Sand on the Gumshoe: a century of Australian crime writing

Those Dear Departed

Much of Australia ’s crime writing was produced by authors who called the country a second home. Fergus Hume, Pat Flower and Arthur Upfield, for example, were from England and it would be remiss to ignore the contributions of other foreign writers.

In general there is little to distinguish the way in which Australia has been portrayed by visiting, resident or native crime authors. On the whole the genre is too strictly confined by stylistic conventions to successfully evoke a distinctive physical and psychological landscape of Australia. For writers whose primary concern was crime and retribution it didn’t really matter whether the body was discovered in a stately home, a suburban loungeroom or the back of Bourke as long as there was a murderer to be brought to book. Certainly Upfield mastered the setting of mysteries in the bush, although this was more due to his own interests, than in any conscious intention to break the conventions.

Whilst homogenous in description, Australia was the setting for crime stories by foreigners from the begi

Hornung later created an Australian version of Raffles. In Stingaree (London, Chatto & Windus and New York, Scribner 1909) the character of the title was a gentleman bushranger who risked capture to further the career of a young and beautiful opera singer. Despite the novelty, the story was just another of Hornung’s romantic frivolities.

Some 50 years later an adept mystery, Murder in Melbourne (London, Arthur Barker, 1958), was written by Dulcie Gray. A British actress of some renown, Gray toured Australia in 1957 and used the Victorian capital as the setting for a puzzle mystery featuring Detective Inspector Welby of the Melbourne C.I.B. It was the second in a long line of such works although she never again mentioned Australia. She did, however, write a script of Murder in Melbourne in 1961 for British radio.

Of all overseas authors, the most prolific was Norman Lee. Another Briton, he wrote some 50 novels between 1945 and his death in 1962. His best known pseudonym (and in the ma

The Corrigan persona fitted Lee like a glove and he strove to identify the character as a flesh-and-blood person as evinced in the dedications of his novels. The Big Squeeze was dedicated to ‘Kay of Kia-Lama – In whose restful retreat overlooking Sydney Harbour I wrote the final chapters of this adventure in the winter of ‘54’’. In Sydney For Sin, the dedication reads ‘For C.D.J, of Blackman’s Bay – One of her names is Donjee (pronounced Don-Shay, from the Spanish) and she lives in a charming house at Blackman’s Bay, on the south coast of beautiful Tasmania. It was in her delightful abode that I wrote this adventure of skulduggery in Sydney and mayhem in Melbourne.’

Norman Lee’s visit to Australia proved a fruitful one. In addition to the Mark Corrigan adventures, Lee utilised Australian settings in works written under two other pseudonyms. As Raymond Armstrong, Lee wrote about the adventures of an arch villainess, the young and impossibly beautiful Laura Scudamore known as The Sinister Widow. Like the Corrigan books, the Sinister Widow series used exotic locations as a backdrop to the criminal pursuits of Scudamore and attempts by her nemesis, Chief Inspector Dick Mason of Scotland Yard, to bring her to justice. Also in common with Corrigan, Raymond Armstrong, a Fleet Street crime reporter, is the chief character as well as author. After exhausting the potential of such locations as London, Paris and Berlin, The Sinister Widow turned up in Australia in The Sinister Widow Down Under (London, John Long, 1958). Mason, of course, follows but the novel lapses into a Boys Own adventure with few saving graces.

A more satisfying Lee pseudonym was Robertson Hobart, whose local outings were Case of the Shaven Blonde (London, Robert Hale, 1959) and Dangerous Cargoes (London, Robert Hale, 1960), which featured another Lee series character by the name of Grant Vickary, and Blood on the Lake (London, Hale, 1961). The last title concerned J. Earle Dixon, an Adelaide insurance investigator, and his efforts to locate a missing geologist in the South Australian desert.

Norman Lee’s style never varied from the loosely constructed homage he paid to the American writers. While Lee was a lightweight novelist who now has little appeal, there was a crisp action and pace in his work that was refreshing for its time.

The best known of these transitory Australian writers is John I

John Creasey is probably the crime genre’s most prolific author. In a career spa

The Toff visited Australia in The Toff Down Under (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1953, New York, Walker, 1969) and as Break the Toff (London, Lancer, 1970). Likewise did Inspector West in Murder, London-Australia (London, Hodder & Stoughton, and New York, Scribner, 1965). Of all Creasey’s creations, those of West and Gideon were the most satisfying. They kept to the strict formula of the British police procedural, mixing an almost documentary-like examination of police methods with a humanising view of their private lives. The books featuring West and Gideon 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.