Helen 0:00

The Kill City Podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands we're on. Here in Melbourne, that's the Wurrundjeri Woi Worong people of the Koran Nation. We honour their deep connection to storytelling, a tradition carried across more than 2,000 generations. Pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and we extend that welcome to all First Nations people listening today.

Leigh 0:51

Helen, lovely to see you. How's things?

Helen 0:53

Hey, Leigh, it's good to see you too. I'm pretty good. It's been a bit of a juggle this week, but uh, look, you know what it's like, nothing out of the ordinary. But I'm really ready to take a break and get stuck in today's episode.

Leigh 1:06

Well that's good, because today we've got a great one. It's Pride Month, a time when LGBTQI Plus communities and allies around the world come together to celebrate, to protest, to remember, and to show up for each other. Um, which felt like the perfect moment for us to shine a light on the LGBTQI Plus writers, characters, and stories that have shaped the Australian crime and mystery fiction genre. Um, Pride started as a protest and it's still a space for visibility and resistance, but it's also become this huge cultural moment for storytelling. And crime fiction has always had a soft spot for outsiders and people who don't quite fit the mould. Um, so what are we going to start with?

Helen 1:43

Yeah, um happy pride monthly. Um yeah, I just think it's um such an important thing um to show our allyship for um the queer community, and um what a perfect way to do it by showcasing um books and authors. So I'm really excited to get stuck in, and as always, um have spent a bit of time researching, and the rabbit holes are pretty cool this time. So, before we get into modern queer crime writers, I actually want to start way back with a gentleman called Fergus Hume. Now he was the guy who accidentally wrote Australia's first literary blockbuster. But interestingly, he wasn't actually Australian at all. He was born in Worcestershire in 1859, raised in Dunedin in New Zealand, he trained in the law there, and then he actually got called to the New Zealand bar, I think, in about 1885.

Leigh 2:37

And then he does the classic trans Tasman pivot straight to Melbourne to become a playwright.

Helen 2:44

Yes, well, that we have heard that happen a bit with um Kiwi actors that you know sort of become Australian. So yeah, he um he arrived, he had really big theatre dreams, but nobody read his scripts, so he decided to write a crime novel as a calling card, and that was the book that became The Mystery of the Handsome Cab. Now, it was published in 1886, and it opens with a dead man in a horse-drawn cab and it unravels into like a really big tangle of secrets and class tensions across the 1880s Melbourne, and the investigation drags the readers through the sort of polished terraces to the cities, rougher back streets, and it kind of shows that Melbourne back then was a place that was split by money and ambition and respectability.

Leigh 3:30

Um and then it like it just took off. It was already a huge hit here in Australia, everyone was reading it, and then it went global, becoming the biggest and fastest-selling detective novel of the entire 19th century. So this was before Conan Doyle had even introduced Sherlock Holmes, and it didn't just compete with Holmes once that was released, it outsold him. Uman Doyle was so unimpressed he dismissed it as a slight tale, mostly sold by the cleverness of the title, um, which is probably Victorian for I'm Furious this colonial upstart is outselling me.

Helen 4:02

I was really hoping you were going to do that in a fancy English accent, Leigh. But yes, no, I think we get the drift. Conan Doyle was not impressed. So, but unfortunately, Hume had actually just sold the copyright for this amazing book for only £50 because he thought it was just going to be this little local success. And then he had to watch while it became this runaway global phenomenon. Like it sold out its first print to run almost instantaneously. The word of mouth spread was incredible, and then it just went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

Leigh 4:36

And Miles Franklin even wrote in the 1950s that Handsome Cab was basically the only Australian book people overseas seemed to know. She actually said, This old vehicle has renowned beyond these shores. It was the extent of their knowledge that Australian literature even existed. Um, it was a superb compliment and a burn in one sentence.

Helen 4:57

Yeah, look, that's just classic Miles Franklin. Just love it. She just she just knew how to do it. Look, and because this is Pride Month, there's actually another side to Fergus Hume that we actually wanted to dig into. Um, now he never actually married. He spent much of his adult life living closely with men, it was reported, including an actor called Philip Beck. He also moved in circles where several of his closest friends were either known to be or suspected to be gay, like the Reverend Telford Major. And then interestingly, in 2025, a Melbourne writer, Lucy Sussex, published a fascinating biographical study called Blockbuster, Fergus Hume and the Mystery of the Handsome Cab. Now she actually was really good at digging into his history, and she found when she went down the burrow into his personal life, and there's long-standing speculation about his sexuality, sort of especially given his domestic arrangements and the fact that he had actually written a homoerotic novel in his time, she found something really interesting. There was a trove article about Hume giving £20 to a young man called Gordon Lawrence, who was later actually jailed in Melbourne for cruising and drag, and the charge was written down as insulting behaviour and vagrancy. Now, one of our favourite crime writers, and also a um renowned solicitor, Kerry Greenwood, she told Sussex that that kind of payment suggested either infatuation or blackmail.

Leigh 6:28

And then Sussex found like the real smoking gun, which was a 1902 article in The Critic in Adelaide.

Helen 6:35

Yes, and that reported that Hume had actually been blackmailed in Sydney by a Shakespearean actor and his accomplice. Now Sussex linked that to a West Indian actor who was called Antoine Bollars, who also had connections to the Gordon Lawrence that we just heard about. Now, so she was able to sort of draw some pretty straightforward conclusions. So she believes that Hume had definitely been blackmailed. The men were involved, were part of his social circle. So while it doesn't give us a simple answer about who he was, it does show us that he was living a private life that didn't kind of quite fit the expectations of the time. You know, it looked like he was someone moving in spaces that were maybe a bit hidden or a bit risky, definitely outside the norm. Just fascinating.

Leigh 7:24

Which makes him a perfect place to start for this episode. A writer on the margins who helped shape the entire direction of Australian crime fiction before the genre even knew what it was becoming.

Helen 7:36

Absolutely. And from there, we're actually going to jump forward about a century to somebody who deliberately queered Australian crime fiction and changed it forever. And I'm talking about Dorothy Porter. So if you're not familiar with her, she was a poet, a verse novelist, and a librettist. Now she was actually one of those writers that could kind of move between all those forms, you know, from everything from opera to from poems to novels, seamlessly. And the reason we're talking about her today is a very famous book of hers called The Monkey's Mask, which was one that she published in 1994. Now, this was completely unlike anything else at the time. It's actually a crime novel that is told entirely in verse, and it's not your standard classroom poetry either. This book has got sex, it's got danger, it's got obsession, it's got a really dirty Sydney underbelly. And look, to be honest, I don't know about you, Leigh, but I was traumatized by the poetry that I had to study in high school, and I still bear scars from Bloody Collages Kubla Khan. But you know, when I read Monkey's Mask, it was just so different. It's like just like nothing I've read. It's like really gritty, it's kind of filthy, funny, tender, absolutely complete opposite of doing homework. And the actual story is told through the voice of the main character. This is Jill Fitzpatrick. She's a lesbian private investigator looking into the murder of a young woman called Mickey Norris. And while she's trying to solve the case, she kind of gets tangled up in this really intense, messy relationship with Diana Maitland, who's a poetry lecturer.

Leigh 9:14

Um The Age had called this sensational book to rave about, to gasp at the daring, the beauty, and the wit. Um, other reviewers were just as struck by how bold and direct it was, especially for a verse novel. And I I honestly I get it. Reading it now, it um it still feels fresh, it's sharp, it's racy, it's fast, and it just does not waste a single word. Now, I'm not really a poetry person either, but you don't have to be to get swept up in it. It's just a great crime story told in a completely different way, and Porter makes it look effortless.

Helen 9:49

Oh, absolutely, and it's just wild to remember what a trial-blazing piece of fiction it was. It was her very first verse novel, and like, oh goodness, what a debut! Because it won the Age Poetry Book of the Year, it won the National Book Council's Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize, the banjo, and in England it even actually got named as the um one of the Times Books of the Year. And then if that wasn't enough, it became after becoming a bestseller, it was translated into multiple languages, it's been adapted for the stage, radio, film, and TV. And I don't think that's anything most poetry books can claim. Definitely not bloody Kubrickan, that's for sure. You can tell I'm scarred, can't you? Did you have to do poetry in high school, Leigh?

Leigh 10:36

I should probably remember, right? Like this reflects my attentiveness in school.

Helen 10:43

Um see if we got to do crime fiction at high school, it could have been a whole different thing for English lit. I remember Shakespeare and yeah, Elizabethan.

Leigh 10:53

Uh I'm I am genuinely drawing, genuinely drawing blanks. Um I actually can't remember what my I I would have done something, but um not with any great.

Helen 11:05

At least at least you don't have scars. That's good. Yeah, you've you've managed to slide it under the carpet. Anyway, better better get back to it. So look, it was also a One Women Multimedia Stage show. The ABC did a radio play on it, and then the big news was in um 2001 because there was a film that came out. Now, this was directed by the Australian director Samantha Lang. Um, Dorothy Porter and Anne Kennedy actually um wrote the screenplay for it. Now it started some great actresses. Um, Susie Porter was Jill, um, the American actress Kelly McGillis was Diana, and Abby Cornish was Mickey Norris. Now, as part of my research, I actually tracked down the original Margaret and David review, which was actually really fun to read because you know we do love it when they disagree.

Leigh 11:55

And in case you didn't hear us talking about Margaret and David in a previous episode, Margaret Pomerant and David Stratton were Australia's iconic movie critics. They hosted the movie show on the ABC and then at the movies on SBS for decades. They were basically Australia's answer to US critics Jean Siskel and Roger E. But only funnier, warmer, and far more willing to disagree mostly politely.

Helen 12:18

Exactly. And their review of the Monkey's Mask was peak, Margaret and David. Margaret really liked it. She said it was always going to be a tough job matching the book, but she thought Samantha Lang, Susie Porter, and Kelly McGillis all did a fantastic job, and she gave it four stars. That's out of five, of course. But David, who hadn't read the book, was a bit more cautious. So he thought the Who Done It side of the story was a bit perfunctory, as he said in his words. So he only gave it three and a half stars.

Leigh 12:46

Ah, classic. Margaret goes with her heart, David with the mechanics.

Helen 12:51

Again, a little bit familiar, isn't it? Um now look, the film is actually R-rated, so it's um it's quite hard to find. So I think when I looked, you might be able to track down a copy if you can access the US Amazon site. But if you're in Australia, I actually think you'd be better off trying to actually straw kind of secondhand um DVD or even video stores. Do videos still exist, Leigh? I think you can find them sometimes.

Leigh 13:17

There's somebody that worked in video stores in the 1990s. I do remember when um no, this must have come out later, but I do remember when this came out on on it would have been DVD at the time. So I I don't think they do exist at all. There's probably one random one, they're like antique shops.

Helen 13:33

Yeah, I reckon. I feel like we just for posterity we should have some in the back of the cupboard, shouldn't we? To show the grandkids one day.

Leigh 13:40

Actually just sold. I had uh like boxes of them in the garage and I put them all on Facebook Marketplace and flogged all of them off because my wife for years has been like, Can we have that space in the garage, please, rather than four boxes of DVDs that we can just stream anytime we want. It would take me longer to find what I'm looking for out in the box than it would be to find it online. So um yes, clear and genuine antiques now they are.

Helen 14:05

I I'm still hanging on to some DVDs, I just can't let go of them. I haven't had complaints. I've hidden them quite successfully somewhere where people can't find them. So, but anyways.

Leigh 14:14

I didn't say I'd got rid of all of them.

Helen 14:16

Ah, okay. Ah, so you still got some alright. Well, maybe we'll we'll find out what they are another day.

Leigh 14:21

Um but look hiding with my CDs that are in the roof and my wife thinks I got rid of.

Helen 14:26

You know, she listens to the podcast, Leigh. You're gonna get in trouble.

Leigh 14:30

Well, this will be the test to see whether she actually does.

Helen 14:32

Ah, okay. All right. You'll you'll report back next time and let us know.

Leigh 14:36

And Porter didn't stop with the monkeys mask. She came back to crime a decade later with El Dorado, a psychological thriller written in verse about a serial child killer stalking Melbourne. Again, she pushed poetry into places most crime writers didn't venture.

Helen 14:50

Yeah, she was just amazing. Look, sadly, Dorothy Porter died in 2008. She was only 54, but she was suffering from breast cancer. But it was such an enormous loss. Uh but the work she left behind, especially the monkey's mask, um, continues to shape readers and writers and sort of the whole landscape of queer Australian prime fiction. Um, I think she really changed the genre, but you know, she did it with poetry and passion.

Leigh 15:17

She absolutely did. Um, a one of a kind. And just to give you a taste of her style, here's a stanza from The Monkey's Mask, um, apologies in advance. Um work today. I should be working. I should be going through the coroner's report, asking questions. What do the bruises on her buttocks mean? Today I'm not working. I'm going to see Diana.

Helen 15:42

Oh, just brilliant. She could just do so much with just a handful of words than most writers can just do with a whole chapter.

Leigh 15:51

I absolutely could not agree more. Right, um let's move on to our next book, shall we?

Helen 15:58

Okay, well, we're um we're gonna change tacks a little bit because the next book we're gonna talk about is a debut young adult crime novel, and it's called Gus and the Missing Boy by Troy Hunter. Now, this was a great little find that I read recently and got completely pulled into the storyline. Now, the setup is really clever because Gus is this true crime obsessed kid. Look, he's overweight, he's gay, he's looking after his injured mum, he generally feels like he doesn't fit in anywhere. And one day he happens to be scrolling through a missing person's website and he finds this digitally aged photo of a boy who actually looks just like him. So suddenly, all these questions he's thinking, hmm, am I a kidnapping victim? And if I am, what does that make my mum?

Leigh 16:45

It's such a great hook. Um, total identity crisis meets crime mystery. Love it.

Helen 16:51

Yeah, it yet you're hooked in. And look, I think what makes this book really work is kind of the friendship in the centre of it. Gus has these um fantastic best mates, Shell and Kane. Um, the way that they're written by Hunter is just so real, like they you can just tell they're just real teenagers. Look, while Gus has come out to his close friends, he's still kind of figuring out what it all means. Um, there's Shell, she's working through her own identity stuff in her own kind of really a bit brasque, um unapologetic way. And then we've also got Kane, who's kind of a bit of a hero on the sports field and off, but he's dealing with a whole bunch of things that he's not ready to talk about. Um, look, and the three of them, you know, they're they're kind of messy teenagers, they're really loyal to each other, they're equal parts, scared and brave, um, you know, all the things that teenagers can be. Um, and at the same time, they're trying to solve this mystery that just keeps getting bigger and bigger the deeper they dig.

Leigh 17:50

And it's clearly um hit a nerve in the best possible way, shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut, and then again for the 2025 Bad Sydney Danger Award. And that's huge for a young adult novel and a big moment for Troy Hunter too.

Helen 18:06

Oh, absolutely, and you know, all kudos to him. You know, he's doing such interesting work in this space. He hosts the Words and Nerds spin-off podcast from Queer Writes Sessions, he runs writing workshops, and he's actually just so passionate about getting reluctant readers, especially boys, into books.

Leigh 18:24

Yeah, and as a dad of boys, I just think that's huge, and I I really love that. Um, getting them to see reading as something that's actually for them not chores or homework um makes such a big difference. And when a writer actually understands how boys think and talk and and worry, um, you can feel it on the page.

Helen 18:43

Oh, yeah, I agree 100% is simile, a parent of a of a boy. Um, look, it's just so important, you just can't underestimate finding um topics and storylines and characters that can draw um what what we call reluctant readers in. Um look, and I in this book you can just really see that care in the way he writes about Gus and his friends. I feel like I could have had them over. They could have been upstairs hanging out, yeah, talking about footy and soccer and whatever boys talk about.

Leigh 19:14

And so if this book has piqued your interest, you'll be pleased to know that the sequel, Gus and the Burning Stones, came out in August 2025. And there's a third book, Gus and the Climate Killer, coming in 2027. Um, it's exciting watching the young adult crime world grow like this, especially one with so much heart. Oh, for sure. And look, another one that's going to go straight to my TBR list.

Helen 19:36

Now, the next book on our list is Haze by Sam Elliott, and this debut absolutely goes hard. It only came out in February this year, and it's set in this fictional South Coast town in New South Wales called Browlett that's basically on fire, literally. The whole place is choking under these insane bushfires, and in the middle of it there's this creepy cult, the people's cleansing light, who um everyone quietly suspects might be lighting the body things.

Leigh 20:02

Alright, so that's just got me hooked already. There's just so much tension before you even get to the crime bit.

Helen 20:09

Yeah, and at the centre of it all is Constable Dahlia Turner, um, who's a really interesting character. She's tough, prickly, former bodybuilder who's carrying this massive, messy past. She actually grew up inside the cult, and coming back to Browlette brings it all to the surface. And then the real emotional punch hits her two best friends, Callum and Xavier, who are a same-sex couple and basically her chosen family, are murdered, and their son, Jude, is abducted. That's the moment the book really snaps into gear because it's not just a case for her, it's personal.

Leigh 20:44

Oh, yeah. And look, Dahlia's got her own complicated family too, right?

Helen 20:49

Yeah, and she's got two mums, Ursula, her birth mum, and Scarlett, who Ursula got together with when they escaped the cult. Dahlia describes them as two broken outcasts made whole by each other, which is such a great line, and it tells you everything about how she sees loyalty and family.

Leigh 21:05

Oh yeah, I just love it.

Helen 21:08

And the book itself is just a ride. Critics called it fast-paced and a wild one, and honestly, it feels like what it's actually like when your whole town is swallowed by bushfires. Sam Elliott even thanks the firefighters, SES crews and emergency workers who battled the 2009 Brow Leigh fires. His grandparents lived there, and you can really feel how much that experience has shaped the book.

Leigh 21:30

Yeah, that's really interesting. Look, I think for us in Australia, bushfires are such a big part of so many people's lives, and there's not just that kind of immediate danger and then the sort of aftermath, but uh straightaway, but it's that emotional fallout that kind of can hang around for years and years. Um, can you tell us a bit more about Sam Elliott themselves?

Helen 21:52

He's a really interesting guy. He's been writing for more than 20 years, and he hosts a podcast called The Right Way, which is About talking to writers and digging into how stories actually get made. And you can feel that practical nuts and bolts approach in the book too.

Leigh 22:07

Yeah, you sure can. And um, ooh, are we going to get more Dahlia Turner?

Helen 22:12

We are. Um, there's a second book in the series coming in 2027, and after everything Dahlia goes through in Hayes, I'm really keen to see what Elliot puts her through next.

Leigh 22:22

Me too. Alrighty. Next on the list is another queer crime writer working right here in Melbourne who writes under the name G. D. Garrity. Now he's, and apologies if I pronounced that wrong, um, he's a Canadian-Australian Indie author. He lives locally with his cat called Mooncake, and he describes himself as board certified and internationally tolerated. Now he writes gay detective fiction featuring DCI Leo Carter, who, according to his website, brings justice for the dead and drinks frankly worrying amount of coffee.

Helen 22:56

Well, that's very on-brand for a Melbournian. Um we're basically just fuelled by coffee. And full disclosure, neither of us have actually um read this book yet. Um we've had a bunch of new authors and novels to get through for this episode. But um from what we've heard about this book, the setup sounds great. Uh a body dumped outside a gay sauna, Carter thrown into a case that looks like a hate crime uh until it clearly isn't, and Melbourne Shiny Laneway is hiding a lot of rot underneath its proper Melbourne noir. And Carter's not a polished hero either. He's lonely, he drinks too much, and makes some questionable choices. Ooh, it does sound intriguing. Look, and Garrity's got a second book, Blood Content, which I think is coming out this year. And from the early buzz that I've read, it looks like it leans even harder into Melbourne's underbelly, and it sounds like he's throwing an even twistier crime for DCI Carter to solve.

Leigh 23:48

So if you're into Melbourne set crime with a queer lead and a bit of grit, the DCI Carter series is definitely one to keep an eye on. Absolutely.

Helen 23:58

Alrighty, before we finish up, we've got to give a quick shout out to Dirttown by Haley Scrivener. Now it's still one of the strongest Australian debuts of the last few years, and something I've always loved is how personal some of those moments are for Shrivener. She has even talked in an interview about Lewis, one of the kid narrators, because she said that he was one of the easiest characters to write because he felt so out of place. And she really connected with that because she grew up in a small town near Wagga Wagga, and she said that she hadn't even heard the word queer as a kid. So all that confusion and sense of not quite fitting anywhere, she actually was able to pour heaps of that into the character of Lewis.

Leigh 24:38

Which is probably why he feels so real. The way she wrote about him was so realistic. He's he's just a kid trying to figure out where he belongs.

Helen 24:48

Exactly. Look, and if people want to revisit it, we actually talked about Dirt Town in our first blood debuts that reshaped a genre episode. Um, and that was episode 12, and we both really enjoyed it, didn't we?

Leigh 25:00

We did. And look, um Hailey Shribner is openly gay, she's a huge supporter of queer voices in crime, and she's been incredibly generous with other writers coming through. Um, she's been cheering on Sam Elliott from the start.

Helen 25:12

Absolutely, and look, you see her out and about, and she's one of those writers that kind of lifts the whole scene.

Leigh 25:18

Yeah, and her follow-up, Girl Falling, which we've also talked about previously, um, has gotten some serious praise. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a remarkable exercise in complex storytelling, written in Scrivener's idiosyncratic, metaphorically vivid prose and a worthy follow-up to the best-selling Dirt Town. It's already picked up a Danger Award in 2025, and in 2026 it was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award in the LGBTQ plus mystery category.

Helen 25:47

Ah, goodness, that's an impressive run.

Leigh 25:50

It really is. So if you loved Dirt Town, Girl Falling is absolutely one to grab.

Helen 25:56

Thank you, it sure is. Now, I'm very conscious that there's probably a whole lot of books we've missed. We kind of did our best to find things in the time, but we'd love to hear if people have other um queer authors or characters that they would love us to talk about. Please send them in, um, send us an email, um, yeah, fan mail, whatever, we'd love to hear from you. Um, but yeah, thank you for hanging out with us this week while we dug into all these um brilliant queer leaning crime reads. Um, I feel like we had such a great mix of stories and voices this week.

Leigh 26:28

And and it feels really important now more than ever to make sure queer voices and lived experiences aren't pushed to the edges. They deserve to be front and centre, heard, and celebrated.

Helen 26:39

Totally. And look, if you're trying to remember a title that we've talked about or you want to chase something up, don't worry. All the books and films that we've talked about today are listed in the show notes.

Leigh 26:49

So next week we've got another really exciting guest author, Christian White, will be on the show. So look out for that.

Helen 26:57

I'm so excited. I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep till then. But anyway, but I will wait patiently. So until then, happy reading and keep your alibis tidy.

Leigh 27:07

See you next time on Kill City.