Delaney.
The first, You’re Wrong, Delaney (London, Collins, 1953) concerns Delaney, a war veteran, who works for a sly grog racketeer at the opening of the book. When his boss is murdered, Delaney, considering himself to be the number one suspect, quickly leaves the scene. He is arrested in the small country town of Black Springs where he remains, the local police conveniently not returning him to Sydney. With limited resources, Delaney uses his talent as a pool shark to earn some money only to find himself suspected of another murder.
Shaw’s style had an attractive urgency that was blatently American. Delaney himself is sketched as a man, who while not quite a criminal, fashions a living on the very edge of the law. You’re Wrong, Delaney was very well received in Britain and it wasn’t long before Shaw was being groomed as a successor to Peter Cheyney who had died in 1951. Cheyney, the British sex-and-violence precursor to James Hadley Chase (another Briton) and Mickey Spillane, was a popular and prolific novelist and creator of the Lemmy Caution character. Shaw’s only real similarity to the sordid trinity of Cheyney, Chase and Spillane was his ability to produce effective American-flavoured thrillers; luckily he ignored his publisher’s entreaties to spice up the Delaney stories.
You’re Wrong, Delaney was reviewed by ‘N.K.’ in The Bulletin who qualified his praise for the book by commenting, ‘It is an excellent thing that Australian fiction- writers should sell their work on world markets, but it seems unfortunate if, as in this book, they must lose their own Australian speech in order to do it. One would like to see this author turn out thrillers of equal excellence as regards plot and action, but where Australian characters speak in their own manner. After all, our criminal slang is said to be as rich as any in the world: why deprive the rest of the world of its nuances?’
Shaw wrote a number of novels using the same character, principally Don’t Slip, Delaney (London, Collins, 1954) and Have Patience, Delaney (London, Collins, 1954), but the fevered production and the implied strain of satisfying Cheney’s market took its toll. After Your Move, Delaney (London, Collins, 1958), no further adventures appeared. A shame, considering the originality of the character and the easy style which made his novel Heavens Knows, Mr Allison (London, Frederic Muller, 1952; New York, Crown Publishers, 1952), filmed by John Huston in 1957 with Robert Mitchum in the lead role, a best-seller in Britain, Australia and the United States.
Shaw’s success rivalled that of Max Murray, an extremely popular novelist of the 1940s and 1950s. Murray ’s wife, Maysie, wrote a string of popular romances under the pen-names Maysie Greig and Jennifer Ames, and the two toured the world in search of exotic locations for their works. Max Murray published 12 mysteries in a ten year period from 1947. Each had the word corpse in their titles and were set throughout the world. The first in the series, The Voice of the Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1947; London, Michael Joseph, 1948) was set in a small English village, the type of location favoured by Agatha Christie. The Sunshine Corpse (London, Michael Joseph, 1954) was set in Florida, The Doctor and the Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1952; London, Michael Joseph, 1953) in Singapore, and The King and the Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1948; London, Michael Joseph, 1949) on the French Riviera. One, The Right Honourable Corpse (New York, Farrer Straus, 1951; London, Michael Joseph, 1952) had an Australian background. It concerned the murder of Rupert Flower, politician and Minister for Internal Resources, during a reception held in his Canberra home. Conventional detectives do not figure largely in Murray ’s stories and in The Right Honourable Corpse the central figure is Martin Gilbert, an Australian spy who masquerades as a pianist.
A fair number of women were plying their trade in the postwar period and a few established major reputations. One in particular was Melbourne-born June Wright. During World War II she worked in the Postmaster General’s department and utilised this setting to marvellous effect in her first crime novel, Murder in the Telephone Exchange (London, Hutchinson, 1948). So Bad a Death (Sydney, Hutchinson, 1949) followed and she continued to publish for the next 20 years, including such books as Faculty of Murder (London, John Long, 1961) and Make-Up for Murder (London, John Long, 1966).
What makes Wright particularly interesting is that her leading characters were invariably women. Maggie Matheson in So Bad a Death, for example, is the wife of a Melbourne policeman. In Faculty of Murder, set at Melbourne University, a young student, Judith Mornane, hunts her sister’s murderer. Wright exhibited a tendency to cram her stories full of needless detail and together with a leaning towards the Gothic, there is the feeling that she never achieved her full potential.
Wright obtained considerable publicity early in her career although most of this centred around her dual role of housewife and novelist. To popular magazines like The Bulletin during the 1950s, it came as some surprise to find a woman could raise four children and still find the time to write.
Not all of Australia ’s crime writing was focused on Sydney and Melbourne.
Estelle Thompson used a southern Queensland rural setting to great effect in several novels. One of the best is A Twig is Bent (London, Abelard-Schuman, 1961) in which a young girl of 12 and her five-year-old brother witness a murder committed by the children’s uncle. The story builds quite a fine level of suspense and the inevitable police presence remains on the perimeter of the story until the end.
The Lawyer and the Carpenter (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1963) and Find a Crooked Sixpence (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1970) are also set in southern Queensland and Thompson is at her best when she is narrating the story from a woman’s point of view, as she does in the latter. Thompson’s strength lay in her ability to maintain the tension in situations that could, in the hands of a less adept story-teller, become hackneyed.
Other writers looked to the west coast for inspiration. Elizabeth Backhouse wrote six mysteries, most of which featured Western Australian police detectives, Detective-Inspector Prentis and Detective Sergeant Landles. Death of a Clown (London, Robert Hale, 1962) is set in a circus troupe visiting Carnarvon while Death Climbs a Hill (London, Robert Hale, 1963) occurs in the Western Australian bush. The Mists Came Down (London, Robert Hale, 1959) takes place on Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth.
This is the one notable Backhouse novel which does not involve Inspector Prentis. The hero, Steve Gillman, is an American private eye who, together with a very stylised portrait of a misty island retreat, creates an interesting mix of old and new world approaches. There is nothing hard-boiled about The Mist Came Down, and neither is Gillman a sap-wielding Sam Spade. Rather, he is a thoughtful, intelligent hero in the English tradition, who solves a murder in a closed community with a measured calm that came to typify later Backhouse efforts.
Nancy Graham used much the same approach as Backhouse, although her style was much closer to the Gothic leanings of June Wright. The Purple Jacaranda (London, Cassell & Company, 1958) is a credibility-stretching tale of a young woman who travels from Sydney at the insistence of a mysterious policeman to investigate her best friend’s husband. Graham’s penchant for the Gothic was such that she was inclined to have newly discovered love-interests ready to save her heroines at the last possible moment. She was also partial to cliff-hanger endings and ‘surprise’ twists that are obvious to any adept reader by the middle of the story. Thus in The Purple Jacaranda, the heroine’s best friend turns out to be the head of a spy-ring threatening national security. The denouement is no more fantastic than Graham’s writing. The Black Swan (London, Cassell & Company, 1958) is also set in Western Australia with a similar heroine and a Gothic-like plot line that comes close to setting the crime genre back 50 years.
Another mystery with Gothic overtones is Helen Maces’ House of Hate (London, Hammond, Hammond & Company, 1958). Noel Gray, a doctor’s wife in rural Tasmania, befriends Felicity Howard, a lovely young girl who in the true Gothic traditions has ‘spun gold hair, the flawless complexion, the blue eyes so dark that in the night they looked almost black, and vivid red lips parting to show the gleam of pearls’. Felicity’s husband, Miles, is the master of Staines, one of the oldest mansions in the district, and, once again true to the Gothic conventions, is a nutter.
Mace is a cut above Graham as a story-teller and the menace of psychological torment that pervades House of Hate makes it quite a thrilling read. In this case, the Gothic makes a convincing
