Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing

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