Back in 2019, I submitted my first story to The People’s Friend – a 9500-word ‘long crime read’. It was set in Van Diemen’s Land (present day Tasmania) in the 1830s and featured a convict constable called Will Grafton. To my delight, the story was bought four months later and published in a May 2020 People’s Friend Special, titled ‘The Convict Constable’. I followed it up with two more long crime reads featuring Will, which were published by TPF in May 2021 and May 2022. I’ve written a good many cosy crimes for TPF since, but these convict constable stories have always been among my favourites.As womag writers will know, stories are sold to TPF under a ‘shared rights’ agreement. Once they’ve bought the stories, they can republish them, and so can the author. I’d always hoped that one day I might have written enough convict constable stories to be able to publish them in book form. I was midway through writing another Will Grafton long crime read for TPF when DC Thomson briefly republished the three convict constable stories in ebook format in 2024.
This move galvanised me into finally doing something about that book of convict constable stories. In my files, I had a convict constable story that TPF had rejected as being a tad dark for their readership. I had the story I was halfway through writing. I had ideas for a couple more stories. And, of course, I still had shared rights to the three published ones.
While self-publishing was an option, I decided to try traditional publishing first. I had a good track record as a writer of short crime fiction. I’d won the Scarlet Stiletto Award (a prestigious short crime story award in Australia), been runner-up three times, and had taken out category prizes like Mystery with History. And I’d had ‘solve it yourself’ mysteries published in Woman’s World in the USA in addition to the dozens of cosy crime stories and the three mystery serials I’d had published in TPF. Plus one of my convict constable stories – which TPF had titled ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ – had been a finalist for the Derringer Awards, run by the Short Mystery Fiction Society in the US, in 2023.
To my surprise, she contacted me almost immediately. Unknown to me, Clan Destine Press had recently started a new imprint for short crime stories called ‘Crime Waves’; the first two collections had just come back from the printer. She was interested in considering my collection for this imprint. We ended the call, with me agreeing to submit a 70,000-word seven-story collection for consideration in early 2025.
Over the Australian summer of 2024-25, I finished the story I was halfway through and wrote two new ones. I also needed to make some changes to the already written stories, mostly to get rid of any repetition. The three stories TPF had published contained necessary repetition to introduce Will and various recurring characters to readers who mightn’t have read the previous stories. The story TPF had rejected contained similar ‘introductions’ to characters. But in a collection of short stories, which would be read one after the other, that repetition wasn’t necessary. I finally submitted the book in April 2025 and was delighted when it was accepted in January this year.
I thought I’d captured all the repetition until I received my edits! While I’d carefully removed those sentences and paragraphs that introduced characters, other little bits had slipped past me. Like mentioning that Hobart Town’s water storage tower was in Macquarie Street every time a convict maid headed there with her buckets. Or that Elizabeth Street was part of Hobart Town’s commercial area every time Will needed to interview a shopkeeper. More cutting!
The editor had pinpointed another continuity issue as well. The three TPF stories took place in March, June and September/October 1838. During that time, Will’s relationship with a convict maid, Norah Cottman, developed from first meeting, to friendship, then to romance. But because of the time jumps, the reader didn’t actually see the relationship develop. Those time jumps allowed for natural growth. Not so with the short story collection, which now had Will solving crimes in March, April, June, July, September/October, and November 1838 and in February 1839. Their relationship needed to develop on the page. This was the most challenging part of the editing process for me, turning romantic elements into a romance that needed to ring true to the reader, but didn’t detract from the crime-solving.
Sentenced Beyond the Seas: The Convict Constable’s Casebook will be published later this year. I’m excited to see Will in book form, and hope people who read the original TPF stories will enjoy reading his other cases, and that he’ll reach a bunch of new readers too.
