Lainie Anderson’s novels about a real pioneering policewoman invite us to play historical detective
- Written by Sue Turnbull, Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong
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 practices birth control. As one of Ethel’s aunts admiringly tells her: “You are our future selves”.
It’s a clever ploy, placing the “paradoxical” real-life character of Miss Cocks, with her reverence for motherhood and perplexing opposition to birth control and abortion, in a close working relationship with a character who embraces views much more in keeping with contemporary beliefs about women’s rights. This juxtaposition effectively stages a dialogue between past and present attitudes.
“In my opinion, a mother is the nearest thing to God upon this earth, because she, too, creates,” Cocks – who, in real life, founded a refuge for babies after her retirement – told The Advertiser in 1936. “That is why I am so opposed to all the abortive practices nowadays.”
But importantly, what Kate and Ethel share is their desire to protect women.
Revealing fashion and complex characters
While women may have achieved more control over their bodies since 1917, both The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace deal with crimes involving rape and domestic violence. Sadly, the persistence of these crimes today suggests the times may not have changed as much as we might hope.
In Murder on North Terrace, this involves the death of the South Australian Art Gallery’s head in front of a controversial painting he has championed. Miss Cocks, meanwhile, is facing domestic crime of a different order involving a man who locks his wife in a truck every night to prevent her entering the house.
Anderson skilfully blends truth and fiction. The controversial painting, Sowing New Seed by William Orpen, did indeed exist. It caused quite a stir at the time, as did the case of the wife padlocked in the truck. Only the murder in the gallery is a fiction.
Real – and ever present – is the backdrop of the first world war. (This is also the backdrop of Anderson’s debut novel, Long Flight Home, also based on historical research and real people.) From the pianist in Moore’s department store playing Pack Up Your Troubles on repeat, to the returned soldiers in Victoria Square, “broken men with missing limbs and lost hope”, the impact of the war on the inhabitants of Adelaide is a constant theme.
In Murder on North Terrace, the war moves centre stage. Miss Cocks and Ethel are now on duty at the Cheer-Up Hut in Elder Park, a home away from home for new recruits and 300 recently returned South Australian soldiers.
As they watch a young amputee threaten to throw himself off a balcony and into the arms of a young woman he has just met, they are once again presented with forces beyond their control: including love, lust and the notorious six o’clock swill – not to mention a predatory rapist.
At least Ethel gets to play the detective, if only briefly. She also receives a marriage proposal – which completely confounds her, since this would mean resigning from the job she loves. Ethel may be a fictional character, but there’s a hard truth here. My own mother experienced it in 1937, when she was forced to give up her job in the United Kingdom as a result of a similar marriage bar.
Given the ongoing dialogue between fact and fiction, if I have any criticism to make of The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace, it is that they should have come with a map of Adelaide in 1917. I keenly wanted to trace Miss Cocks and Ethel’s movements through the city as they went about their business of saving women and solving crime.
Publishers take note: there’s the opportunity for a crime walk here. There, readers might investigate for themselves the relationship between the real and the imaginary that Anderson so effectively blurs. At the same time, she gives us a compelling portrait of what life might have felt like in Adelaide at that time.
Such is the power of good crime fiction that touches the heart as well as the mind – while inspiring a desire to play history detective.
Authors: Sue Turnbull, Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong
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