"Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Latta David, Wander Waif, Hume Fergus, Favenc Earnest, Hornung E. W., Bedford...)

Colonial Beginnings

In the late 1860s a Melbourne woman, Mrs Mary Fortune, was churning out detective stories for a weekly magazine, The Australian Journal. Mrs Fortune’s series, many of which featured a Melbourne police detective called Mark Sinclair, continued well into the 1880s. She wrote under the pseudonyms ‘W.W.’ or ‘Waif Wander’ and whilst very little can be discovered about her, what is fascinating is that she wrote in the mode of what was to become the classic police procedural and predates virtually all those women writers who are considered to have been present at the genre’s birth.

Whilst Mrs Fortune’s midwifery is not widely known, Fergus Hume’s definitely is. Hume was an Englishman who came to Australia with the unlikely goal of establishing a literary career and proceeded to do just that. His first book, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Melbourne, Kemp amp; Boyce, 1886; London, The Hansom Cab Publishing Company, 1887; New York, Munro, 1988) sold millions of copies around the world. Its significance, however, derives as much from its commercial success as its timing. Whatever its merits, Hume wrote one of the first detective stories to garner mass popular appeal.

Hume never bothered to disguise the curious start to his writing. Before launching himself as a popular novelist he sought the advice of a Melbourne bookseller who advised him that novels featuring detectives, particularly the work of French author Emile Gaboriau, were widely popular. It was in these new detective stories that Hume accordingly immersed himself.

With detectives as their central characters both Hume and Fortune were at the cutting edge of the nascent mystery genre. Certainly Gaboriau, detailing the adventures of Lecoq of the Sûreté, along with Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe in the 1860s had only recently established the tradition of police detective fiction. This is hardly surprising given the relative novelty of the modern detective. Whilst the Metropolitan Police Act, creating a police force for London, was adopted in 1829, a formal detective department, replacing the Bow Street Runners, was not established until 1842.

The development of the police detective proceeded at a quicker pace in Australia. Sydney had its own ‘George Street Runner’ in Israel Chapman, a convict who came to Australia after a short career as a highwayman. He eventually became a constable and displayed considerable talent in capturing bushrangers. This led to his appointment in the mid-1820s as a police runner or detective. The nickname came from his being based at the George Street police station.

In Melbourne, a formal detective division was established by William Sugden, appointed Chief Constable of the City Police in 1844. It continued when the force was reorganised into the Victorian Police in 1853. By the 1860s there were some 40 detectives operating throughout the colony. In addition, a number of private agents were in business. Among the best known was Melbourne ’s Mercantile Agency and Private Inquiry Office, opened in 1866 by Otto Berliner.

Berliner had joined the New South Wales police in 1855 and moved to Melbourne four years later. Although he had little more than a decade of professional experience, Berliner became a renowned figure. In his public and private capacities, he tracked down numerous murderers, solved Victoria ’s first case of gold coin forgery and investigated the claim of a Wagga Wagga butcher, one Arthur Orton, to be the long lost heir to the Tichbourne baronetcy in England.

Detectives, both public and private, were thus a fact, albeit a relatively recent one, of Australian life when both Mrs Fortune and Hume began to write. Their characters, Fortune’s Mark Sinclair and Hume’s Messrs Gorby and Kilsip, resemble the genuine article and all moved in what must have appeared a faithful recreation of the criminal undercurrents of Melbourne.

The writings of both Fortune and Hume captured the popular imagination to an extent which was as yet largely unrivalled by better known authors in the northern hemisphere. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, for example, appeared in 1886, a year before an English doctor by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle saw his first crime story, A Study in Scarlet, published. Doyle’s writing did not enjoy any immediate popularity. Indeed it was not until 1891, when the continuing adventures of the master detective began to appear in The Strand Magazine that the Holmesian juggernaut gained momentum. By that year Hume’s novels had sold hundreds of thousands of copies throughout the world and had tapped into the vast potential demand for crime fiction.

Hundreds of authors, including a fair number in Australia, were present at the creation of modern crime fiction. Some were very good. Most weren’t.

A rare example of the critically satisfying Australian work is Francis William Lauderdale Adam’s Madeline Brown’s Murder (Melbourne, Kemp amp; Boyce, 1887). Published a year after Hume’s debut, the story has a chilling prologue detailing the killing of the mysterious Madeline Brown and goes on to recount how David Stuart, a journalist with The Age, Melbourne, and an admirer of Brown, tracks down the murderer. Adams, a poet of some note, produced an effective mystery that avoided much of the melodrama of the typical Victorian novel and which certainly reads much better one hundred years on than most of its competitors.

Adam’s novel is only one example of the considerable body of local mysteries and thrillers published throughout the late nineteenth century. At the forefront were a number of newspapers and magazines which serialised not only hackneyed English romances and the inevitable local magpies but skillful crime stories and original stylish fiction.

Some authors such as Rolf Boldrewood in Robbery Under Arms and Marcus Clarke in For the Term of His Natural Life chose not to Dickenise Melbourne, drawing their inspiration from convicts and bushrangers. The former was serialised in the Sydney Mail in 1882, six years before it was published in book form. Clarke’s story was also serialised in The Australian Journal from March 1870, appearing in a severely abridged book form four years later. Whilst the Boldrewood and Clarke classics do not strictly belong in the crime genre they certainly utilised many of its themes and pointed the way towards the development of the popular mystery.

As does some of the writing of Ernest Favenc. Born in England in 1845 Favenc was in Australia by 1864. A young man with a sense of adventure he easily learnt the bushcraft required to survive in the outback. In the following years he worked in northern Queensland and opened up vast tracts of land in the Gulf Country and Western Australia for settlement. In 1877 he led an expedition funded by a Queensland newspaper intended to preclude the establishment of a railway from Darwin to Queensland.

Favenc’s novels include The Secret of the Australian Desert (London, Blackie amp; Company, 1895) and The Moccasins of Silence (Sydney, George Robertson, 1896). He also published a number of short-story collections such as The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics (Sydney, Bulletin Newspaper Company, 1893) and My Only Murder and other Stories (Melbourne, George Robertson, 1899).

Transplanting the traditions of the Victorian novel to colonial Australia also gave rise to some interesting exercises. Sydney-born Patrick Quinn produced a typical piece of period nonsense in the closing years of the nineteenth century. His novel, The Jewelled Belt (Melbourne, George Robertson, 1896) concerns the struggle of an Englishman, Dick Chester, to discover the identity of a man found murdered on the banks of Melbourne ’s Yarra River. In keeping with the dictates of convention there is a love interest (the victim’s inevitably lovely daughter) and a gimmick (a belt holding precious stones that the victim wore around his waist).

The Jewelled Belt shared certain key characteristics with The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. Both Hume’s Mr Gorby and Quinn’s Dick Chester uncover the identity of the respective murder victims through the public notice columns of the Melbourne newspapers and both (Hume with much greater success than Quinn) attempt to imbue the city with a sinister atmosphere.

Another author providing local colour was John David Hennessey, a Methodist minister who came to Australia from England. He gave up the church for journalism and, eventually, for life as a novelist. Most of his works were the fairly standard romantic adventures of the period although his The Outlaw (London, Hodder amp; Stoughton, 1911) was a popular bushranging novel that won second prize in a competition organised by British publisher Hodder and Stoughton and sold six printings in three years. A later thriller, The Caves of Shend (London, Hodder amp; Stoughton, 1915) began with a subterranean vault under a ruined mansion in the south-eastern suburbs of Sydney containing two chained skeletons and a fortune in gold coins. Despite this promising beginning, the novel degenerates into just another romantic adventure.