A Convict Constable's Journey by Liz Filleul

When I migrated from England to Australia in 1995, a friend recommended I read The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. It was a history book about the lives of convicts transported from Britain to Australia between 1787 and 1868. While reading this giant tome, I came across a reference to convict constables – convict men who’d behaved well on the voyage and were recruited as constables to help bolster the police force in the Australian colonies.

An avid reader and aspiring writer of crime fiction, I zoned in on this reference, thinking a convict constable would make a great character in a novel.

But more than 20 years went by before I created convict constable Will Grafton. And 30 years passed before he appeared in a book.

Looking back, I think the reason for this is twofold. First, I needed time to settle down in Australia before setting a book there. (The irony of this being that Will is completely new to Australia!) Second, my favourite crime novels in the late 1990s were feminist PI books – VI Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, Kate Brannigan etc – and I was keen to create my own feisty female gumshoe. In around 2018, while researching for a different project, I came across a colonial-era news snippet that I thought could make the basis of a short historical crime story. I recalled that long-ago reference to convict constables, and after doing more research into the police in 1830s Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land (now Hobart, Tasmania), I had my investigator.

But what to do with the story once I’d written it? I was a ‘serial offender’ in Sisters in Crime Australia’s Scarlet Stiletto Awards (winner in 2004, runner-up in 2007, 2011 and 2016) for short crime stories, but the rules stipulated that the main character be female. So my usual hunting ground for short crime fiction was out. While browsing in the newsagent’s, I came across a copy of The People’s Friend Special, a magazine I remembered from growing up in England. Inside it was a pull-out eight-page mini-mag featuring what the magazine called a ‘cosy crime long read’. I bought the magazine, looked up the People’s Friend’s submission guidelines online, and decided that this was a good paid market for my convict constable story. I read a few more issues to get more of an idea of their very distinct style and tone before sitting down and writing ‘The Convict Constable’. I submitted it to The People’s Friend in 2019, it was accepted around three months later, and it was published in March 2020. I wrote two more convict constable stories for them, which were published in 2021 and 2022, called ‘Death Knock’ and ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’. I was delighted when ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ was shortlisted for a Derringer Award in 2023.

Right from when I’d started writing ‘The Convict Constable’, I’d hoped that I’d have enough ideas to one day put together a book of short stories about Will Grafton. By mid-2024, I was getting closer to that goal. In addition to the three published stories, I had one that People’s Friend had rejected as being a tad too dark for them. I was halfway through writing another Will Grafton mystery and had ideas for a couple more.

Self-publishing was an option, but I decided to try the traditional route first. I contacted Lindy Cameron, owner of Australian small-press genre publisher Clan Destine Press, asking whether she’d be interested in publishing a book of seven convict constable short stories.

Lindy responded straightaway. Unknown to me, she had just established a new imprint, Crime Waves, for publishing short crime story collections. She said if I could put together the seven stories, she’d consider publishing them as a book.

I wrote the remaining stories over the Australian summer of 2024-25, submitted the book in April 2025, and Lindy accepted it in January this year.

Then came the challenge of tackling the continuity issues that showed up during the editing process.

The stories People’s Friend had published contained some necessary repetition – readers buying the magazine in 2022 might not have read the stories published in 2020 and 2021. Hence, each story introduced Will and recurring characters to the reader. But in a collection, all the reader had to do was turn the page, so that repetition needed to go.

Additionally, the original three stories took place in March, June and September 1838, creating natural space for Will’s relationships to develop. With the events of two new stories taking place in April and July, Will’s relationships, including his romance with a convict maid, needed to develop on the page.

Sentenced Beyond the Seas will be published this month and is available in both print and ebook format. I’m so looking forward to seeing Will’s adventures in book form!

I still write regularly for The People’s Friend, and have written over 50 stories, plus several serials for them since my first acceptance in 2019. They haven’t all been crime stories, but the majority have been. Other gumshoes I’ve created for The People’s Friend include 1950s London private detectives Jon Carew and Pat Ellicott, and a 1913 ‘lady detective’, English suffragette Drusilla Wade. In Drusilla, I finally have my (first-wave) feminist PI!

Sentenced Beyond the Seas can be preordered from Clan Destine Press at a 20% discount until September 13. https://www.clandestinepress.net/collections/our-books/products/sentenced-beyond-the-seas.

Liz Filleul is a British-Australian short story writer. She writes regularly for the UK women's magazine The People's Friend, and has also had stories published in Woman's World in the USA and Woman's Weekly in the UK. She won Sisters in Crime Australia's Scarlet Stiletto Award for short crime fiction in 2004, was runner-up in 2007, 2011 and 2016, won the Cross-Genre Award in 2011, and the Mystery With History Award in 2016 and 2025. She was also a finalist for the 2023 Derringer Award. She migrated to Australia from the UK in 1995, after meeting her Australian husband while backpacking in Tasmania.