"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...)

The Mass Market

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, advances in the technology of book production began to make it possible for crime writers to reach new audiences. Until the 1890s hardcover novels were expensive items, far beyond the means of the average working person but with rising literacy an increasing proportion of the population were reading. The answer to expensive but popular novels were subscription or circulating libraries where, for an annual fee plus about 2d per day per book, readers could obtain the latest novels by their favourite authors.

Such libraries were the mainstay of the major publishers; only the wealthiest individuals could afford the high cost of hardcover novels. Some publishers, however, realised that if retail prices could be reduced, people would happily buy books instead of just borrowing them. The result was the ‘yellowback’, poorly manufactured novels with cardboard covers which barely held together their contents. Cheap in price as well as production standards, the resulting boom in sales proved these visionaries correct. The yellowbacks competed with the various magazines for the favour of readers and enjoyed one major advantage, where magazines such as The Australian Journal could only publish novels in serialised form, the cheap paperbacks could be consumed in one sitting, a bonus for many readers.

The yellowbacks preceded the pulps which, in turn, developed into paperbacks. In terms of yellowback fiction, one notable local precursor to Alan Geoffrey Yates was Nat Gould, a nineteenth century Dick Francis. Born in Manchester, England, Gould came to Australia as a journalist in 1884 and stayed for some 11 years. This was ample time to immerse himself in the local racing scene and to begin a literary gallop that eventually totalled more than 130 novels. His output was so prolific that upon his death in 1919 there remained 22 titles yet to reach the presses. Dozens of his books had Australian settings, although Gould made no special effort to define the nature of the Australian landscape, character or indeed social order. All his racing adventures were in the yellowback category which, being inexpensive and readily available, ensured the widest possible audience. By the 1950s The Bulletin estimated that Gould’s sales were in excess of 30 million copies.

Arthur Wright covered the same territory and market but whilst Gould trawled widely for his locations, the Bathurst-born Wright stuck mostly to Sydney. Wright had a particular affection for Randwick and Rosehill racecourses which featured in many of his works, including his debut Keane of Kargoorlie (Sydney, Sunday Times Company, 1897), first serialised in a Sydney sports newspaper and A Rogue’s Luck (Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1922). Wright’s melodramas, often mixing romance and adventure in equal parts, did not possess the same breathless treatment of horseracing that Gould so effortlessly displayed, but his plots swung along and provided some interesting descriptions of the country.

The Australian reader of crime fiction was to be better served by Randolph Bedford. Bedford was a journalist who went on to become a member of the Queensland parliament and like Arthur Upfield years later, had a great love of the Australian bush. From his youth Bedford tramped the outback and wrote about his experiences to great effect in such magazines as The Bulletin. In Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1911) he presented a series of short stories set in the bush that had much in common with Sherlock Holmes.

The narrator of Billy Pagan is Henry Fleet, a Watson-like character who acts as devil’s advocate for the reader. Fleet becomes a companion to a drifter scraping a living from prospecting, one Billy Pagan: ‘… a young man, dressed like any score of other men – in a shirt of many pockets and open at the breast; dust-marked tweed trousers, tucked into old wrinkled, travel-worn, brown leather leggings, fastened with leather loops and only one buckle; boots heavy to the sole and light as the upper – so serving to show the extraordinary delicacy of the man’s feet; a soiled Terai hat very wide in the brim; the trousers supported by a leather belt that held watch, compass and aneroid pouches, and knife and pipe sheaths.’

Like a swaggie’s vision of Holmes, Pagan has an almost supernatural ability to detect wrongdoing. In one story Pagan makes a cursory examination of a deserted mine site and concludes that it was worked by two men, one of them being a sailor from a cold climate who has murdered his companion to keep secret their discovery of a gold reef. Pagan and Fleet track the murderer, a Dutch seaman, to the Western Australian mining town of Coolgardie where he is brought to justice.

The stories contained within Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer, are set in mining districts of Western Australian, Tasmania and northern Queensland, and each is filled with writing richly evocative of location and atmosphere. The relationship between Pagan and Fleet has much to compare with Holmes and Watson, and it is regrettable that Bedford did not come to realise the worth of continuing the Pagan adventures.

There seems no logical reason why authors such as Gould, Wright and Bedford became the pulp staples of the railway new-stands, while pedestrian talents such as Hennessey found favour with the more established publishers. One possible explanation is that Hennessey and others like him consciously exploited the form of melodramatic Victorian-inspired adventures which left little room for the development of Australian characters or locations except as exotic backdrops.

Whatever the reason a number of Australian authors began to give British publishers what they wanted. Over the years authors like Arthur Gask, Pat Flower, Margot Neville and Sidney Courtier filled the circulating libraries of Britain and Australia with their books.

Like American western writer Zane Grey, South Australian-born Arthur Gask, spent the early years of the twentieth century as a dentist. In between impacted molars, Gask nutted out a thriller which he eventually titled The Secret of the Sandhills (Adelaide, Rigby, 1921; London, Herbert Jenkins, 1930), subtitled A Mystery of Henley Beach to identify its Adelaine locale. The novel did not readily find an Australian publisher but when it finally appeared sold a thousand copies in a matter of weeks. British publisher Herbert Jenkins picked up Gask’s second novel, Cloud, the Smiter (London, 1926), to begin an association that lasted for more than 30 novels, ending with Crime Upon Crime (London, 1952) published the year after Gask’s death. Many of Gask’s stories feature South Australia although those starring his series character, Detective Gilbert Larose, remained firmly set in England.

Pat Flower came to Australia in 1928 as a teenager. The wife of artist Cedric, she turned to writing in the 1950s with the first of her long stream of novels, Wax Flowers for Gloria (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus amp; Robertson, 1958). Flower’s earlier works do not anticipate the quality of her later writing. Her considerable literary talent was initially overwhelmed by a jokesy approach particularly in the half dozen or so early books that feature her sole series character, Inspector Swinton. The good Inspector was a policeman given to meat pies and suburban domesticity and was little different from the majority of English flavoured police heroes common in Australian crime fiction through much of this century.

Possibly Flower was lampooning this derivative fashion although any evidence of such intent is buried deep. Certainly her sense of humour verged on the heavy handed. Consider, for example, the device occasioned by her married name in the titles. Not only is there Wax Flowers for Gloria but Goodbye Sweet William (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus amp; Robertson, 1960), One Rose Less (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus amp; Robertson, 1961) and Hell for Heather (London, Hale, 1962). If this isn’t sufficient, Inspector Swinton is assisted by a young colleague, Detective-Sergeant Primrose.

Flower sketched the idle moneyed. Further reinforcing the English tradition, many of her plots unfold in country houses or fashionable city apartments. Whilst her characters, certainly those of Swinton and Primrose, are nothing new, Flower did introduce some remarkably ingenious, though hardly credible, plot devices. In Goodbye Sweet William, for example, the final twist has the guests at a house party apparently murdering their host whilst the victim in fact dies of entirely natural causes.

Flower did, however, tire of such facetiousness and early in her career abandoned Inspector Swinton in favour of psychological mysteries. Her new maturity was realised in such novels as Cobweb (London, Collins, 1972; New York, Stein amp; Day, 1978) and Odd Job (London, Collins, 1974; New York, Stein amp; Day, 1978). Crisscross (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein amp; Day, 1977) is a particularly masterful tale of madness, written from the perspective of a badgered husband. Her last novel, Shadow Show (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein amp; Day, 1978) was released just two years short of her death.

Margot Neville was the pen name of two sisters, Margot Goyder and Anne Neville Goyder Joske who collaborated on a string of thrillers beginning with Lena Hates Men (New York, Arcadia House, 1943; as Murder in Rockwater, London, Geoffrey Bles, 1944) and finishing with Head on a Sill (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1966). The Neville heroes, Detective-Inspector Grogan and Detective-Sergeant Manning, who appeared in all but two of the novels, followed the same well travelled path as Flower, although as a general rule, Neville is far ahead.

Murder and Gardenias (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1946) was one of the early mysteries that established the Neville reputation. The story opens with an examination of the residents of a fashionable Sydney apartment building. A body of a young man, stuffed into a chest, is discovered in one of the apartments. The residents and their relationships display varying degrees of complexity and it is up to Grogan and Manning to fathom the tangled relations and unmask the killer.

Murder and Gardenias displays Neville’s eloquence and ability to balance a large number of characters. A later Neville, Drop Dead (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1962) uses much the same setting. Claude Nevinson, a successful and philandering restaurateur, falls to his death from the balcony of his mistress’ apartment which is in the same building as those of Nevinson and his wife and the wife’s lover.

Whilst certainly superior to those of Pat Flower, the Margot Neville novels were startlingly similar in approach. The writers managed to take the traditions of the English police mystery and transplant them into an Australian setting. They succeeded only because the structure of the English mystery was maintained; there was certainly no attempt made to generate a genuine feel for the surroundings. When the Flower and Neville characters look out over Sydney Harbour, they could easily be viewing the Thames. And the sombrely attired wallopers from the Sydney C.I.B. could pass for representatives of Scotland Yard. Flower and Neville paid homage to a peculiar British form which had no room for bush pubs or Aborigines. Yet given their immense commercial success it is not surprising that they saw little need to introduce much local colour.

Sidney Courtier was more than willing to use recognisably Australian settings and characters. Although a teacher by occupation, Courtier could well have devoted his entire career to writing. Beginning in the late 1930s, he survived in the netherworld known only to the freelancer until the publication of his first novel, The Glass Spear (Sydney, Invincible Press and New York, Wyn, 1950; London, Dakers, 1952). It introduced the first of Courtier’s two series characters – Ambrose Mahon, a superintendent with the Sydney C.I.B. The Glass Spear is an excellent introduction to this consistently entertaining writer. Set on an isolated outback station just after World War II, the country locale was a device that Courtier was to continually utilise in later novels.

Mahon is never directly assigned to the cases he eventually solves. He just happens to be in the right place at the right time. In The Glass Spear he is holidaying with friends. In Come Back to Murder (London, Hammond, Hammond amp; Company, 1956) he revisits a country town where he was once stationed as a sergeant, whilst in A Shroud for Unlac (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1958) he is attending a woolshow. In Mimic a Murderer (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1964) Mahon is fortuitously at the scene for no better reason than to accelerate the development of the plot.

Courtier’s work is amongst the most interesting of all Australian writers in that he concerned himself with recognisable and unique, if occasionally bizarre, Australian locales. Death in Dream Time (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1959), for example, featuring Detective Inspector C.J. ‘Digger’ Haig of the Brisbane C.I.B., is set in an Aboriginal theme park in far north Queensland. ‘Alchera, the Dream Time Land ’, has been established by the eccentric Austin Flax in a rainforest jungle. Hordes of tourists assemble daily to tour the nine life-like dioramas explaining the beliefs of the Arunda Aborigines. Haig is on the scene to investigate a traffic accident that turns out to be a murder and draws his suspects from a group of the park’s creditors.

Had Australian crime writing developed any apparent local flavour through these decades? Did it say anything about our nation or our collective identity? To both questions – the answer is probably not. With the exception of Arthur Upheld and Sidney Courtier, there was little difference between English and Australian crime writing. It was as if the majority of local novelists had decided that the best way to assure lasting fame, and sales, was to parrot their British and, to a much lesser extent, American counterparts.

It could also have been the result of conservative publishers mindful of the enormous market for English country house mysteries, particularly after World War II, and determined to foster authors to meet the demand. But while this area of crime writing was popular, it did not necessarily follow that such tradition could easily be transferred to Australia. To be fair, it could be argued that crime fiction has generally veered toward entertainment rather than social comment. The formulas are fairly well drawn in each of the sub-genres, whether it be Gothic, detective or police procedural, and readers rail at any interruption to the action.

Whatever the reason, a large number of Australian authors were producing English-flavoured mysteries with little or no relation to our society. The Active police detectives called to investigate genteel crimes were invariably similar, as if each author used identical style sheets. The Sydney C.I.B. was overrun with make-believe detectives and the trend continued into the 1970s with the work of Charles Whitman. In such works as Doctor-Death (London, Cassell amp; Company, 1969), Death Out of Focus (London, Cassell amp; Company, 1970) and Death Suspended (London, Cassell amp; Company, 1971) Whitman worked his series characters, Detective-Sergeant Douglas Gray and Detective-Inspector Bob Lindon of (you guessed it) the Sydney C.I.B. through the same tired routines that had hardly changed in decades.

An exception to the tired police formula was Elizabeth Salter who wrote some intelligent puzzle-mysteries concerning Detective-Inspector Mike Hornsley. Salter was a major literary talent, a biographer of some note (including studies of Daisy Bates and Robert Helpmann) and, obviously, a fan of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. From 1957 until 1964, she lived in London, where she was private secretary to Dame Edith Sitwell (writing The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London, Houghton Mifflin, 1967) and Edith Sitwell (London, Oresko Books, 1979). Most of her series of detective novels were written during this time.

Salter’s character, Hornsley, is a Sydney C.I.B. detective although he wandered far in the course of his investigations. In Once Upon a Tombstone (London, Hutchinson, 1965), the majority of the action takes place in Austria whilst in Death in a Mist (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957) he unravels a murder in New Zealand. For the most part, however, the scenery she described with a loving attention to detail was that of Sydney. Other Salter mysteries, including There was a Witness (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1960), feature Hornsley and he emerges as one of the finest policemen to grace Australian crime fiction. Long overdue recent reprints of her books will only confirm this opinion. Once Upon a Tombstone and Death in a Mist were re-released by Angus amp; Robertson in the late 1970s and again in 1988.

The work of Gask, Flower, Neville and a dozen less enduring authors were prime examples of the cultural cringe. The works of Upfield, Courtier and Salter are thus all the more satisfying because they dared to write books with a unique indigenous character set in Australia for Australians.

Another of these marvellous mavericks was A.E. (Archibald Edward) Martin. A journalist who worked with C.J. Dennis on the satirical magazine, The Gadfly, Martin won The Australian Women’s Weekly 1942 novel contest with Common People (Sydney, Consolidated Press, 1944). Martin turned to mysteries in 1944 with Sinners Never Die (New York, Simon amp; Schuster, 1944; Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1945). The central character, Henry Xavier Ford, is an old man in a nursing home for whom a mystery of 50 years past gradually unfolds in a series of flashbacks.

Martin’s quirky characters make him one of the best of the more recent new neglected writers. Another excellent Martin novel, The Chinese Bed Mystery (London, Max Reinhardt, 1955), is set in a circus. His other books include Death in the Limelight (New York, Simon amp; Schuster, 1946) and The Curious Crime (New York, Doubleday, 1952; London, Muller, 1953). Martin is one of the few Australians to be published in The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (another was Arthur Upfield, who produced his only Bony short story especially for it) winning praise for his stories ‘The Flying Corpse’ and ‘The Power of the Leaf.’ The latter is a worthy example of Martin’s unusual talents, dealing with the efforts of Ooloo, an Aborigine of the Narranyeri tribe, to solve the strange death of a young man.

For every delight there are, of course, dozens of authors who aspired to brilliance but never quite made it. This is not to slight their efforts, but their writing, often prolific, disappeared from view and never surfaced to face any contemporary critical assessment.

One author to suffer such a fate was Eric North, an imitator of the American hard-boiled style and the pseudonym of journalist Bernard Cronin. His Chip on my Shoulder (London, Dennis Dobson, 1956), features a reporter with the Melbourne Dispatch called Merton Ryde. While investigating the death of a close friend Ryde uncovers a drug ring. The novel is packed with Cadillacs, night club chanteuses and similar trans-Pacific touches that must have appeared terribly sophisticated in the 1950s but are now merely uninspiringly derivative. Ryde comes up against two Melbourne detectives known as the Homicide Twins. ‘They were the murder boys of the C.I.B. They lived on raw meat.’ – Leo Darbin was ‘200 pounds of abattoir left-overs’ and his partner, Jim Poddy was ‘as good looking as a wart touched with sulphuric acid’. The attempt to emulate a Black Mask style did not succeed in that novel or the next, Nobody Stops Me (London, Dennis Dobson, 1960) where the hero, Saxon Brent, is as much a caricature in the Australian landscape as Merton Ryde.

Nor were these North’s worst efforts. Consider as an example his earlier Who Killed Marie Westhaven? (Sydney, Midget Masterpiece Publishing Company, 1940) a collection of six very short stories featuring a Chinese criminologist, Dr Lao Sars. Set in Sydney, Sars is a detective savant assisted by Sergeant Smythe of the Metropolitan Police and Brian Tembolt, a reporter with The Evening Comet. The collection, with a cheeky opening notation that the stories were edited by Bernard Cronin, pits Sars against seemingly impossible crimes. With a measure of fantastic scientific skill, Sars always manages to bring the perpetrator to justice to the amazed delight of Smythe and Tembolt.

Just as another Australian author, J.M. Walsh, was fashioned by over-eager publishers into a local version of Edgar Wallace, several years later another local author was being hailed as a major new talent. Charles Shaw joined the staff of The Bulletin in 1939, writing under a variety of pen-names including ‘Old-timer’, ‘Ben Cubbin’ and ‘Cowpuncher’. Another of Shaw’s Bulletin pseudonyms, ‘B.S.’, came from the initials of his much-loved 1936 Bantam Singer car. In the early 1950s he again used his car for inspiration for the name Bant Singer as author of a number of adventures featuring an opportunist called Delaney.

The first, You’re Wrong, Delaney (London, Collins, 1953) concerns Delaney, a war veteran, who works for a sly grog racketeer at the opening of the book. When his boss is murdered, Delaney, considering himself to be the number one suspect, quickly leaves the scene. He is arrested in the small country town of Black Springs where he remains, the local police conveniently not returning him to Sydney. With limited resources, Delaney uses his talent as a pool shark to earn some money only to find himself suspected of another murder.

Shaw’s style had an attractive urgency that was blatently American. Delaney himself is sketched as a man, who while not quite a criminal, fashions a living on the very edge of the law. You’re Wrong, Delaney was very well received in Britain and it wasn’t long before Shaw was being groomed as a successor to Peter Cheyney who had died in 1951. Cheyney, the British sex-and-violence precursor to James Hadley Chase (another Briton) and Mickey Spillane, was a popular and prolific novelist and creator of the Lemmy Caution character. Shaw’s only real similarity to the sordid trinity of Cheyney, Chase and Spillane was his ability to produce effective American-flavoured thrillers; luckily he ignored his publisher’s entreaties to spice up the Delaney stories.

You’re Wrong, Delaney was reviewed by ‘N.K.’ in The Bulletin who qualified his praise for the book by commenting, ‘It is an excellent thing that Australian fiction-writers should sell their work on world markets, but it seems unfortunate if, as in this book, they must lose their own Australian speech in order to do it. One would like to see this author turn out thrillers of equal excellence as regards plot and action, but where Australian characters speak in their own manner. After all, our criminal slang is said to be as rich as any in the world: why deprive the rest of the world of its nuances?’

Shaw wrote a number of novels using the same character, principally Don’t Slip, Delaney (London, Collins, 1954) and Have Patience, Delaney (London, Collins, 1954), but the fevered production and the implied strain of satisfying Cheney’s market took its toll. After Your Move, Delaney (London, Collins, 1958), no further adventures appeared. A shame, considering the originality of the character and the easy style which made his novel Heavens Knows, Mr Allison (London, Frederic Muller, 1952; New York, Crown Publishers, 1952), filmed by John Huston in 1957 with Robert Mitchum in the lead role, a best-seller in Britain, Australia and the United States.

Shaw’s success rivalled that of Max Murray, an extremely popular novelist of the 1940s and 1950s. Murray ’s wife, Maysie, wrote a string of popular romances under the pen-names Maysie Greig and Jennifer Ames, and the two toured the world in search of exotic locations for their works. Max Murray published 12 mysteries in a ten year period from 1947. Each had the word corpse in their titles and were set throughout the world. The first in the series, The Voice of the Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1947; London, Michael Joseph, 1948) was set in a small English village, the type of location favoured by Agatha Christie. The Sunshine Corpse (London, Michael Joseph, 1954) was set in Florida, The Doctor and the Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1952; London, Michael Joseph, 1953) in Singapore, and The King and the Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1948; London, Michael Joseph, 1949) on the French Riviera. One, The Right Honourable Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1951; London, Michael Joseph, 1952) had an Australian background. It concerned the murder of Rupert Flower, politician and Minister for Internal Resources, during a reception held in his Canberra home. Conventional detectives do not figure largely in Murray ’s stories and in The Right Honourable Corpse the central figure is Martin Gilbert, an Australian spy who masquerades as a pianist.

A fair number of women were plying their trade in the postwar period and a few established major reputations. One in particular was Melbourne-born June Wright. During World War II she worked in the Postmaster General’s department and utilised this setting to marvellous effect in her first crime novel, Murder in the Telephone Exchange (London, Hutchinson, 1948). So Bad a Death (Sydney, Hutchinson, 1949) followed and she continued to publish for the next 20 years, including such books as Faculty of Murder (London, John Long, 1961) and Make-Up for Murder (London, John Long, 1966).

What makes Wright particularly interesting is that her leading characters were invariably women. Maggie Matheson in So Bad a Death, for example, is the wife of a Melbourne policeman. In Faculty of Murder, set at Melbourne University, a young student, Judith Mornane, hunts her sister’s murderer. Wright exhibited a tendency to cram her stories full of needless detail and together with a leaning towards the Gothic, there is the feeling that she never achieved her full potential.

Wright obtained considerable publicity early in her career although most of this centred around her dual role of housewife and novelist. To popular magazines like The Bulletin during the 1950s, it came as some surprise to find a woman could raise four children and still find the time to write.

Not all of Australia ’s crime writing was focused on Sydney and Melbourne.

Estelle Thompson used a southern Queensland rural setting to great effect in several novels. One of the best is A Twig is Bent (London, Abelard-Schuman, 1961) in which a young girl of 12 and her five-year-old brother witness a murder committed by the children’s uncle. The story builds quite a fine level of suspense and the inevitable police presence remains on the perimeter of the story until the end.

The Lawyer and the Carpenter (London, Hodder amp; Stoughton, 1963) and Find a Crooked Sixpence (London, Hodder amp; Stoughton, 1970) are also set in southern Queensland and Thompson is at her best when she is narrating the story from a woman’s point of view, as she does in the latter. Thompson’s strength lay in her ability to maintain the tension in situations that could, in the hands of a less adept story-teller, become hackneyed.

Other writers looked to the west coast for inspiration. Elizabeth Backhouse wrote six mysteries, most of which featured Western Australian police detectives, Detective-Inspector Prentis and Detective Sergeant Landles. Death of a Clown (London, Robert Hale, 1962) is set in a circus troupe visiting Carnarvon while Death Climbs a Hill (London, Robert Hale, 1963) occurs in the Western Australian bush. The Mists Came Down (London, Robert Hale, 1959) takes place on Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth.

This is the one notable Backhouse novel which does not involve Inspector Prentis. The hero, Steve Gillman, is an American private eye who, together with a very stylised portrait of a misty island retreat, creates an interesting mix of old and new world approaches. There is nothing hard-boiled about The Mist Came Down, and neither is Gillman a sap-wielding Sam Spade. Rather, he is a thoughtful, intelligent hero in the English tradition, who solves a murder in a closed community with a measured calm that came to typify later Backhouse efforts.

Nancy Graham used much the same approach as Backhouse, although her style was much closer to the Gothic leanings of June Wright. The Purple Jacaranda (London, Cassell amp; Company, 1958) is a credibility-stretching tale of a young woman who travels from Sydney at the insistence of a mysterious policeman to investigate her best friend’s husband. Graham’s penchant for the Gothic was such that she was inclined to have newly discovered love-interests ready to save her heroines at the last possible moment. She was also partial to cliff-hanger endings and ‘surprise’ twists that are obvious to any adept reader by the middle of the story. Thus in The Purple Jacaranda, the heroine’s best friend turns out to be the head of a spy-ring threatening national security. The denouement is no more fantastic than Graham’s writing. The Black Swan (London, Cassell amp; Company, 1958) is also set in Western Australia with a similar heroine and a Gothic-like plot line that comes close to setting the crime genre back 50 years.

Another mystery with Gothic overtones is Helen Maces’ House of Hate (London, Hammond, Hammond amp; Company, 1958). Noel Gray, a doctor’s wife in rural Tasmania, befriends Felicity Howard, a lovely young girl who in the true Gothic traditions has ‘spun gold hair, the flawless complexion, the blue eyes so dark that in the night they looked almost black, and vivid red lips parting to show the gleam of pearls’. Felicity’s husband, Miles, is the master of Staines, one of the oldest mansions in the district, and, once again true to the Gothic conventions, is a nutter.

Mace is a cut above Graham as a story-teller and the menace of psychological torment that pervades House of Hate makes it quite a thrilling read. In this case, the Gothic makes a convincing appearance on Australian soil.

Given the popularity of crime novels among Australian readers in the 1950s and 1960s, the contemporary local success of authors such as these women is not surprising. Given the overall quality of their work, the fact that they are almost unknown today is equally unsurprising.

One author whose popularity overseas overshadowed them was Adelaide-born Geraldine Halls who wrote as Charlotte Jay, G.M. Jay and Geraldine Jay (her maiden name). Halls travelled extensively from the 1940s until her return to Adelaide in 1971 and many of her novels benefit from an intimate knowledge of exotic surroundings. Arms for Adonis (London, Collins, 1960; New York, Harper amp; Row, 1961) is a thriller set in Beirut, while Beat Not the Bones (London, Collins, 1952; New York, Harper amp; Row, 1953) and The Voice of the Crab (London, Constable, and New York, Harper amp; Row, 1974) feature New Guinea. Her works do not fall comfortably into the crime genre, crossing more often into mystery-suspense, but her well drawn characters have an unmistakable real-life feel. She won The Mystery Writers of America’s coveted Edgar Allen Poe Award for Beat Not the Bones.

Whether this surprisingly large crop of crime novelists of the 1950s and 60s deserve to be obscure as they are today is debatable. One author who very certainly does is Dezil Batchelor, a sporting commentator of the 1930s who tried his hand at writing thrillers. His The Test Match Murder (Sydney, Angus amp; Robertson, 1936) is an unintentionally hilarious slice of homegrown gimmickry. John Franklyn, captain of the English Test team, falls dead whilst approaching the crease at the Sydney Cricket Ground. A pin smeared with poison and planted in a batting glove is the murder weapon. Owen Brownlow, a radio sports commentator, witnesses the scene and calls on the assistance of his brother Latimer, a brilliant amateur detective. Latimer confounds the slow-witted police with his forensic genius and solves the crime.

Batchelor had read a little too much Bulldog Drummond and Sexton Blake between overs. He breathlessly established Latimer’s credentials as the man who ‘solved the hideous enigma of the headless ballet dancer which had baffled the united forces of the Paris Sûreté’. As if this wasn’t enough, the last time Latimer ‘had dragged him into criminal investigation, Owen had reached the penultimate chapter of the story facing the hatchet man of a Chinese tong with a time machine tethered to his left ankle’.

As a crime writer, Batchelor was a first rate cricket commentator and the most pleasant feature of The Test Match Murder is its cricketing atmosphere. After this gem he kept to sport for quite a few years and it wasn’t until the late 1950s that he returned to novels. A few, like Everything Happens to Hector (London, Heinemann, 1958) and The Man Who Loved Chocolates (London, Heinemann, 1961) were mysteries, although others, including For What We Are About To Receive (London, Herbert Jenkins, 1964) and The Delicate Flower (London, Herbert Jenkins, 1965), were mannered comedies in the English tradition. Thankfully his later crime stories are now so rare as to be virtually unknown.

Despite Batchelor’s very British evocation of the gentleman amateur and Wright’s lady sleuths, the fascination with the conventionally employed police detective, which characterised Australian authors from Mrs Fortune in the 1860s onwards, continued dominant.

Paul McGuire, foreign correspondent, diplomat and Australia ’s first ambassador to Italy, neatly packaged a career as a crime novelist into the decades from 1931. His 16 novels began with Murder in Borstal (London, Skeffington, 1931 as The Black Rose Murder, New York, Bretano 1932) and included the quite brilliant Burial Service (London, Heinemann 1938 as A Funeral in Eden, New York, Morrow, 1938) and The Spanish Steps (London, Heinemann 1940 as Enter Three Witches, New York, Morrow, 1940). McGuire’s series characters, Chief Inspector Cummings and Inspector Fillinger, were London detectives who never ventured closer to Australia than the English Channel.

In the development of Australian crime writing, it was not until quite late that thrillers became an established form. Paul Brickhill, famous for his classic books of World War II, The Dam Busters (London, Evans Brothers, 1951; New York, Ballantine 1965), The Great Escape (London, Faber amp; Faber, 1951) and Reach for the Sky (London, Collins, 1954), turned overseas for what was then a very contemporary plot. His entirely gripping thriller, The Deadline (Sydney and London, Collins, 1962; as War of Nerves, New York, Morrow, 1963), is set in Paris where an Australian tourist who has witnessed the murder of a French politician strives to avoid the attentions of an Algerian assassin.

Ian Hamilton also broke the traditional mould and reflected the changing shape of popular culture with a few mysteries starring Pete Heysen, a television journalist. Heysen’s first outing was The Persecutor (London, Constable, 1965) and The Man With The Brown Paper Face (London, Constable, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1967). Hamilton was clearly comfortable with the American ‘hip’ style and seemed more at ease with the then current spate of United States television adventures and caper movies than the time-worn conventions of police procedurals. There was a cop in Hamilton ’s novels, one Detective-Sergeant Brockhurst of the remarkably populous Sydney C.I.B., but his role was to act as an official foil for Heysen. At best the books are good fun although they have not weathered the years favourably. Re-reading Hamilton is like watching re-runs of television’s The Mod Squad, an exercise in nostalgia that doesn’t seem quite so satisfying the second time around.