The Festival Club played host on Friday night to the 13th Ned Kelly Crime Writing Awards. A goodly turn-out was there to soak up the glamour and prestige you’d expect in a darkened bar in the underbelly of Fed Square, running the bar ragged of change and glassware and to see Jane Clifton set the tenor of the evening by flaunting her backside with a delightful wiggle. Yes, it was a night of literary congratulations, machinations and disarmingly cosy inebriation.
The kick off was the traditional ‘debate’. This year’s theme ‘Women do it better…’ seemed to suffer from a lack of attribution to the pronoun. What are women better at? Doing crimes? Being criminal? Getting away with crimes? Writing crime? The debaters seemed as baffled as the crowd. Still, it was entertaining. Liz Porter for the affirmative put in an appropriately tongue-in-cheek tour of historically devious women criminals who defied capture while her team mate PD Martin authoritatively spoke on the superior capacity of female brains to control emotions.
