The Death of Dora Black is a crime novel featuring Kate Cocks, officer in charge of the Women’s Police Branch of the South Australian Constabulary. In January, 1917, she and a colleague, Ethel Bromley, are called to the morgue to identify a body. She tells the coroner that the deceased’s surname is Black and she’d been served by Black when visiting Ladies’ Footwear at Moore’s department store.
The investigation into the death of Dora Black becomes the responsibility of DS Fred Clark, who openly disparages the work of the ‘petticoat brigade’, excluding Kate and Ethel from his team.
Kate, a regular customer at Moore’s, hears that Ruby Campbell, another staff member working in the Ladies’ Footwear department and a friend of Dora Black, has failed to turn up for work. Fred Clark doesn’t consider this significant. Kate and Ethel disagree and begin their own investigation.
When not following up leads relating to Dora’s death and Ruby’s disappearance, Kate Cocks and her colleagues expose crimes. They, for example, search for and prosecute fraudulent clairvoyants who are preying on grieving widows of husbands mowed down on the killing fields of Europe. The widows are offered bogus messages from ‘the other side’. Kate and her team also close down brothels, then illegal, and are successful in discovering how opium is being brought into Adelaide. Using her intelligence, intuition and commonsense, Kate Cocks is an outstanding leader and investigator.
The Death of Dora Black is well researched, educational and entertaining, with occasional touches of humour. The book is dedicated to policewoman Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks (1875-1954), the first officer in charge of the Women’s Police Branch in South Australia.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In early 2024 I completed a PhD with the University of South Australia, exploring the life of South Australia’s Kate Cocks. In 1915 she became the first policewoman in the British Empire employed on the same salary and with the same powers of arrest as men. Here’s a piece I wrote about her legacy for The Conversation. As part of my PhD I have also written a historical murder mystery inspired by Kate’s extraordinary life and some of the cracking cases she solved which became The Death of Dora Black.
Way back in 1989 I scored my first job in journalism at Mildura’s Sunraysia Daily by listing my hobbies as “beer and pasta”. I scored a sub-editing job at The Times in London by telling the night editor I had better legs than everyone else who’d applied. (We were talking on the phone, so he couldn’t tell I was fibbing.)
I was a columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail for 17 years, from 2006 to 2023. Other former roles include state political reporter for Melbourne’s Herald Sun and public relations manager for the South Australian Tourism Commission.
I co-founded the support website Mining Family Matters with mining mum and dear friend Alicia Ranford in 2010. We won national awards, expanded into Canada and helped hundreds of thousands of families globally to survive and thrive despite the pressures of mining life and working away. We’ve closed the business now, as we’ve both moved on to other careers, however we still sell our printed survival guides (180,000 copies sold and counting).
Life seems to be directing me towards history. In mid-2023 I was named Emerging Historian of the Year by the History Council of South Australia (predominantly for my work on the Vickers Vimy), and later in the year I joined the History Council’s executive committee.
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