In 2023, Australia’s Sisters in Crime marked the 30th anniversary of the Scarlet Stiletto Awards by producing podcasts of the first prize winning stories in the lead-up to the gala ceremony on 25 November at South Melbourne’s Rising Sun Hotel.
I am pleased to say that I was among the winning authors, and one of my short crime stories “Undeceive” has been produced as a podcast, narrated by Sisters in Crime member, Susanna Lobez. Susanna has worked as an actor, broadcaster and lawyer and, if you’ve from Melbourne, and have seen her read the winning Body on the Library stories at the Athenaeum Library, you’ll know she is a fabulous reader and can do different voices.
As the ‘Sisters’ explained, while there are a lot of crime podcasts out there, most involve true crime. The ones that involve crime fiction mostly involve book discussion. Few, if any, involve the reading of crime stories. So – they decided to add fiction to the crime mix, with podcasts of the award winning Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto winning stories. So – listen up!
“Undeceive” is what I would describe as a typical hybrid crime story from my pen. That is, complex, in verse, strange, and based on real emotional pain woven into fiction. I wrote it as a young working mother, and it is sadly based on a real incident, but changed into fiction. Still, the emotional truth of “Undeceive” is that it combines the trauma of the death of two people close to me and their mental health journeys as well as my own bitter experience in intellectual property theft. What to do when someone claims your writing as their own? That happened and inflicted a deep wound and profound lack of trust. My protagonist in “Undeceive” became the heroine vigilante for the crime against her sister. It was wish fulfilment for me, though I will say this to the criminal involved in the real life story theft I experienced – this is not the last time I will write of this incident, so watch out! I have a long memory.
So – that is my introduction to my strange short story “Undeceive”, that won the first prize trophy and Innovation Prize in the 2008 Scarlet Stiletto Awards. While it piqued the interest of publishers it was deemed too innovative – as it was in verse! However, there is no doubt that winning the coveted Scarlet Stiletto red shoe opened doors within the crime writing sisterhood, and gave me the confidence to stamp myself with the ‘crime writing’ brand – even though my work will always be oddly hybrid and speculative, image-based and narrative.
Hey, there is an audience for that sort of writing, right?
“Undeceive” by Evelyn Tsitas
Podcast Credits
Concept designer, co-producer, and narrator: Susanna Lobez
Co-producer: Carmel Shute
Announcer: Leigh Redhead
ProductionManager: Tim Coy
Graphic Designer: Caz Brown
Copyright Sisters in Crime Australia
PLUS: To read a hard copy collection of winning Scarlet Stiletto stories over 30 years: https://sistersincrime.org.au/celebrating-30-years-of-mystery-murder-and-malice/
100 days to the doctorate & beyond 