Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Introduction

My mother has a strict regard for truth. She loves facts, history, biography. But my father taught me fiction because he told wonderful stories. Dad was a wharfie and a knockabout bloke, who ran away from his nice respectable middle-class home when he was fifteen to be a shearer; who had been everywhere and done everything; who invented a special tool to replace dolls’ arms; who felt that if a story needed embellishment to make it a good story, then he was the man to embellish it. I listened to his stories with huge enthusiasm, but I never really believed him. You wouldn’t bet your life on my dad’s veracity.

So no one was more surprised than me to find that the Tamam Shud mystery was all true.

In 1948 my father went to Adelaide. He had just got out of the army and had been stringing wires at Woomera Rocket Range as a signaller. He was slim and tanned with a mop of red curls and beautiful brown eyes. A friend of his, a boxer called Ray Dunn (also known as Killer), had had a disagreement with John Wren, the crime lord of the time, and felt that trying his luck in another city for a while might be wise, so he and my dad palled up. They stayed in Adelaide for almost a year.

In December 1948, my dad told me, the body of a man was found at the bottom of the steps on Somerton Beach. He was clean, manicured, well-nourished and well-dressed and had no visible wounds. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing all the labels from his clothes, which attracted immediate attention from the constabulary. And in the fob pocket of his pleated trousers, overlooked at first, was a piece of paper with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ on it. ‘Tamam Shud’ is the last phrase of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the works of a Persian poet translated by Edward FitzGerald, which used to be a popular Christmas gift for relatives one did not know well. My father said that the rest of the book was found in a car belonging to a doctor, parked at the top of the steps down to Somerton Beach. The phrase ‘Tamam Shud’ had been torn out of it and on the back of the page there was an unbreakable code. The autopsy determined that the man had been poisoned but the poison could not be identified. He was buried in West Terrace cemetery and the police kept a body cast, but no one ever claimed him.

All true. I should have twigged, because, unusually, my dad’s story had no ending. No satisfactory solution. Years later, when I was casting about for a mystery to solve for a short story collection called Case Reopened, I remembered Dad’s Tamam Shud story and looked it up. And I found that not only had my dad been accurate, which was not like him at all, but that the case was even more peculiar than he had known.

I had my own Adelaide connection as well. I used to go there every summer in the seventies for the fruit picking. I stayed in East Terrace with a friend of mine and enjoyed the city, especially as a relief from all those grapes. But I have always been uneasily aware that under its hypercivilised veneer, Adelaide is an eerie place, where they rather go in for strange killings – Truro, Snowtown, The Family. Murder is universal but Adelaide murder always has a twist. I remember thinking, as I lazed around Central Market, drinking Italian coffee and eating jam doughnuts from the pie cart, that I would love to investigate the history of the city one day and see if I could work out what made it such a fey place.

They are all gone into the world of light. My Adelaide of the seventies is gone, along with my youth and strength. The Adelaide of 1948 is gone, both the authorised version and the one related to me by my dad. The man found on Somerton Beach is gone, cocooned in his mystery. My father has gone, three years dead. In this book I will try to understand all of them and provide some explanations and then I will have to close the book and let them all go.

I cannot tell you how that feels.