Sydney, 1943. Joyce Brennan is the only woman doing police work on the Eastern Suburbs beat, and she is allowed no uniform, no rank and no real authority. She works from a spare desk in the Bondi Pavilion, and because nobody guards their tongue in front of a typist, she hears everything: at the Kiosk, in the surf, at the dances, in the station lunch room.
Eight books, 1943 to 1948, warm and wry in the register of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, with the institution that will not quite have her out of Maisie Dobbs and Columbo for the engine. Every case is solved without a body: theft rings, missing children, and one wrong note about a baby a mother was never shown, which runs the length of the series. Every book ends with something put right.
The Books
Book 1
The Police Typist
Four thefts from the changing sheds above the sand, four dockets stamped and filed, and a widow on a bench who will not accept bad luck as the answer for her husband's ring.
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Book 2
The Change Room
Sworn at last, and the first work they hand her is paperwork on girls marched off the sand for an inch of bare midriff. Then a woman comes to her door with powder patted over one cheekbone.
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Book 3
The Borrowed Child
Baskets appear on her doorstep for a fortnight, wordless, after the morning she went into the green water after a stranger. The family leaving them will not talk to police. They will talk to her about a missing four-month-old boy.
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Book 4
The Contact Room
Handbags off the sand at the south end, and a woman shoved down going for hers. Half the beach saw something; none of it will be said to a uniform. And a letter proposes folding her room into the station.
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Book 5
The Credit
Half of Bondi's cupboards have grown legs, says the inspector who wants the quarter's figures. Ration books gone entire, goods by the crate, sly grog on Fridays: three crimes wearing one coat, if the talk is right.
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Book 6
The Photographs
A Randwick woman comes to her with a niece, a boarding house, and a baby born too early that did not live. Days later, at half past six, she stands in the shallows and knows she is being watched.
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Book 7
The Temp
Take leave, the inspector says. She says Katoomba, tells everyone who loves her the mountains, and moves three blocks. A false name for the letting agent, her own for the hospital, and nobody in Sydney who knows where she is.
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Book 8
The Uniform
A memorandum lifts the case off her desk, in view of its complexity, and hands it to a constable she trained herself. The same week a letter comes down from the Women's Establishment, addressed to her.
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