Crime writer Jacqueline Bublitz gives a voice to forgotten women

As a 16-year-old leaving New Zealand to live as an exchange student in a small town in the United States, Jacqueline Bublitz had to rely on the kindness of strangers. She lived with a family she didn’t know and often had teachers and other adults take her under their wing.

In her first book, the bestselling author played with this idea: what happens when you trust the wrong people? Before You Knew My Name (2021) tells the story of Alice Lee and Ruby Jones, two women from different backgrounds who come to New York solo.

Best-selling author Jacqueline Bublitz explores what it means to be a young woman out in the world, exploring and taking risks.Credit: Simon Schluter

“I wanted to explore these women in a way that felt really grounded in the reality of what it’s like if you want to live in this world, to be in our Western world as a young woman, you want to travel, and you want to take risks. You have to trust people sometimes, you have to rely on the kindness of strangers sometimes.”

As soon as a manipulative person knows you don’t have a support network, you’re in danger, Bublitz says. “Ultimately, I never had those experiences. The fact that I consider myself lucky is really frustrating – I shouldn’t consider myself lucky that I was never taken advantage of.”

A young woman’s murder in Melbourne’s botanic gardens provided the seed for the book. Bublitz was living on St Kilda Road in 2014 when she woke to the news that 32-year-old Renea Lau had been raped and murdered on her way to work. Her body was found in Kings Domain by an early-morning jogger.

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“Pretty quickly afterwards, there wasn’t much of a reminder of what happened to Renea. There were some flowers by the tree where it happened and then after a while, there was nothing. Not a plaque, not a reminder. And that story was one that I just couldn’t let go, and that’s how I got the idea for what became Before You Knew My Name.”

Writing about gendered violence and knowing about “missing white woman syndrome” and the media’s tendency to seemingly value some lives more than others, Bublitz wanted to give voice to the women who are often otherwise forgotten.

“I mentioned the tree before, where they had a little memorial to Renea, and I would sit there and be like, ‘Is this OK?’ Because it [the book] isn’t based on her life in any way,” she says. “I set it in another country, very explicitly to avoid tapping into any part of a true story. At the same time, there is no doubt that I was building something out of this truly horrific thing that happened.”

Bublitz, now 46, moved to Melbourne when she was 18, where she stayed until her early 40s. After spending a decade working at recruitment company Seek, she decided in 2015 to quit and move to New York.

Leave the Girls Behind

“I had grand plans of going and writing the novel while I was there,” she says. “I’d never had time, which seemed to me the one thing that was preventing me from writing anything. And it turns out, it’s not time, it’s a whole bunch of things combined.”

Describing that time as her “method era”, Bublitz wandered around New York, at times loving it, feeling like she was in a movie, and at others, feeling extreme loneliness.

Thankfully, at a certain point, the characters came to her, fully formed. “It is this miraculous thing that I’d heard other writers talk about, where Alice Lee just pretty much came and sat down next to me. I was in a little studio apartment in New York and she was just there, and I just knew who she was. I knew her name, I knew where she’d come from, and I knew her voice straight away. What I didn’t know was that I was going to tell the story from her perspective – that took me a little bit longer,” she says.

As an aspiring writer, Bublitz spent some time researching the craft. She recalls one tip that said, “If you want to kill your book, have a dead narrator - nobody wants to read that”.

“I knew that didn’t feel right,” she says. “[Because] no one was waiting for it, I was able to discard that advice without consequence, and the only thing I was losing was time and my savings, which weren’t going to last long anyway.”

Turns out, people do indeed read books with a dead girl’s narration. Before You Knew My Name has sold 150,000 copies in Australasia and won a swag of awards, including general fiction book of the year in the Australian Book Industry Awards and best debut in the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards.

Reviewing it in The Observer, Michael Robotham wrote: “It has been labelled a crime novel but it is so much more – weaving feminism, philosophy, romance, politics and domestic abuse … It has echoes of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.”

Growing up, Bublitz had a vivid imagination. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve entertained myself with telling stories and constant conversations in my head … sometimes I would just invent people and set them off on adventures and listen to what they had to say. I definitely was a kid who was considered odd at times.”

Even as a child, she was aware of victim blaming. The murder of 21-year-old Grace Millane on a Tinder date in New Zealand infuriates her, along with the media’s preoccupation with Millane having gone home alone with a stranger. Of course she did, says Bublitz, and she should have been able to assume she was safe. It’s an idea that informs both her novels. Her second, Leave the Girls Behind, was published in October.

“It’s all grounded in reality, even though it’s heightened reality because obviously, my characters are going through things that are … a larger version of life than hopefully most of us ever do.”

Currently working on her third book – she calls it a trinity rather than a trilogy – Bublitz sounds genuinely amazed by her success. “[It’s] something that I conceptually understand, the sales figures and the awards, but it’s still something I feel quite distant from,” she says.

“I’m not sure if that’s a character flaw in me. Occasionally, I’ll have a moment where I realise, holy shit, this is really like the dream’s come true, but most of the time, I’m just a little bit confused about how it happened.”

Leave the Girls Behind (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

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