Cocks, as she was usually known, did in fact exist. (So did Moore’s department store, before it was gutted by fire in 1948.) Cocks was the first woman police officer in the British Empire to be paid at the same rate as her male colleagues and granted similar powers of arrest.
In fact, she was the first policewoman in South Australia, which in 1894 became the first state to grant women the vote and the right to stand for parliament. (A year after New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.)
Review: The Death of Dora Black; Murder on North Terrace – by Lainie Anderson (Hachette)
Journalist and novelist Lainie Anderson discovered Cocks while randomly scrolling through her Twitter feed during the COVID pandemic. She then applied to the University of South Australia to do a PhD on Miss Cocks, aiming to make her the protagonist in a popular crime novel. This resulted in a two-book deal.
Anderson’s (still embargoed) thesis addressed the challenge, and ethics, of turning a real woman into a fictionalised character. Whatever her concerns might have been, The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace are fine additions to feminist historical crime fiction: perhaps best exemplified by the Miss Phryne Fisher mysteries written by the late Kerry Greenwood.
Indeed, Miss Cock’s fictional offsider, the indomitable Constable Ethel Bromley, is somewhat reminiscent of Phryne. Ethel is also wealthy and beautiful. She, too, entertains a lover and........