continually utilise in later novels.
Mahon is never directly assigned to the cases he eventually solves. He just happens to be in the right place at the right time. In The Glass Spear he is holidaying with friends. In Come Back to Murder (London, Hammond, Hammond & Company, 1956) he revisits a country town where he was once stationed as a sergeant, whilst in A Shroud for Unlac (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1958) he is attending a woolshow. In Mimic a Murderer (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1964) Mahon is fortuitously at the scene for no better reason than to accelerate the development of the plot.
Courtier’s work is amongst the most interesting of all Australian writers in that he concerned himself with recognisable and unique, if occasionally bizarre, Australian locales. Death in Dream Time (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1959), for example, featuring Detective Inspector C.J. ‘Digger’ Haig of the Brisbane C.I.B., is set in an Aboriginal theme park in far north Queensland. ‘Alchera, the Dream Time Land ’, has been established by the eccentric Austin Flax in a rainforest jungle. Hordes of tourists assemble daily to tour the nine life-like dioramas explaining the beliefs of the Arunda Aborigines. Haig is on the scene to investigate a traffic accident that turns out to be a murder and draws his suspects from a group of the park’s creditors.
Had Australian crime writing developed any apparent local flavour through these decades? Did it say anything about our nation or our collective identity? To both questions – the answer is probably not. With the exception of Arthur Upheld and Sidney Courtier, there was little difference between English and Australian crime writing. It was as if the majority of local novelists had decided that the best way to assure lasting fame, and sales, was to parrot their British and, to a much lesser extent, American counterparts.
It could also have been the result of conservative publishers mindful of the enormous market for English country house mysteries, particularly after World War II, and determined to foster authors to meet the demand. But while this area of crime writing was popular, it did not necessarily follow that such tradition could easily be transferred to Australia. To be fair, it could be argued that crime fiction has generally veered toward entertainment rather than social comment. The formulas are fairly well drawn in each of the sub-genres, whether it be Gothic, detective or police procedural, and readers rail at any interruption to the action.
Whatever the reason, a large number of Australian authors were producing English-flavoured mysteries with little or no relation to our society. The Active police detectives called to investigate genteel crimes were invariably similar, as if each author used identical style sheets. The Sydney C.I.B. was overrun with make-believe detectives and the trend continued into the 1970s with the work of Charles Whitman. In such works as Doctor- Death (London, Cassell & Company, 1969), Death Out of Focus (London, Cassell & Company, 1970) and Death Suspended (London, Cassell & Company, 1971) Whitman worked his series characters, Detective-Sergeant Douglas Gray and Detective-Inspector Bob Lindon of (you guessed it) the Sydney C.I.B. through the same tired routines that had hardly changed in decades.
An exception to the tired police formula was Elizabeth Salter who wrote some intelligent puzzle-mysteries concerning Detective-Inspector Mike Hornsley. Salter was a major literary talent, a biographer of some note (including studies of Daisy Bates and Robert Helpmann) and, obviously, a fan of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. From 1957 until 1964, she lived in London, where she was private secretary to Dame Edith Sitwell (writing The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London, Houghton Mifflin, 1967) and Edith Sitwell (London, Oresko Books, 1979). Most of her series of detective novels were written during this time.
Salter’s character, Hornsley, is a Sydney C.I.B. detective although he wandered far in the course of his investigations. In Once Upon a Tombstone (London, Hutchinson, 1965), the majority of the action takes place in Austria whilst in Death in a Mist (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957) he unravels a murder in New Zealand. For the most part, however, the scenery she described with a loving attention to detail was that of Sydney. Other Salter mysteries, including There was a Witness (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1960), feature Hornsley and he emerges as one of the finest policemen to grace Australian crime fiction. Long overdue recent reprints of her books will only confirm this opinion. Once Upon a Tombstone and Death in a Mist were re-released by Angus & Robertson in the late 1970s and again in 1988.
The work of Gask, Flower, Neville and a dozen less enduring authors were prime examples of the cultural cringe. The works of Upfield, Courtier and Salter are thus all the more satisfying because they dared to write books with a unique indigenous character set in Australia for Australians.
Another of these marvellous mavericks was A.E. (Archibald Edward) Martin. A journalist who worked with C.J. Dennis on the satirical magazine, The Gadfly, Martin won The Australian Women’s Weekly 1942 novel contest with Common People (Sydney, Consolidated Press, 1944). Martin turned to mysteries in 1944 with Sinners Never Die (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1944; Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1945). The central character, Henry Xavier Ford, is an old man in a nursing home for whom a mystery of 50 years past gradually unfolds in a series of flashbacks.
Martin’s quirky characters make him one of the best of the more recent new neglected writers. Another excellent Martin novel, The Chinese Bed Mystery (London, Max Reinhardt, 1955), is set in a circus. His other books include Death in the Limelight (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1946) and The Curious Crime (New York, Doubleday, 1952; London, Muller, 1953). Martin is one of the few Australians to be published in The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (another was Arthur Upfield, who produced his only Bony short story especially for it) winning praise for his stories ‘The Flying Corpse’ and ‘The Power of the Leaf.’ The latter is a worthy example of Martin’s unusual talents, dealing with the efforts of Ooloo, an Aborigine of the Narranyeri tribe, to solve the strange death of a young man.
For every delight there are, of course, dozens of authors who aspired to brilliance but never quite made it. This is not to slight their efforts, but their writing, often prolific, disappeared from view and never surfaced to face any contemporary critical assessment.
One author to suffer such a fate was Eric North, an imitator of the American hard-boiled style and the pseudonym of journalist Bernard Cronin. His Chip on my Shoulder (London, Dennis Dobson, 1956), features a reporter with the Melbourne Dispatch called Merton Ryde. While investigating the death of a close friend Ryde uncovers a drug ring. The novel is packed with Cadillacs, night club chanteuses and similar trans-Pacific touches that must have appeared terribly sophisticated in the 1950s but are now merely uninspiringly derivative. Ryde comes up against two Melbourne detectives known as the Homicide Twins. ‘They were the murder boys of the C.I.B. They lived on raw meat.’ – Leo Darbin was ‘200 pounds of abattoir left-overs’ and his partner, Jim Poddy was ‘as good looking as a wart touched with sulphuric acid’. The attempt to emulate a Black Mask style did not succeed in that novel or the next, Nobody Stops Me (London, Dennis Dobson, 1960) where the hero, Saxon Brent, is as much a caricature in the Australian landscape as Merton Ryde.
Nor were these North’s worst efforts. Consider as an example his earlier Who Killed Marie Westhaven? (Sydney, Midget Masterpiece Publishing Company, 1940) a collection of six very short stories featuring a Chinese criminologist, Dr Lao Sars. Set in Sydney, Sars is a detective savant assisted by Sergeant Smythe of the Metropolitan Police and Brian Tembolt, a reporter with The Evening Comet. The collection, with a cheeky opening notation that the stories were edited by Bernard Cronin, pits Sars against seemingly impossible crimes. With a measure of fantastic scientific skill, Sars always manages to bring the perpetrator to justice to the amazed delight of Smythe and Tembolt.
Just as another Australian author, J.M. Walsh, was fashioned by over-eager publishers into a local version of Edgar Wallace, several years later another local author was being hailed as a major new talent. Charles Shaw joined the staff of The Bulletin in 1939, writing under a variety of pen-names including ‘Old-timer’, ‘Ben Cubbin’ and ‘Cowpuncher’. Another of Shaw’s Bulletin pseudonyms, ‘B.S.’, came from the initials of his much-loved 1936 Bantam Singer car. In the early 1950s he again used his car for inspiration for the name Bant Singer as author of a number of adventures featuring an opportunist called
