Crime Writer Eve Thomson and Lawyer-Authors on Real Courtrooms

One contributor says she gets frustrated when the legal side of a crime novel is wrong. In her book Smother, she closes each chapter with a scene of a witness being cross-examined or examined. A judge's ruling follows, so readers can play at being jurors.

She admits the scenes cannot be perfect. "It can be tricky to put forward a set of facts that hooks the reader but is also believable from a lawyer's perspective," she says in the piece.

Television versus the court

She blames part of the gap on American television. "I suspect some misapprehensions have come about from American television series, with lawyers walking around the courtroom and banging on the table in front of the judge – that would never happen in Australia."

Viewers of courtroom dramas might also be shocked by the procedural tangle before a case reaches trial, she says. "It's often the length of the process that takes its toll on individuals."

Her novels are "crime adjacent", she says. Often no crime occurs, but a legal case drives the story. She is drawn to civil law, where she sees more grey and room to examine moral choices. She writes in snatched time: 20 minutes before her children wake, or last thing at night.

A law firm turned into fiction

A second contributor wrote How to Kill a Client to show what life inside a law firm is really like. She describes vast sums of money and meetings with people who are "kind of … sociopathic". She then decided to kill one of them off on the page.

"I think women probably have more subtle ways of killing people," she says. The book set other lawyers guessing which character was which. In fact, she says, she was "taking a number of people and popping them together into a Frankenstein figure".

She says many creative people enter law because their parents insist on a steady job, when what they want is to write a novel or a musical.