Sand on the Gumshoe

ARTHUR UPFIELD

One of the giants of Australian crime fiction, Arthur Upfield, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, in 1888 and came to Australia in 1911. He worked and travelled widely, particularly through the outback, and upon the outbreak of World War 1 joined the Australian Imperial Forces. Upfield served at Gallipoli, and in Egypt and France, and returned to England after the war as private secretary to a British Army officer.

Australia proved too much of an attraction and Upfield was back in 1921. He tried prospecting, pearling and labouring, and at one time patrolled a 320 kilometer section of a rabbit-proof fence across Western Australia. The year was 1929 and it proved an important period in Upfield’s career.

While working as a boundary rider, Upfield was busy planning the perfect crime, or rather the perfect plot for his newly realised fictional detective, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police. With the help of his workmates, Upfield devised the central mechanism of his 1931 novel, The Sands of Windee (London, Hutchinson, 1931), a short story, ‘Wisp of Wool and Disk of Silver’, and unintentionally, a real life murder mystery. One John Thomas Smith, alias Snowy Rowies, a station hand who had assisted Upfield in the search for the perfect murder plot, put it into action. In March 1932 Rowies was found guilty of murder and executed three months later.

The Sands of Windee, serialised in The Western Mail newspaper at the time of Rowies’ Trial, was a major success for Upfield. His own account of the Snowy Rowies story, The Murchison Murders, was published (Sydney, Midget Masterpiece Publishing Company) in 1934. Upfield continued producing Bony thrillers, 29 novels in all, until his death in Bowral, New South Wales, in 1964. The last, The Lake Frome Monster, was completed by J.L. Price and Dorothy Strange and published in 1966.

‘Wisp of Wool and Disk of Silver’ was especially written for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and is the only short story by Upfield. It is interesting to compare it with The Sands of Windee, if only to discover how authors sometime hate to leave a good idea alone.