Loving against your better judgment is a mistake many make. But what happens when the man you’ll do anything for is a murderer?

The Love of a Bad Man takes the bad boy trope to the extreme. This short story collection, the second book from Perth-born writer Laura Elizabeth Woollett, imagines the inner lives of historical figures who committed crimes all in the name of love. It’s a retelling of women like Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, and Blanche Caldwell, sister-in-law to Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame. The stories treat death with a gothic inevitability and explore human darkness with a light touch.

Guardian Australia: What inspired this collection?

Laura Elizabeth Woollett: I read about the kidnapping of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart when I was 14. It stuck with me because of her age, partly, but also because the details of the story were so bizarre: that it was a husband and wife team, not just a man, doing the kidnapping; that they were religious fundamentalists; and that Elizabeth Smart was alleged to develop Stockholm syndrome. Wanda [the last story in the collection] came out of that.

I found quite a few stories like that – of relationships that are very messed up, of criminal couples, and women with evil guys. And this was something I wanted to explore.

Each story has such individual voice: a disciple of Charles Manson, a Manchester typist, an American woman in the roaring 20s. How did you get inside the heads of the characters?

I started off reading true crime and biographies. Because they were all set in the 20th century, there was actually video footage available. With Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, there were about four hours of home movie footage that I could look at. And seeing images helped me get a feel for their lives.

In terms of voice, I was trying to look at colloquial language; [I was] reading things and watching movies. For Blanche [sister-in-law to Clyde Barrow], which is set during the Great Depression, I rewatched some episodes of the HBO series Carnivàle – I call this kind of research “productive procrastination”. And for Martha, which has a post-WWII setting, I read James M Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce and watched the excellent HBO adaptation of it.

You’ve said before that fiction allows you “to get under the skin of different characters”. There’s something so recognisable about each protagonist in this collection. How did you humanise these women who were already immortalised in crime reports?

It was easier for some than for others. Marceline Jones [wife of Jim Jones, of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown massacre] had a couple of letters, which I read. These gave a way into even the most unsympathetic of characters, like Catherine Harrison, an Australian serial killer. A letter to her children was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1987. I tried to make her more sympathetic by showing her as a mother, even if she rejected that role.

Myra [Hindley, who murdered five children in England with her boyfriend Ian Brady] was one of the first ones I was interested in. I recognised a bit of myself in the fact that she was 18 years old and an intelligent girl from a mundane place, looking to transcend it. I felt that way, growing up in Perth. Ian Brady was a man, not a boy, and a bit of an intellectual in working-class England. He stood apart – he was exciting, unconventional. Those qualities would have been attractive to me at that age. So there was a sense of, “Could that have been me, if the wrong guy came along?”

Is this a retelling of something many women have experienced in some form or other: loving a bad man, against their better judgment?

It’s a pretty common situation. I think it’s a matter of what you’re craving and who crosses your path. Goodness can also be attractive. Sometimes badness can be disguised by goodness.

We often imagine men as possessing humanity’s darkness. Do your stories support this?

A lot of these women wouldn’t have murdered without the influence of these men. But I don’t think it means that women don’t have violence in them.

Do you think men are more violent?

In practice, yes. Women have the potential for violence but we aren’t as likely to express it against others, because of the way we’re socialised.

With this collection you’ve explored the power of being in love, and how that power is wielded. Was that what you intended?

Everyone falls in love. And we don’t necessarily have control over who we fall in love with.

• The Love of a Bad Man is out now through Scribe