Murder mavens

Killer Queens

Readers around the world are desperate for murder mysteries set in outback towns or the glittering Gold Coast. The Weekly explores the Aussie crime craze that’s being led by fearless female writers.

WORDS by GENEVIEVE GANNON

Before she could read, a young Sally Hepworth used to turn the pages of picture books and make up stories. Her mother, a history teacher, had written a non-fiction book while she was pregnant with Sally, so her love of words “may have been an in-utero thing,” Sally says. But like so many people with creative ambition, she wasn’t sure how to go about becoming a professional author. She enrolled in an arts degree at Monash University and got a job in HR “because I wanted to know how everyone was paid and who was in trouble,” she confesses with an arch smile. Life carried her from Bayside, Melbourne, to Canada, where she found herself with a year of paid maternity leave, and time to test out her dream.

“I Googled ‘How to write a book’,” Sally laughs. “It wasn’t a write-by-numbers thing, but that first time I did look at, ‘How do you do it?’”

She spent a year drafting and redrafting until she had finished a manuscript. It was, she insists, terrible, but she had proved to herself that she could do it, and she knew she could do it again. In 2015, she published The Secrets of Midwives. For the first few years of her career, Sally’s US publisher urged her to set her books in America.

“I wanted to get published and I was like, ‘Okay’. I felt like my stories were universal,” she says, so she obliged. But she wanted to write stories set in Australia. “If for no other reason than I thought I could tell a better story in a setting I knew.”

Sally continued to build her skills and her audience. In 2018, she published The Family Next Door, set in Melbourne. Today, Sally is one of the biggest names in Australian books. Her novels have appeared on The New York Times bestseller list and loomed over Times Square on a billboard. The ABC’s adaptation of The Family Next Door broke iview streaming records and will be followed by screen versions of her blockbusters The Soulmate and Darling Girls, which have been optioned by Big Little Lies producer Bruna Papandrea. It turns out, the world’s readers are not only fine with Australian novels, they’re clamouring for them.

Sally Hepworth

A New York Times bestseller, Sally’s book The Family Next Door is now a television series starring Teresa Palmer (below), with more screen adaptations in the works.