Sand on the Gumshoe

Apart from Arthur Upfield, Carter Brown and Peter Corris most Australians would be struggling to name many other home-grown writers of crime and detective fiction. Yet there is in fact a long Australian tradition of crime writing. The new crop of Australian crime writers are just returning the genre to the popularity it enjoyed for a century from the 1860s.

Maybe our convict origins have something to do with it, maybe it’s just human nature to be entertained by stories of violence and greed and the darkness of the human soul. Whatever the case, from the nineteenth century on, dozens of Australian authors have ventured into the genre to satisfy a hungry local market.

Australia has a surprisingly rich and varied tradition of crime writing embracing with varied degrees of success such branches of the idiom as detective stories, thrillers, mysteries, police procedurals and even gothic adventures. For much of our history, we have followed the traditions of British crime fiction. In recent years, however, the hard-edged commentary of the United States has become dominant.

This progression is best reflected in the work of Upfield, Brown and Corris, authors who have achieved both critical and commercial success around the world and somehow avoided the obscurity that has befallen their counterparts. The work of the trio can indeed be viewed as a microcosm of the development of Australian crime literature. Upfield’s approach grew out of the English police procedural, reflecting Australia ’s long tradition as a British cultural colony. Brown in comparison was a rude shock. His work was brashly modern, harshly violent and thoroughly Americanised. By the time Corris began to write in the early 1980s the formula had mellowed but the United States remained the dominant influence. The development of Australian crime fiction has thus mirrored the country’s agonised struggle to forge a new cultural identity, no matter how derivative.

Arthur Upfield created a wholly unique Australian detective. Born of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, better known as Bony, featured in 29 of the author’s 33 novels. From the first, The Barrakee Mystery (London, Hutchinson, 1929; as The Lure of the Bush, New York, Doubleday, 1965) to the last, The Lake Frome Monster (London, Heinemann, 1965), completed after Upfield’s death, Bony has endured.

British-born Upfield came to Australia in 1911 and worked for many years in the outback. He was among other occupations, a station hand, a boundary rider and a prospector, who distilled his love of the far country into his novels. Upfield’s keen eye for detail and his ability to generate an Australian atmosphere kept fans around the world satisfied long after Bony captured his last villain.

To contemporary readers, Upfield’s treatment of his Aboriginal characters smacks of racism, but his writing was, of course, a product of his time. Thus in The Lake Frome Monster he describes a half caste as having not enough of the white race in him to produce staple honesty and too much of the black race to permit freedom from aboriginal superstition. Yet Upfield delighted in extolling the individual superiority of Bony above all races. It is Bony who is assigned the toughest cases. He plays the part of labourer, itinerant worker, even swagman, to crack a case and, in a telling allusion to his ambiguous position in Australian society, prefers to work anonymously and alone.

Patience, as Bony cheerfully admits, is his greatest asset. He can solve a case in two weeks or it can take two years. He never fails and his exceptional talents reinforce his enormous self regard. As he comments in Wind of Evil (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1937; London, John Hamilton, 1939; New York, Doubleday, 1944), ‘I admire murderers immensely – almost as much as I admire myself.’

Bony first appeared during the so-called ‘golden age’ of crime writing, the period between the two world wars which produced authors such as John Dickson Carr, R. Austin Freeman, S.S. Van Dine, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers, a time when the manufacture of mystery relied far more on the inherent puzzle than considerations of character and plot. This was the era of genteel murders in locked rooms where detectives and their suspects were all bound by the conventions of rigid social codes.

Upfield’s locales were a little light on drawing rooms and evinced a shocking paucity of butlers. Yet his approach had much in common with the conventions of the ‘golden age’ practitioners. Bony’s cases occurred in small, rural communities, just the type of closed universe that the locked room mystery depended upon. There were a finite number of suspects and the guilty party (or parties) was always among them. Most importantly, while Upfield disguised some of the more vital clues from the reader, he invariably adhered to the conventions and played fair.

Upfield’s novels sold well in both Great Britain and Australia but his lasting success was not established until 1943 when his novels began to be released in the United States. Beginning with Death of a Swagman (New York, Doubleday, 1945; London, Francis Aldor, 1946; Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1947) the majority of the Bony books were first published in the United States. Anthony Boucher, in The New York Times Review of Books, described Bony as the most original fictional detective of the last 20 years’ and Upfield became the first Australian to be admitted to the Mystery Writers’ Guild of America. Upfield’s novels were translated into German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese and still support a thriving international fan club of the Bony faithful.

If Upfield was prolific then Carter Brown (the pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates) was positively fecund. The extent of his output remains open but bibliographical sources suggest a minimum of 190 and a maximum of 325 novels. Beyond dispute is Carter Brown’s position as a dinky-di literary phenomenon. Yates, for all his energy, worked in that corner of the genre that even now receives little serious attention in literary circles. Apart from a passing cultish curiosity in the early 1980s when Yates’ autobiography was published and a musical made from his novel, The Stripper (Sydney, Horwitz, and New York, New American Library, 1961; London, New English Library, 1962) he has never achieved the recognition that the quality of his writing and its sheer volume deserved.

Yates fed the market for pulp fiction with a startling energy. The numerous Carter Brown detectives occupied mythologised American settings, despite the fact that Yates had little practical knowledge of the United States until quite late in his career. Thus, one Carter detective, Al Wheeler, worked in a fictional Californian city near Los Angeles, and another, Randy Roberts, came from San Francisco. Yates’ characters inhabited the same bleak, violent landscape that Hollywood had been manufacturing under the label of film noir for decades. Yates’ writing was like the romantic, dream landscapes fashioned by the early Black Mask-style writers, a style which continued into the post 1945 period. This style had much in common with the Westerns and the cowboy epics of popular literature in that it enhanced the traditional struggle between good and evil. The heroes of such stories were fine men (and occasionally women) hardened but not seduced by the evil they faced. They reacted to violence in order to save the society they were sworn to protect.

Brown’s heroes were as violent as his villains. His women, with the exception of the sole central female character, Mavis Seidlitz, were either dumb, well-endowed secretaries or dumb, well-endowed victims. His corrupt cities were similar to those of Micky Spillane or James Hadley Chase, but Brown’s saving grace was an undercurrent of humour that occasionally verged on satire.

Yates knew his market well and was careful to deliver exactly what was demanded. As society changed so, to some limited extent, did Carter Brown’s universe. From the late 1960s the plots became crazier reflecting Yates’ perception of the new social mores and he began to avoid the old-fashioned themes of fevered vengeance which characterised the later works of both Spillane and Chase. The sultry, lurid book covers remained, as did his faithful audience, although towards the end of Yates’ career his readership was eroded by the large number of television series that had seized upon his genre.

Sales remained the true measure of Yates success. At his death in 1985 press estimates put his sales at over 55 million copies. His novels sold in more than 20 countries and 14 languages. Whilst Yates’ work may be obscure (the Australian publisher of Carter Brown mysteries, Horwitz, have no titles in print) it must be the very type of financial obscurity that many authors crave.

Unlike Yates, Peter Corris enjoys both critical and commercial adoration. Since the publication of his first crime novel, The Dying Trade (Sydney, McGraw Hill, 1980), his transplantation of the Californian private eye tradition to Australia has earned him a major reputation. Corris’ hero, Cliff Hardy, has appeared in eight novels and three collections of short stories, including the latest, Man in the Shadows (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1988) and a film version of one of his novels, The Empty Beach (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1983).

Cliff Hardy is a notable creation. In common with such classic Californian counterparts as Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Lew Archer, he is a loner with a knight errant mentality who solves his cases more through force of personality than any deductive genius. Corris’ regard for writers such as Raymond Chandler is evident. Even if the first Hardy novel was a little too close to the style of Ross MacDonald for critical comfort, Corris has firmly established his hero’s individual character in its successors.

Hardy is heir to the myth of the digger and all the values that tradition evokes. He lives in a run-down terrace in inner Sydney Glebe, drinks flagon wine and drives an ageing Falcon to an equally run-down office in Kings Cross. He has an utterly endearing disrespect for authority and gets beaten up with comforting regularity. A strong feature of the Corris creation is the merging of character and place. Corris has created a cityscape for Hardy which is constantly recognisable. Cliff Hardy, in many ways, is Sydney. The city is an element in the Hardy stories as forceful as that of Robert B. Parker’s Boston or John D. MacDonald’s Florida.

Whilst Upfield, Yates and Corris are the jewels in the axe handle of Australian crime fiction, they are far from isolated examples of our long fascination with crime and its retelling. Just as Britain has celebrated its highway-men and the United States gangsters and outlaws so Australia has demonstrated a limitless fascination with criminals and victims as diverse as Ned Kelly, Squizzy Taylor and the Chamberlains.

There has always been and probably always will be a large and receptive audience for crime writing. Just why people delight in reading of murder most foul can never be satisfactorily explained. Over the years all manner of people, from psychologists to the crime writers themselves, have attempted this puzzle. Their widely differing conclusions have only succeeded in further confusing the discussion. Perhaps John Creasy (author of the Gideon series) glimpsed a measure of the truth when he opined, ‘The crime story is almost the only novel worth reading today because it deals with the fundamental conflict of mankind; the conflict of good and bad. At its best it is the morality play of our age.’

Yet there are issues inherent in the vast popularity of crime writing that make such a statement a touch too simplistic. For many years crime writing was dismissed as fodder for the mass market, mindless relaxation for the poorly educated, and it is only in relatively recent times that such works have been seriously examined by the literary and academic fraternities. Such revision has come about not from the continuing popularity of the genre but by the range of people it attracts. Joseph Stalin enjoyed the detective tales of Edgar Allen Poe, Freud likewise with Dorothy Sayer; John F. Kennedy with Ian Fleming and Einstein with Erle Stanley Gardner.

Creasy went some way to explaining the modus operandi of the genre as a whole; there is something extremely comforting in a literature that sets out to create order from chaos. G.K. Chesterton, himself a proponent of crime writing, travelled this path with his 1901 essay ‘A Defense of Detective Stories’. He presented the genre as expressing some sense of the poetry of modern life and; ‘By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but traitors within our gates.’

Such arguments may well be dismissed as apologetics. Other commentators have painted crime writing as a harmless past-time. William Huntington Wright, who as S.S. Van Dine was one of the most popular authors of crime’s supposed ‘golden age’, followed this line of thought in an introduction to a 1927 anthology. The detective novel, he claimed: ‘… does not fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but belongs rather in the category of riddles; it is, in fact, a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form.’ This may well have been a viable argument when applied to Wright and his best known creation, the omniscient Philo Vance. But Wright does not allow for the psychological complexity of the audience for crime fiction and could never have anticipated the proliferation of the genre as it exists today.

So are puzzle-mystery fans simply indulging in crosswords-with-curare? Is the reader of hard-boiled detective stories wallowing in mere macho wish-fulfillment? The debate rages on but the popularity of the genre is beyond dispute. And it is a popularity that has always attracted Australian authors. Certainly Upfield, Corris and Yates are the best known practitioners of crime fiction but they are not unique and are in fact the heirs to a long Australian tradition.

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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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.

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 & 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 & Robertson, 1960), One Rose Less (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & 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 & Day, 1978) and Odd Job (London, Collins, 1974; New York, Stein & Day, 1978). Crisscross (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein & 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 & 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 & 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 & Company, 1969), Death Out of Focus (London, Cassell & Company, 1970) and Death Suspended (London, Cassell & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & Stoughton, 1963) and Find a Crooked Sixpence (London, Hodder & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & Row, 1961) is a thriller set in Beirut, while Beat Not the Bones (London, Collins, 1952; New York, Harper & Row, 1953) and The Voice of the Crab (London, Constable, and New York, Harper & 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 & 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 & 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.

The Pulps

Whilst the mainstream publishers kept to the traditional areas of the genre, the police dominance of Australian crime writing was largely broken by the pulp writers. ‘Yellowbacks’ and ‘pulps’, although derisive terms for the working class of publishing, were the heirs of the popular magazines of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the source of a gradual revolution in Australian crime writing.

The immortal Nick Carter, for example, visited these shores in An Australian Klondike (New York, Street & Smith, 1896). This title was one of no less than 437 in the Carter series written by Frederick van Rensselaer Dey who was engaged in 1891 by Street & Smith to continue the character initiated by John Coryell. An Australian Klondike only used idealised outback settings, for Dey never allowed the trials of either travel or serious research to stand in the way of his feverish production of these dime novels. The fact that he produced all his Nick Carter adventures in just 21 years goes a great way toward explaining his haste.

The most interesting feature of An Australian Klondike is that it is set in the bush, an environment which many Australian writers eschewed. With the exception of Upfield, Courtier, Randolph Bedford, Nancy Graham, Helen Mace, Estelle Thompson and the all too brief career of A.E. Martin, very little crime literature had an exclusively rural setting. It seems the only crime many authors considered worth writing about occurred in the cities. The pulps continued this single minded approach, particularly during the 1950s, when they really started to steam.

Anybody who suggests that there was no production of pulp crime fiction in Australia should look no further than the mass of periodicals and paperback series such as Adam, Man, Cavalier, Male, Detective Fiction, Famous Detective Stories, Leisure Detective, Action Detective and the Shilling Thriller series which prospered in these years.

One of the best was the short-lived Detective Fiction. Published by Frank Johnson it began in 1949 and employed an army of writers producing some remarkably good stories. Frank Walford, crocodile hunter and journalist, had written a stream of popular novels from the 1930s before his work appeared regularly in Detective Fiction. In stories such as ‘The Flame Pearl’, ‘The Spare Parts’ and ‘The Polished Razor’ he featured a series character, Dr Frederick Norman. Other notable writers included the husband and wife team Richard and Alfreda Phillips (‘The Case of Mamie Parish’ and ‘The Case of the Life Sized Doll’) and Norman Way with stories such as ‘You Can’t Be Too Careful’ and ‘Framed’. In addition to Detective Fiction there were other magazines for which the pulp writers toiled furiously.

Of the mass of pulp writers Max Afford was unquestionably the best. In his time Afford was renowned as a famous radio script writer. One of his best known programmes, Danger Unlimited, chronicled the deductive exploits of Jeffrey Blackburn. A former professor of mathematics, Blackburn and his wife Elizabeth, exhibiting just the slightest hint of Nick and Nora Charles, also appeared in Afford’s print writing, notably in such light and enjoyable novels as Blood on His Hands (London, Long, 1936; Sydney, Frank Johnson, 1945,). Set during Melbourne ’s centennary celebrations, it involved the locked room murder of a prominent judge and featured a delightful secondary character in Bertha Fenton, a wisecracking journalist. Afford resurrected the Blackburns for Detective Fiction in ‘The Vanishing Trick’.

A giant among the writers was Bob Mackinnon who scripted the radio serial The Dark Stranger, featuring amateur sleuth Simon Drake. Mackinnon boasted that he churned out 1.5 million words a year in a mass of pulp titles including a series of racing thrillers. Authors such as Afford and Mackinnon certainly benefited from the exposure guaranteed by their successful careers in radio. Afford’s Blackburn character was well known on radio and certainly helped sell novels, reflecting the ease with which the author could utilise a character already well-known to audiences.

Those Dear Departed

Much of Australia ’s crime writing was produced by authors who called the country a second home. Fergus Hume, Pat Flower and Arthur Upfield, for example, were from England and it would be remiss to ignore the contributions of other foreign writers.

In general there is little to distinguish the way in which Australia has been portrayed by visiting, resident or native crime authors. On the whole the genre is too strictly confined by stylistic conventions to successfully evoke a distinctive physical and psychological landscape of Australia. For writers whose primary concern was crime and retribution it didn’t really matter whether the body was discovered in a stately home, a suburban loungeroom or the back of Bourke as long as there was a murderer to be brought to book. Certainly Upfield mastered the setting of mysteries in the bush, although this was more due to his own interests, than in any conscious intention to break the conventions.

Whilst homogenous in description, Australia was the setting for crime stories by foreigners from the beginning of the genre. One of the earliest visitors was E.W. Hornung, who arrived from England in 1884. It was treatment for asthma rather than any sense of adventure that lured the young Ernest William to Australia, but in a mere two years he accumulated sufficient material to fuel many novels. Most were little more than derivative romantic adventures utilising bushranging and pastoral themes but Hornung’s famous gentleman thief and sometimes test cricketer, Raffles, is an enduring creation. All the more so because Raffles commenced his life of crime in the small Victorian town of Yea, recounted in the short story, ‘Le Premier Pas’, in the first Raffles collection, The Amateur Cracksman (London, Methuen and New York Scribner, 1899).

Hornung later created an Australian version of Raffles. In Stingaree (London, Chatto & Windus and New York, Scribner 1909) the character of the title was a gentleman bushranger who risked capture to further the career of a young and beautiful opera singer. Despite the novelty, the story was just another of Hornung’s romantic frivolities.

Some 50 years later an adept mystery, Murder in Melbourne (London, Arthur Barker, 1958), was written by Dulcie Gray. A British actress of some renown, Gray toured Australia in 1957 and used the Victorian capital as the setting for a puzzle mystery featuring Detective Inspector Welby of the Melbourne C.I.B. It was the second in a long line of such works although she never again mentioned Australia. She did, however, write a script of Murder in Melbourne in 1961 for British radio.

Of all overseas authors, the most prolific was Norman Lee. Another Briton, he wrote some 50 novels between 1945 and his death in 1962. His best known pseudonym (and in the manner of Nick Carter and Ellery Queen, series character as well) was Mark Corrigan. A private eye retained by U.S. Intelligence, Corrigan roamed the world with his beautiful assistant, Tucker MacLean. Lee spent some time in Australia from the middle 1950s and infused such Corrigan tales as The Big Squeeze (London, Angus & Robertson, 1955), Big Boys Don’t Cry (London, Angus & Robertson, 1956), Sydney For Sin (London, Angus & Robertson, 1956) and The Cruel Lady (London, Angus & Robertson, 1957) with a vivid local colour.

The Corrigan persona fitted Lee like a glove and he strove to identify the character as a flesh-and-blood person as evinced in the dedications of his novels. The Big Squeeze was dedicated to ‘Kay of Kia-Lama – In whose restful retreat overlooking Sydney Harbour I wrote the final chapters of this adventure in the winter of ‘54’’. In Sydney For Sin, the dedication reads ‘For C.D.J, of Blackman’s Bay – One of her names is Donjee (pronounced Don-Shay, from the Spanish) and she lives in a charming house at Blackman’s Bay, on the south coast of beautiful Tasmania. It was in her delightful abode that I wrote this adventure of skulduggery in Sydney and mayhem in Melbourne.’

Norman Lee’s visit to Australia proved a fruitful one. In addition to the Mark Corrigan adventures, Lee utilised Australian settings in works written under two other pseudonyms. As Raymond Armstrong, Lee wrote about the adventures of an arch villainess, the young and impossibly beautiful Laura Scudamore known as The Sinister Widow. Like the Corrigan books, the Sinister Widow series used exotic locations as a backdrop to the criminal pursuits of Scudamore and attempts by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Dick Mason of Scotland Yard, to bring her to justice. Also in common with Corrigan, Raymond Armstrong, a Fleet Street crime reporter, is the chief character as well as author. After exhausting the potential of such locations as London, Paris and Berlin, The Sinister Widow turned up in Australia in The Sinister Widow Down Under (London, John Long, 1958). Mason, of course, follows but the novel lapses into a Boys Own adventure with few saving graces.

A more satisfying Lee pseudonym was Robertson Hobart, whose local outings were Case of the Shaven Blonde (London, Robert Hale, 1959) and Dangerous Cargoes (London, Robert Hale, 1960), which featured another Lee series character by the name of Grant Vickary, and Blood on the Lake (London, Hale, 1961). The last title concerned J. Earle Dixon, an Adelaide insurance investigator, and his efforts to locate a missing geologist in the South Australian desert.

Norman Lee’s style never varied from the loosely constructed homage he paid to the American writers. While Lee was a lightweight novelist who now has little appeal, there was a crisp action and pace in his work that was refreshing for its time.

The best known of these transitory Australian writers is John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, otherwise celebrated by his pseudonym, Michael Innes. Born in Scotland, Innes spent ten years from 1935 as Professor of English at the University of Adelaide. His academic duties did not slow his production of mystery novels, including a number in his Inspector (later Sir John) Appleby series such as Appleby on Ararat (London, Gollancz, and New York, Dodd Mead, 1941) and Appleby’s End (London, Gollancz, and New York, Dodd Mead, 1945) as well as other novels such as Hamlet Revenge (London, Gollancz, 1937) and Lament For a Maker (London, Gollancz, and New York, Dodd Mead, 1938). Whilst some of these enjoyed an Australian setting or characters, the link was largely incidental.

John Creasey is probably the crime genre’s most prolific author. In a career spanning little more than 40 years, he produced about 560 books under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. Apart from mysteries he also wrote westerns, war-time stories, juvenile fiction and non-fiction but his most enduring creations were policemen – Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard (under the pseudonym of J.J. Marric), Inspector Roger West, also of Scotland Yard and a Simon Templar-like character, the Hon. Richard Rollison, who struck fear into the hearts of London’s criminal fraternity as The Toff.

The Toff visited Australia in The Toff Down Under (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1953, New York, Walker, 1969) and as Break the Toff (London, Lancer, 1970). Likewise did Inspector West in Murder, London-Australia (London, Hodder & Stoughton, and New York, Scribner, 1965). Of all Creasey’s creations, those of West and Gideon were the most satisfying. They kept to the strict formula of the British police procedural, mixing an almost documentary-like examination of police methods with a humanising view of their private lives. The books featuring West and Gideon were consistent with a long tradition, both past and future, that continues to the present day under the care of such authors as P.D. James.

In Murder, London-Australia, Scotland Yard investigates the murder of a young Australian girl, a recently arrived passenger aboard the S.S. Kookaburra. When another passenger dies mysteriously, West travels first to Hong Kong and then to Sydney in search of the murderer. Despite the occasional slip up (West boards the ‘Manley ferry’), the novel works well.

For many of these writers Australia was just another setting. A foreign, sometimes exotic, location but enough like home for the language not to be a problem. They may have come just for a holiday or, like Creasey, as part of a promotional tour and took the opportunity to soak up enough atmosphere to provide their characters some scenic relief.

Far From Home

Like Alan Yates, a number of other Australians have felt no compunction in setting their work overseas. Dale Collins, for example, found writing about Britain much easier than setting his work at home. A 25-year old journalist he accompanied an American millionaire on a sailing expedition and later detailed his adventures in The Sea Tracks of the Speejacks Around the World (London, Heinemann, 1923), a book that was an immediate success. Settling in England, Collins carried the nautical background into a number of novels.

Of his crime stories, the best known is The Fifth Victim (London, Harrap, 1930). Set in London, it concerns an Irish counterfeiter, Den O’Dare, who returns to a life of crime on the urging of his shrewish wife after his release from prison. The plot is hokey (O’Dare dies nobly of a cerebral haemorrhage following his arrest) but the staccato writing style echoes the hard-edged Black Mask material of the Americans.

It is interesting to contemplate what might have been if Collins had avoided commercial success and instead carved a living solely from the pulps. Whatever the result, it would surely have further isolated his work from the critical establishment as evidenced by the comment on Collins in H.M. Green’s History of Australian Literature as a talent ‘… soon wasted… in mere thrillerism.’

Other expatriate Australians who succeeded in British publishing were J.M. Walsh and Percival Rodda. Both settled in England during the 1920s and wrote numerous thrillers which rarely mentioned Australia. James Morgan Walsh, who won the unfortunate label of ‘ Australia ’s Edgar Wallace’, was one of those authors whose pens outstripped their publishers ability to cope. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including John Cerew, H. Haverstock Hill and George M. White and most of his books featured England, where he lived from the age of 32. Only a few, notably the crime stories The Man Behind the Curtain (Sydney, Cornstalk Publishing Company, 1927; London, Hamilton, 1931) and The League of Missing Men (Sydney Cornstalk Publishing Company, 1927; London, Hamilton, 1932), had Australian settings.

Rodda wrote as Gavin Holt and developed the character of the criminologist-sleuth Professor Bastion in works such as Six Minutes Past Twelve (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1928). He also combined with thriller master Eric Ambler under the pseudonym of Eliot Reed to write Skytip (New York, Doubleday, 1950; London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1951), Tender to Danger (New York, Doubleday, 1951; as Tender to Moonlight, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1952) and The Maras Affair (London, Collins and New York, Doubleday, 1952).

By the time Collins, Walsh and Rodda reached Britain, another Australian, Arthur J. Rees, was already well established. After working on both The Melbourne Herald and The New Zealand Herald in the early years of the century, he repaired to England. None of his books, wallowing in such titles as The Shrieking Pit (London, Lane, 1919), The Threshold of Fear (London, Hutchinson, and New York, Dodd, 1925) and The Corpse That Travelled (New York, Dodd, 1938), mentioned his homeland.

One Australian even made it into the now legendary American pulp market. D.L. Champion was born in Australia but educated in New York City. From the 1930s he wrote for Black Mask and Dime Detective, magazines that introduced such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald to a crime-hungry world. Champion’s best known series character, Inspector Allhof, appeared in Dime Detective from 1940 until 1946. In 20 years of activity, it is estimated he wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 20 million words.

Another expatriate of note was John Evan Weston Davies, better known under his thriller pseudonym of Berkly Mather. Born in 1914 in Sydney, he attended the Kings School in Parramatta but in his teens moved to England, entering the British Army’s Royal School of Artillery.

For the next 30 years, Davies was a career soldier, retiring in 1960 with the rank of colonel. For some time before this, however, he had found time to write. His experience in India and the Far East as an army officer served him well and his debut spy thriller, The Achilles Affair (London, Collins, and New York, Scribner, 1959), was the first of many to utilise Indian and Chinese locations and situations.

While using such exotic settings, his leading characters were invariably British. Peter Feltham, the middle-aged English spy in The Achilles Affair, reappeared in With Extreme Prejudice (London, Collins, and New York, Scribner, 1976), while the hero of his second novel, The Pass Beyond Kashmir (London, Collins, and New York, Scribner, 1960), was the Welshman Idwal Rees who returned in The Terminators (London, Collins and New York, Scribner, 1971) and Snowline (London, Collins, and New York, Scribner, 1973).

A number of the Mather novels have been filmed, and he himself scripted The White Dacoit (London, Collins, 1974). Davies’ film work has received much critical attention and he is perhaps best known for his co-scripting credit on the first James Bond movie, Dr. No. He also wrote well over one hundred teleplays and a large number of radio plays.

The locals, the expatriates and the visitors all contributed to a seamless flow of crime writing. As their traditional audience grew old and died it was replaced by younger readers with the same taste and only slightly different perceptions. Crime was crime and a murder sketched by Waif Wander in the late 1860s thrilled its readers just as surely as the Nat Gould yellowbacks bought at grimy railway station bookstalls, or the Carter Browns racked in a surbuban newsagency. The character of society changed, but Australian crime fiction remained popular and seemed destined to never fade away. But that was very nearly what happened.

The Current Crop

In the late 1960s Australian crime writing went into a decline. Reading pulps died out and was replaced by less demanding activities such as watching television, although this medium did keep crime to the forefront. The British kept the genre pure with such procedurals as Z Cars, while the Americans produced an almost endless stream of crime dramas like 77 Sunset Strip, Mannix and Perry Mason.

Australia also had its own cathode-tube wallopers. In the early years of Australian television from 1956 they sprang from successful radio shows. Consider Your Verdict, which ran on Australian television from 1961 until 1963, had its courtroom formula finely honed by radio. So did Homicide, known as D-24 on the wireless, a cops and robbers thunderer set in Melbourne. Homicide ran for an exhausting 13 years, from 1964 until 1977, and was produced by Hector Crawford who ensured crime remained a Victorian pursuit with a string of hit television shows including Division Four, Matlock Police and our very own spy series, Hunter.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that a crime series was set exclusively in Sydney – a private eye show called Ryan which featured Rod Mullinar screaming around the harbour foreshores in a Valiant Charger, assisted by a then little known blonde actress by the name of Pamela Stevenson. There was also a short lived (1972-73) series based on the Arthur Upfield mysteries, although a New Zealand actor, James Laurenson, was called in to play Bony in blackface. Bony, as the series was called, had the distinction of being the first Australian television show to win top ratings overseas – in Scotland, of all places.

In print, Carter Brown survived with a dwindling readership through the swinging ‘60s to the late 1970s. Arthur Upfield died in 1964 and the sisterly partnership that published under the pen name of Margot Neville was ended by death in 1966. Sidney Courtier passed away in 1975, as did Pat Flower in 1978. The only one of the veterans to continue into the 1980s was Jon Cleary with a rejuvenated Scobie Malone.

Cleary occupies a peripheral position in Australian crime writing. A successful novelist since the late 1940s, many of his suspense adventures encroach upon the crime genre. In terms of straight crime fiction, however, his greatest contribution lies in the creation of Scobie Malone. Malone is a career cop, but his character signals a change in the nature of Australian crime writing. Perhaps it is the fact that Malone is such a superior creation that makes him so radically different to his mass of fictional colleagues.

Malone first appeared in The High Commissioner (London, Collins and New York, Morrow, 1966) when as a C.I.B. detective he is sent to London to arrest Australia ’s senior diplomat for a murder committed some 20 years past. Cleary’s was a fresh approach. Malone is a convincing human being, far more substantial than the conventional mechanical catalyst of a cardboard plot line. Malone made a welcome return in Helga’s Web (London, Collins and New York, Morrow, 1973) but it was then a long time between cases. He didn’t reappear until Dragons at the Party (London, Collins, 1987), a remarkably fine book from one of the world’s great crime writers. The latest Malone novel is Now and Then, Amen (London, Collins, 1988).

It was not until the debut of Peter Corris with The Dying Trade in 1980, that the genre showed signs of a revival along with a new generation of writers.

In the nearly ten years since crime fiction has returned to favour in Australia it has assumed a strong local identity. It is no longer fashionable to produce wildly derivative English potboilers; instead Australian authors present a faithful re-creation of our society in all its colourful aspects. More often than not, some action occurs in the Outback and invariably touches on such topical concerns as Aboriginal relations and American defence installations. Politicians are generally presented as corrupt, reflecting an international tradition that is almost as old as crime fiction itself. The criminals can most often be found in the canyons of big business, straight from the pages of the daily papers. There seems little room for blue-collar crime.

This is not, however, a curiously Australian phenomenon. Australians are merely following the forms already dominant in the preference of book buyers. If there is any discernible trend, it seems that the majority of Australian crime writing in the 1980s follows the American fashion, especially with regard to Californian-flavoured private eyes and with thrillers.

While the market hasn’t entirely become crowded with Australian authors, there has certainly been a growing crop of indigenous crime fiction. As with the earlier years some of the work is great, most less so. An optimist would rejoice at the interest being shown by Australian publishers. A pessimist (or would it be a realist) would reply that no local publishing activity is preferable to dross.

Yet amongst the new generation there are some very good writers indeed. Peter Corris remains the foremost and undoubtedly the most prolific with eight novels and three short story collections in just eight years, and that’s just for Cliff Hardy. Corris has also produced a series of novels about an Australian spy, the first being Pokerface (Melbourne, Penguin, 1985), and a series of Flashman-like adventures of an Australian actor in the United States during the 1920s with Box Office Browning (Melbourne, Penguin, 1987) Beverley Hills Browning (Melbourne, Penguin, 1987).

Another fine local writer is Robert G. Barrett. In a string of short stories he has created one of the greatest ‘characters’ in modern Australian literature. Les Norton is a strapping young man – a big, red-haired ex-meat worker from Queensland – who comes to Sydney in the mid-1970s to work as a bouncer in an illegal casino. Barrett’s stories are enormously funny, chronicling the adventures of Norton as he lives on the edge of Sydney ’s criminal fraternity and constantly falls into trouble.

Collected into You Wouldn’t Be Dead for Quids (Sydney, Waratah Press, 1985 and Sydney, Pan Books, 1986), The Real Thing (Sydney, Pan Books, 1986) and The Boys From Binjiwunyawunya (Sydney, Pan Books, 1987), Barrett isn’t a crime writer in the accepted sense. It is more a case of Damon Runyon out of Henry Lawson but the characters are drawn from life. Norton’s boss is Price Galese, a thinly veiled reproduction of prominent Sydney racing and gambling identity Perce Galea. Galese’s best mate is Sir Jack Atkins, Premier of New South Wales, who bears a striking resemblance to Sir Robert Askin. Norton and the other inhabitants of the Kelly Club casino can be found within the pages of David Hickie’s The Prince and the Premier; they were the hard men of Sydney ’s underworld. Many died violently. One of their happier legacies has been to people Barrett’s stories with priceless colour.

Another success story is Melbourne author Arthur Mather. It is perhaps a mark of Australian insularity that one of our best selling thriller writers is unknown in his own country. Mather has been writing for some years, beginning with a science fiction effort, The Pawn (Melbourne. Wren, 1975). Soon afterwards he attracted a New York based agent (at one time he was represented by William Morris Agency) and cracked the U.S. market. Most of his subsequent thrillers were set in America, usually New York, and had science fiction backgrounds such as The Mind-Breaker (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1980) and The Duplicate (London, Sphere, 1985).

With Deep Gold (New York, Bantam, 1986) Mather produced one of the best known commercial thrillers written by an Australian. An old man is murdered in a New York hospital and the case is assigned to Ed Zarich, a tough homicide detective. From military records, he finds the victim was reported missing, presumed dead, during World War II and from there pieces together the mystery of an American PT boat that vanished in the Pacific and a cargo of stolen Japanese gold.

Mather’s novel sold extremely well in the United States but took two years to obtain a British and Australian release whilst his next book, The Raid (Sydney, Bantam, 1986), received only moderate attention in Australia. Despite the lack of home-town recognition, Mather has a steadily growing following overseas and appears certain of greater fame.

Another major talent is Perth-based William Warnock. Like Mather, Warnock formerly worked in the advertising industry before turning to literature. His Danziger’s Cut (London, MacDonald, 1986) is set in the California movie colony of Malibu. Danziger is a former policeman turned best-selling author. His creation, a two-fisted detective in the Spillane mould called McKnight, grows more potent with each adventure while Danziger himself becomes softer with success. When Danziger’s ex-girlfriend, an Australian actress, starts mixing with a bad crowd, he seeks revenge by turning himself into McKnight.

Mather and Warnock have found their niche, if not local celebrity, with thrillers. Less appealing has been the writing of Leon de Grand, a former mining tycoon who set out to emulate Robert Ludlum with three novels, The Von Kessel Dossier (Sydney, Fontana, 1985), The Two-Ten Conspiracy (Sydney, Fontana, 1986) and The Whittington Pact (Sydney, Collins, 1988) but proved that a well-tried formula doesn’t necessarily ensure a best-seller.

The fashionable technique of making fiction from actual characters and situations, widely known via Nicholas Meyer’s partnering of Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud in The Seven Per Cent Solution (New York, Dutton, 1974; London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), was used by media personality Derryn Hinch and author Nigel Krauth. Hinch’s Death in Newport (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1987) is a murder mystery set during the 1974 America’s Cup challenge while Krauth’s Matilda, My Darling (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1983) won the Vogel Prize for his story of nineteenth century private detective Hammond Niall and the help he receives in solving a case from no less than Banjo Patterson.

Successful Australian crime writers exhibit markedly different styles, from the slick professionalism of Arthur Mather and the late 1980s re-emergence of Jon Cleary’s Scobie Malone thrillers to the stylistic integrity of Peter Corris. So plentiful has been the supply of material from new and established writers that they begin to assume the range and variety of a golden age.

Corris cornered the market on the private eye tradition early on, although today he is far from dominating it. Keith Dewhurst’s McSullivan’s Beach (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1985) is an amiable nod in this direction while Marele Day’s The Loves of Harry Lavender (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1988) with a female gumshoe, the redoubtable Claudia Valentine, amply demonstrates just how entertaining gender-switching can be in good hands.

Hossana Brown similarly has a female investigator rejoicing in the unlikely name of Frank le Roux. She is an, ‘Investigator Extraordinary. Toast of the governments and big corporations over five continents’. I Spy You Die (London, Gollancz, 1984) is set in England whilst Death Upon A Spear (London, Gollancz, 1986) deals with the prickly subject of Aboriginal race relations. Le Roux, despite a jokesy nature, is a fine creation and traced with an element of absurdity that brings to mind Michael Moorcock’s character Jerry Cornelius.

Hosanna Brown is reputed to be the pseudonym of a Canberra academic. It is interesting to note the attraction the crime genre holds for scholars as both Peter Corris and Bob Brissenden work or have worked as academics.

Nor are the traditional forms completely abandoned. Tom Howard, the pseudonym of Sydney author John Howard Reid, masquerades as author, narrator and central character, a device beloved of such writers as Norman Lee and, perhaps best known, Ellery Queen, all self-published, which have an old-time American police procedural flavour. Howard is a loner hero whose motives and methods have been honed by the little-seen bureaucracy of a big-city police force. In such novels as The Health Farm Murders (Sydney, Rastar, 1985), The Beachfront Murders (Sydney, Rastar, 1985), All Possible Avenues (Sydney, Rastar, 1986) and Howard’s Price (Sydney, Rastar, 1985), Howard has touched on most of the available influences known to the crime writing genre. It is an interesting approach and short circuits the potential deadness of situation and character that could easily befall such a series.

William Leonard Marshall also writes police procedurals. Born in Sydney and educated at the Australian National University, Marshall travelled the world and eventually settled in Ireland. He returned to Australian in 1983. His Yellowthread Street series, set in Hong Kong, are similar to Ed McBain’s (the pseudonym of Evan Hunter) 87th Precinct novels and include Yellowthread Street (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1975), Gelignite (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1976; Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1977), Skulduggery (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1975) and Head First (London, Seeker & Warburg 1986).

Another resurgent trend is toward the cosy English-influenced clue puzzle mysteries used in Australia by the likes of the Nevilles and Pat Flower. Publishing identity (and award-winning childrens’ author under the pseudonym of Emily Rodda) Jennifer Rowe began a series highlighting the detecting genius of busy-body Verity ‘Birdie’ Birdwood with Grim Pickings (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1987). This book is a gem; a tradition like the clue puzzles still have as much relevance in the 1980s as they did when Miss Marple first appeared.

However it is a form that requires considerable skill and talent. Joan Flanagan’s The Murder Game (Sydney, Hutchinson, 1988) ventures into the same territory, even going as far as adding some Gothic atmosphere for good measure, but the feeling remains that there are far too many potholes in this particular stretch of the road. Flanagan rides her plot a little too hard and has difficulty keeping track of the characters, but she displays an obvious talent and further novels should be well received.

Thrillers have returned to prominence in the 1980s. Morris West has produced some excellent examples, the best being Masterclass (London, Hutchinson, 1988). Yet many thrillers often begin with great ideas which fail in the execution. Colin Mason, formerly a Democrat senator for New South Wales and an author of some note, has produced a thriller, Copperhead Creek (Sydney, Sun Books, 1987). The plot mixes multi-national mining interests, the uranium debate and the kidnap of the Prime Minister’s daughter – potentially assured ingredients for a best-seller. Not so, it appears, for Copperhead Creek is a leaden weight of little interest. Although the political background is first-class, Mason has not exercised the wordcraft necessary to make the novel interesting.

A more practiced exercise came from Kit Denton, noted military historian and scholar of the Breaker Morant legend. Fiddler’s Bridge (Sydney, John Ferguson, 1986) concerns the ambitious robbery of an Australian Army payroll by a group of ex-service misfits. Laura Jarman, the daughter of a regular soldier, assembles a team of specialists, all with their own reasons for turning to crime, to carry out the raid in a small country town.

Denton reworks the caper novel for Fiddler’s Bridge. It is married only by his knee-jerk puritanism – after building considerable rapport with the characters, the reader is disappointed to have them nabbed by a police presence that appears virtually out of nowhere. Another author may well have allowed the team to get away with it; it would have been a preferable option.

Another staple component of the thriller is the conspiracy theory, a common device used by such giants of the form as Robert Ludlum, Frederic Forsyth and Jack Higgins. Leon Le Grand abused it but poet and academic Robert Brissenden, like Arthur Mather, has proved the form can be well exploited south of the equator. Brissenden’s Poor Boy (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1987) tells the story of Tom Caxton, a foreign correspondent chasing the story of his career in South-East Asia. Caxton, like many heroes of the thriller genre, is an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances.

A similar exponent of the form is Philip Cornford. The central character in his The Outcast (London, Michael Joseph, 1988) is also a journalist. Paul Mackinnon is the sort of hard-edged character commonly found in the world of thrillers. Set onto a story suited to his talents and reputation, he soon finds himself out of his depth, the expendable tool of the Australian security forces and the KGB. Cornford’s attempt to colour Australia ’s strategic position, particularly the matter of American defence bases in the outback, with international intrigue does not hold the self-conscious hues of many less-talented writers. The Outcast is one of the better thrillers to come from an Australian pen.

Yet another sub-genre exploited in recent times is best illustrated by John Carroll’s Catspaw (Apollo Bay, Pascoe Publishing, 1988). A police informer set up by an unscrupulous cop, Don Bartholomew is above all a survivor. The prison scenes early in the novel are well drawn and set the scene for his anti-hero’s later employment as an enforcer for a Sydney drug-runner. By implication, life is safer inside a cell. Bartholomew remains a stoolie long enough to report on crooked cops and drug deals then engineers his own escape with a girl and suitcase full of cash.

In comparison, Ray Mooney’s A Green Light (Melbourne, Penguin, 1988) is far too realistic and raw a story to dwell satisfactorily within the conventions of crime fiction. Mooney began his writing career while serving time in prison. After several plays, his first novel is a chilling portrait of a sociopath whose addiction to violence is stronger than any drug. Johnny Morgan, the central character, is said to be based on a real-life Australian crime figure. At over 800 pages, it is an extremely long book and Mooney’s downfall as a novelist comes from his success as a playwright. The plot is carried along by enormous slabs of dialogue but it nonetheless stalls. The characters, particularly Morgan, are bleak and dangerous, like guard dogs long abandoned. While dialogue-laden prose can be well utilised (like the novels of American author George V. Higgins), A Green Light diminishes a worthy premise.

It is unfair to expect that all the recent Australian crime titles should be masterpieces. Maybe it is enough that they were published at all, that local publishers noticed the resurgence of the genre and took the chance. As the 1980s draw to a close, opportunities for new writers are booming as never before. Some publishers seem intent on establishing local crime imprints to supplement their overseas lists, while a growing number of American and British houses are taking well-gambled chances on Australian authors. There is one important reason for this renewed growth; there is a market for crime writing by and about Australia.

The sad fact is that for too long Australian crime writing languished in obscurity. Such talents as Waif Wander, Max Afford, Pat Flower, Margot Neville, Sidney Courtier, A.E. Martin and Bant Singer have been out of print for decades and it remains for Australian publishers to discover, as their British and American counterparts have long known, that a lucrative market exists for nostalgia re-releases.

This anthology is an attempt at evaluating Australia ’s past in crime writing and the final choice is as wide-ranging as it is eclectic. Fergus Hume, Arthur Upfield and Carter Brown are musts for such a collection. Each are important historical figures; Waif Wander is equally important although her contribution is only now being realised. Hornung, despite being an Englishman (like Hume) and only a brief visitor, gave the world a major series character and it was in rural Victoria that Raffles embarked on a life of genteel crime.

In selecting the remaining authors, the emphasis has been on talent and entertainment. Randolph Bedford, with his outback Sherlock Holmes, more than fits the bill. So too does A.E. Martin with a truly Australian nice twist. Vince Kelly spent most of his life writing about real crime cases and celebrating the triumphs of the police over the criminal mind. His little known fictional effort is a neat blend of the hard-boiled American school and the British police procedural, coloured by some concerned sociology. Max Afford shows the ability of fine series characters to transcend the seeming gulf between literature and radio – the most popular entertainment forms during the period he gained his most remarkable success.

One regret is that such other important players as Flower, Neville and Courtier, Geraldine Halls, Paul McGuire and Percival Rodda didn’t utilise the short story as a vehicle for their skills. As taking extracts from novels is not a good way to gauge an author’s talents it is not possible to include samples of their writing herein.

This anthology celebrates the pioneering spirit of our literary forebears. Peter Corris, Robert G. Barrett, Tom Howard, Jennifer Rowe and the many others who are now so familiar to modern readers are not the sudden result of some mysterious form of artistic spontaneous combustion. Rather they are a continuation of a grand tradition and to enjoy their works to the fullest it is necessary to glimpse that which has preceded them.

For many fans this will be a journey of discovery, a chance to meet and greet those figures that have for too long been relegated to the very edge of the genre’s crowded universe.