how Wendy James began her award-winning career

I didn’t set out to become a crime writer. When I began writing, I was aiming for what I thought of as something “higher”. For 10 years or so, I focused primarily on short stories. I was published in all the right places, even won a few prizes. I was, of course, in training for that pinnacle of literary expression – the big, serious novel.

As well as developing my technical muscle, I was also waiting to be magically transformed into the type of person I imagined wrote novels: someone all-knowing and wise, with a perfect understanding of the human dilemma, someone who knew all the answers to all the questions. Surely Real Authors were not like me: an ordinary suburban mother, busy with family and work and with a mind scattered in myriad ways?

Eventually, I stopped waiting for this metamorphosis. Far from developing into that sagacious, godlike creature, I still seemed to have only questions, none of which were ever satisfactorily answered. It had become clear that I was going to continue to be myself, and anyway, by this time I’d discovered that most writers were ordinary people, living ordinary lives. Despite this, they’d managed to write novels. Good novels. I limbered up, took a deep breath, and began the ascent.

My first novel, Out of the Silence, was a fictionalised retelling of the intertwining stories of Maggie Heffernan, a young Australian woman, who, destitute and despairing and suffering from what was then called puerperal mania, drowned her infant in the Yarra River, and Vida Goldstein, the suffragist (and one of Australia’s first female Senate candidates) who championed her cause, eventually securing her release from prison.

Like many first novels, it was years in the making. By the time it was published I was nearly 40 – I’d moved homes and towns and jobs, had two more children. I’d hoped – like most first-time novelists – that this book would make my fortune and my name.

Alas, fame and fortune weren’t forthcoming, but in a turn as surprising as it was edifying, the book was awarded a Ned Kelly – one of Australia’s premier crime-writing prizes. This had the potential to send my writing career in a different direction, from the heady heights to the mean streets of the writing world. But was it a path I wanted to follow? After all, wasn’t crime fiction a lesser form of literature? Wasn’t it a not-quite-serious genre for not-quite-serious people?

In my defence, I wasn’t entirely alone in my snobbery. Historically, the books we loosely term crime fiction have had a bad reputation, seen as appealing to readers of questionable intelligence, vulgar tastes and suspect morals. Mid-20th century critic Edmund Wilson suggested that reading detective stories was “simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking”. Even the poet W.H. Auden, notoriously “addicted” to whodunnits, regarded them as too easily consumed and forgotten, and thus nothing to do with capital-A Art. This view isn’t merely a quaint remnant of the past: author John Banville, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, regards his literary works as Art and his crime fiction, which he writes under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, as “cheap”.

Critic Edmund Wilson suggested that reading detective stories was “simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking”.

WENDY JAMES

A little like Auden, my intense love of crime fiction was my dirty little secret – one of them, anyway. Despite my literary pretensions, I read crime novels voraciously. The habit had begun early, with Nancy Drew, then progressed rapidly through the Golden Age gateway: Christie, Tey, Sayers, Marsh and co. I’d read all the late-20th century greats, then moved on to the writers of the new millennium. I’d never actually stopped reading crime fiction. And now, according to the Ned Kelly judges, I was writing it.