Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing

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