Steve Braunias was transfixed the first time he stepped into a courtroom – though at the time it seemed like “a chamber of horrors” – launching a lifelong passion that has seen him become New Zealand’s pre-eminent true-crime writer
“I was a young journalist at the Greymouth Evening Star and was assigned to be the court reporter,” he says.
“I found it fascinating that you’d be placed in this room to discuss death and injury and dishonesty, assault, trauma. Fascinating that you’d have this chamber of horrors that you sit in and talk about all those things within a curious set of legal rules.”
Since those early days on the West Coast, Braunias has penned 14 books at last count, covering topics ranging from political campaigning, to travel, to reviewing all the food joints along Auckland’s Lincoln Road.
But the 65-year-old is most renowned for his true-crime writing, covering a string of high-profile cases including the Grace Millane murder and the Mark Lundy trial, as well as less well-known stories that piqued his interest, such as the mysterious death of journalist Murray Mason in 2019.
Along the way, he’s become one of New Zealand’s most popular authors, tapping into the vast public appetite to hear the stories of those enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
“I think they’re interested in people pushed to the edge, either by themselves or circumstances, to perform or endure extreme things,” he said. “They are all these fascinating character studies of pressure and loss of reason and loss of nerve.
“Of course, there’s mystery too, because the cornerstone, I guess, of criminal justice is that you [as an observer] just don’t really know what happened.”
‘A certain ghoulishness’
Braunias’ criteria for what makes a compelling true crime story is broad: “Tragedy, violence, mystery, the way a case can sometimes comment on the times and place we live in – and also gossip value.”
He’s acutely aware that true crime’s pursuit of scandal can come across as salacious, saying he tries to keep the victims at the forefront of his mind.
“Not all of us is ennobling. There’s a certain sort of voyeurism to it and a certain ghoulishness,” he says. “However, that’s balanced, I think, by people whose interest in it can be a way of expressing concern for the community, particularly in New Zealand. I think we definitely saw that with Grace Millane.”
Millane’s murder in 2018 shocked New Zealanders and prompted widespread soul searching about how a young British backpacker was unable to travel safely in the country’s largest city.
Stories such as Millane’s took their toll on Braunias, who declared he was done with true crime after including her case in his 2024 book The Survivors, only to be drawn back to the genre by a tale so steeped in gossip value and ghoulishness that it proved impossible to resist – Philip Polkinghorne’s alleged murder of his wife, Pauline Hanna.
Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century made the bestseller lists and prominent criminal defence barrister Emma Priest recently provided a glowing assessment, saying: “Steve Braunias’ book surely takes out best criminal law read of the year”.
Polkinghorne was ultimately acquitted after a trial that heard evidence about sex workers, drugs and Auckland’s social elite – all recounted in vivid detail in Braunias’ book.
Braunias famously described Polkinghorne as a “malignant sex dwarf” but told LawNews that despite public distaste for the Auckland eye surgeon, “the verdict, going by the evidence as produced at trial, was the only correct one to reach. There was essentially nothing controversial about it.”
Connecting through writing
While some lawyers affect a lack of interest in true crime, Braunias is having none of it.
“Oh, they’re just as susceptible as anybody else, including the judiciary,” he says.
“But I do have a very high regard for the criminal law fraternity, prosecutors, defence lawyers, police and the bench. I think their standards are really high and very impressive.”
Despite this, and his long-standing interest in the courts, Braunias has never considered becoming a lawyer himself.
“As I say, I’m really impressed by that standard. I don’t think it’s a standard that I could aspire to. I don’t have that kind of intelligence. The only thing I can do is compose some okay sentences,” he said.
“You see some nice writing and good eloquence in a courtroom, but it’s not the main focus. The thing I’m most interested in and fascinated by is literature and the way that it connects with real life, so that it’s not purely this bubble of language, it’s the way it relates to things which have really happened, or really are happening, to all sorts of people.
“The way I connect with that is through literature and through language. It’s not through justice or acting for the Crown, or the various ethics and philosophies of defence work.”
Braunias said that he found many of the cases he has covered simply by wandering into a courtroom with no prior knowledge.
“Sometimes it’s really just chance, random visits. Some of them are so socially important that you’re always going to join everybody else – Polkinghorne, [Clinton] Rickards, Grace Millane, they’re so explicitly interesting to everybody that I’ll tag along as well.
“But at many of the trials I have covered, there’s been absolutely nobody else there from the media. They’ve shown no interest.”
Braunias cites US writers Dominic Dunne and Janet Malcolm as his true-crime inspiration, describing the latter as “the best courtroom writer of the past 100 years”.
He is reluctant to rate his own work or single out cases that have particularly intrigued him, saying: “A death is a death. I don’t think there’s a sort of a sliding index of crimes.”
“When you write, you’re going through a lot of things in your mind – morals, judgments, obviously the need for accuracy, possibly some sort of insight, and the propelling desire to write a good sentence. Those are the things which are paramount.
“How successful it is, I don’t know. I’m not a very good judge on my own writing, nor should I be.”