Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing

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 Surete, 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