Australian writer Lainie Anderson published her first novel about Kate Cocks, The Death of Dora Black, in 2024.

Kate Cocks (1875 – 1954) was in kinship care as a child and Lainie Anderson includes that part of her background in her novel as she is imagining Cocks on the beat solving a crime as South Australia’s first woman police officer.

In her 2025 novel, Murder on North Terrace, it’s 6 months later & Anderson has 27-year-old Constable Ethel Bromley – Kate Cocks’ junior – included in the investigation of the murder in the Art Gallery of Philip Lyons, “a board governor and the honorary curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia” (p. 27).

We find out in this 2nd novel that the financially privileged Ethel Bromley had been in informal foster care as child when her mother was unwell.

There are also a character Kate Cocks had been involved with when she was a welfare officer. Maurice Mundy is furious with Kate Cocks because of the way he was treated in the reformatory she’d had him committed to.