@SheKilda Body in the Pool Writing Competition winner: Christina Lee

Melbourne weather can derail the best laid plans of mice and (wo)men.

Months ago, when  SheKilda 2011 organisers investigated Rydges on Swanston as a convention venue, they took one collective look at the rooftop pool adjoining the meeting rooms and started to plot a Body in the Pool writing competition.

For the opening cocktail party, a small gang of conspirators artfully arranged the female ‘body’ which had (notionally) been dragged from the pool. The victim had a green stiletto plunged into her right eye and was surrounded by (real) Victoria Police tape.  All sorts of ID, credit and loyalty cards spilled out of the handbag lying next to the body.

The body, later identified as Ms Manny Quinn, was to be the star attraction on the rooftop but, being Melbourne, it started to rain just as the cocktail party kicked off so most participants (except for a few diehard smokers) couldn’t start penning the best opening paragraph for a crime story about Quinn’s murder until they stumbled across the crime scene until the next day.

Twenty-one attendees got their entries in by the end of Saturday’s proceedings and the verdict of the judges – crime writers Alex Palmer, Flick (Felicity) Pulman and Wendy James – was unanimous. The winner was long-term member, Christina Lee, the winner of two Scarlet Stiletto trophies, for this opening paragraph :

A crime of passion, or a crime against fashion? I’d certainly want to kill anyone who wore green stilettos with a red top, thought Gloria. She ground out the stub of her pink Sobranie with her own nine-inch spike and shivered in the Melbourne gloom. Inside, the health-conscious were sipping champagne without a care in the world. There were definite disadvantages to being a smoker these days. For one thing, it was always you that found the body.

It was one occasion when crime did pay – Christina walked away with a pile of true crime books, a bottle of Killer Stiletto wine and a fabulous chocolate stiletto shoe which she has proudly stored in her fridge in Brisbane.

The murder itself was ‘solved’ in the plenary session by former Assistant Victoria Police Commissioner, Sandra Nicholson, forensic entomologist Mel Archer and forensic pathologist Linda Iles who replaced the ill Shelley Robertson at the last moment. After ‘dissecting’ the body and hearing the evidence of a witness, Sandra Nicholson produced handcuffs (in SheKilda red) and promptly arrested founding Sisters in Crime convenor, Carmel Shute, and led her off to choruses of laughter.

It appears that Carmel had been so stressed out by helping to organise SheKilda that she been patronising the Hellfire Club – a secret that Manny Quinn threatened to expose. Carmel’s been told she might get time off for good behaviour to help organise the next SheKilda (whenever that is!)