descriptions of the country.
The Australian reader of crime fiction was to be better served by Randolph Bedford. Bedford was a journalist who went on to become a member of the Queensland parliament and like Arthur Upfield years later, had a great love of the Australian bush. From his youth Bedford tramped the outback and wrote about his experiences to great effect in such magazines as The Bulletin. In Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1911) he presented a series of short stories set in the bush that had much in common with Sherlock Holmes.
The narrator of Billy Pagan is Henry Fleet, a Watson-like character who acts as devil’s advocate for the reader. Fleet becomes a companion to a drifter scraping a living from prospecting, one Billy Pagan: ‘… a young man, dressed like any score of other men – in a shirt of many pockets and open at the breast; dust-marked tweed trousers, tucked into old wrinkled, travel-worn, brown leather leggings, fastened with leather loops and only one buckle; boots heavy to the sole and light as the upper – so serving to show the extraordinary delicacy of the man’s feet; a soiled Terai hat very wide in the brim; the trousers supported by a leather belt that held watch, compass and aneroid pouches, and knife and pipe sheaths.’
Like a swaggie’s vision of Holmes, Pagan has an almost supernatural ability to detect wrongdoing. In one story Pagan makes a cursory examination of a deserted mine site and concludes that it was worked by two men, one of them being a sailor from a cold climate who has murdered his companion to keep secret their discovery of a gold reef. Pagan and Fleet track the murderer, a Dutch seaman, to the Western Australian mining town of Coolgardie where he is brought to justice.
The stories contained within Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer, are set in mining districts of Western Australian, Tasmania and northern Queensland, and each is filled with writing richly evocative of location and atmosphere. The relationship between Pagan and Fleet has much to compare with Holmes and Watson, and it is regrettable that Bedford did not come to realise the worth of continuing the Pagan adventures.
There seems no logical reason why authors such as Gould, Wright and Bedford became the pulp staples of the railway new-stands, while pedestrian talents such as Hennessey found favour with the more established publishers. One possible explanation is that Hennessey and others like him consciously exploited the form of melodramatic Victorian-inspired adventures which left little room for the development of Australian characters or locations except as exotic backdrops.
Whatever the reason a number of Australian authors began to give British publishers what they wanted. Over the years authors like Arthur Gask, Pat Flower, Margot Neville and Sidney Courtier filled the circulating libraries of Britain and Australia with their books.
Like American western writer Zane Grey, South Australian-born Arthur Gask, spent the early years of the twentieth century as a dentist. In between impacted molars, Gask nutted out a thriller which he eventually titled The Secret of the Sandhills (Adelaide, Rigby, 1921; London, Herbert Jenkins, 1930), subtitled A Mystery of Henley Beach to identify its Adelaine locale. The novel did not readily find an Australian publisher but when it finally appeared sold a thousand copies in a matter of weeks. British publisher Herbert Jenkins picked up Gask’s second novel, Cloud, the Smiter (London, 1926), to begin an association that lasted for more than 30 novels, ending with Crime Upon Crime (London, 1952) published the year after Gask’s death. Many of Gask’s stories feature South Australia although those starring his series character, Detective Gilbert Larose, remained firmly set in England.
Pat Flower came to Australia in 1928 as a teenager. The wife of artist Cedric, she turned to writing in the 1950s with the first of her long stream of novels, Wax Flowers for Gloria (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & Robertson, 1958). Flower’s earlier works do not anticipate the quality of her later writing. Her considerable literary talent was initially overwhelmed by a jokesy approach particularly in the half dozen or so early books that feature her sole series character, Inspector Swinton. The good Inspector was a policeman given to meat pies and suburban domesticity and was little different from the majority of English flavoured police heroes common in Australian crime fiction through much of this century.
Possibly Flower was lampooning this derivative fashion although any evidence of such intent is buried deep. Certainly her sense of humour verged on the heavy handed. Consider, for example, the device occasioned by her married name in the titles. Not only is there Wax Flowers for Gloria but Goodbye Sweet William (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & Robertson, 1960), One Rose Less (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & Robertson, 1961) and Hell for Heather (London, Hale, 1962). If this isn’t sufficient, Inspector Swinton is assisted by a young colleague, Detective-Sergeant Primrose.
Flower sketched the idle moneyed. Further reinforcing the English tradition, many of her plots unfold in country houses or fashionable city apartments. Whilst her characters, certainly those of Swinton and Primrose, are nothing new, Flower did introduce some remarkably ingenious, though hardly credible, plot devices. In Goodbye Sweet William, for example, the final twist has the guests at a house party apparently murdering their host whilst the victim in fact dies of entirely natural causes.
Flower did, however, tire of such facetiousness and early in her career abandoned Inspector Swinton in favour of psychological mysteries. Her new maturity was realised in such novels as Cobweb (London, Collins, 1972; New York, Stein & Day, 1978) and Odd Job (London, Collins, 1974; New York, Stein & Day, 1978). Crisscross (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein & Day, 1977) is a particularly masterful tale of madness, written from the perspective of a badgered husband. Her last novel, Shadow Show (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein & Day, 1978) was released just two years short of her death.
Margot Neville was the pen name of two sisters, Margot Goyder and Anne Neville Goyder Joske who collaborated on a string of thrillers beginning with Lena Hates Men (New York, Arcadia House, 1943; as Murder in Rockwater, London, Geoffrey Bles, 1944) and finishing with Head on a Sill (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1966). The Neville heroes, Detective-Inspector Grogan and Detective-Sergeant Manning, who appeared in all but two of the novels, followed the same well travelled path as Flower, although as a general rule, Neville is far ahead.
Murder and Gardenias (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1946) was one of the early mysteries that established the Neville reputation. The story opens with an examination of the residents of a fashionable Sydney apartment building. A body of a young man, stuffed into a chest, is discovered in one of the apartments. The residents and their relationships display varying degrees of complexity and it is up to Grogan and Manning to fathom the tangled relations and unmask the killer.
Murder and Gardenias displays Neville’s eloquence and ability to balance a large number of characters. A later Neville, Drop Dead (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1962) uses much the same setting. Claude Nevinson, a successful and philandering restaurateur, falls to his death from the balcony of his mistress’ apartment which is in the same building as those of Nevinson and his wife and the wife’s lover.
Whilst certainly superior to those of Pat Flower, the Margot Neville novels were startlingly similar in approach. The writers managed to take the traditions of the English police mystery and transplant them into an Australian setting. They succeeded only because the structure of the English mystery was maintained; there was certainly no attempt made to generate a genuine feel for the surroundings. When the Flower and Neville characters look out over Sydney Harbour, they could easily be viewing the Thames. And the sombrely attired wallopers from the Sydney C.I.B. could pass for representatives of Scotland Yard. Flower and Neville paid homage to a peculiar British form which had no room for bush pubs or Aborigines. Yet given their immense commercial success it is not surprising that they saw little need to introduce much local colour.
Sidney Courtier was more than willing to use recognisably Australian settings and characters. Although a teacher by occupation, Courtier could well have devoted his entire career to writing. Beginning in the late 1930s, he survived in the netherworld known only to the freelancer until the publication of his first novel, The Glass Spear (Sydney, Invincible Press and New York, Wyn, 1950; London, Dakers, 1952). It introduced the first of Courtier’s two series characters – Ambrose Mahon, a superintendent with the Sydney C.I.B. The Glass Spear is an excellent introduction to this consistently entertaining writer. Set on an isolated outback station just after World War II, the country locale was a device that Courtier was to
