Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing

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