Duck Season Death Read online

  DUCK SEASON DEATH

  ALSO BY JUNE WRIGHT

  Murder in the Telephone Exchange

  So Bad a Death

  The Devil’s Caress

  Reservation for Murder

  Faculty of Murder

  Make-Up for Murder

  © 2014 the Estate of Dorothy June Wright

  Introduction © 2014 Derham Groves

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  A Dark Passage book

  Published by Verse Chorus Press

  PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293

  [email protected]

  Cover design by Mike Reddy

  Interior design and layout by Steve Connell/Transgraphic

  Art on next page by Emilie Jane Wright

  Dark Passage logo by Mike Reddy

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

  ISBN 978-1-891241-98-7 (ebook)

  INTRODUCTION

  The crime novels of Australian author June Wright (1919–2012) have been unfairly forgotten, and in my view thoroughly merit a fresh reassessment. The mother of six children had six books published by Hutchinson in London between 1948 and 1966. “June demonstrates herself to be both mentally and physically fertile,” observed the outspoken journalist Beth Thwaites in The Truth newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria. Interesting locations, spirited female characters and believable social settings are characteristic of all of June’s murder mysteries.

  After June’s first child, Patrick, was born in 1942, “to combat the lack of mental exercise, I haunted the local lending library for reading matter,” June recalled in 1997. “But, owing to the war, there was not a large supply . . . I read all of the novels by Frances Parkinson Keyes and a new authoress called Monica Dickens. Dynastic epics covering generations of English family life soon dried up. Agatha Christie was a favourite; Mignon Eberhart, a skilled performer of the ‘Had I but known’ school, more so. That’s it, I thought after a period of re-reads. I’ll write my own!”

  Being an avid reader of crime fiction, June knew precisely how to proceed. “You must drop your clues, like stitches, on the way out, and pick them up neatly in a pattern when you’re coming in,” she told the Australian magazine Woman’s Day in 1948. “The clues give the reader a chance and you mustn’t fool him with any misleading trickery. You must have a plausible plot and the murderer must get an honourable mention early in the book, although you never let the reader into his mental processes. There must be no coincidences or unaccountable solutions.”

  June had to juggle writing with looking after her husband, Stewart, and their six children: Patrick, Rosemary, Nicholas, Anthony, Brenda and Stephen. Six nights a week (her one night “off” was spent ironing clothes!), after the children had gone to bed, she escaped to her study to write for two or three hours, come what may, when “the dozens of ideas she has while peeling potatoes and washing nappies spill from her brain into print,” wrote Lisa Allan of The Argus newspaper in Melbourne. “And therein are the two essential ingredients for writing [June] says—patience and perseverance. ‘It’s easy to dash off 200 inspired words, but the other 80,000 to finish the book aren’t always so quick in coming.’” Writing about 1,000 words in longhand per night, the first draft of a book usually took June three or four months to complete, “unless something cataclysmic happens to the family in the meantime,” she told the author of “Housewife’s Recipe for Murder” (1958).

  June’s first crime novel, Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948), was set in the Central Telephone Exchange in Melbourne, where she had worked as a telephonist during World War II. In this book Sarah Compton, a supervisor, is bashed to death with a “buttinsky,” a gadget used by telephone mechanics to interrupt telephone conversations. Maggie Byrnes, a gutsy young telephonist at the exchange (like June was), narrates the fast-moving whodunit, which outsold Agatha Christie’s novels in Australia in 1948. (Verse Chorus Press reissued Murder in the Telephone Exchange in 2014.)

  Most book reviewers were full of praise for June’s maiden effort. However, she was completely floored by the following slap on the knuckles from A.R. McElwain, the influential crime fiction reviewer for two widely read daily newspapers, The Advertiser in Adelaide, South Australia, and The Herald in Melbourne, whom June later described as “a devotee of the detective story and a zealous guardian of its mores.” “Above all, Miss [sic] Wright must never again aggravate the honest student’s blood-pressure by resorting to a low, inexcusable trick to lead him off on the wrong track—right there on page one at that,” wrote McElwain in his review of Murder in the Telephone Exchange. This led to a friendly exchange of letters between the author and the reviewer. McElwain encouraged June to read The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) edited by Howard Haycraft. “It is the best anthology of practically everything good that has been written about detection stories and contains criticism and hints by all of the dons of the craft,” he said. June henceforth regarded McElwain as her literary guide.

  JUNE WRIGHT IN 1952

  So Bad a Death (1949), June’s second murder mystery, also features Maggie Byrnes, who is now married to John Matheson, a police inspector whom she met during the investigation of Sarah Compton’s murder. In this book the newlyweds rent “Dower House” in Middleburn, a fictitious Melbourne suburb, which was based on Ashburton, the real Melbourne suburb where June lived at the time. Despite Middleburn’s outward gentility, it proves to be a hotbed of crime. So Bad a Death was serialised on ABC radio and also in Woman’s Day.

  June’s third book, The Devil’s Caress (1952), is more of a psychological thriller than a whodunit. It features Marsh Mowbray, an attractive young GP, who is unwittingly pitted against her boss, Katherine Waring, a Senior Honorary Physician at the hospital where she works, and Katherine’s husband Kingsley, a leading Melbourne surgeon, while staying at the Warings’ beach house at Matthews, a fictitious hamlet on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. “Mrs. Wright’s reportage is as ever brisk and competent,” commended A.R. McElwain in his review of The Devil’s Caress. “But I eagerly await the day when she concentrates more upon genuine, plausible detection and less upon melodramatic situations.”

  For her fourth crime novel, Reservation for Murder (1958), June created the unassuming but strong-willed Catholic nun-detective Mother Mary St. Paul of the Cross – Mother Paul for short. She was based on Mother Mary Dorothea Devine (1900–1990), a Sister of Charity who was the head of the maternity ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne when June gave birth to twins there in 1946. In Reservation for Murder Mother Paul is in charge of Kilcomoden, a hostel for office girls and secretaries near Melbourne, which is also the scene of a murder and an apparent suicide. John Long, an imprint of Hutchinson, published this book. Writing didn’t make June rich; the royalties from Reservation for Murder paid for new sliding doors in the Wrights’ living room.

  June’s fifth and sixth crime novels, Faculty of Murder (1961) and Make-Up for Murder (1966), also feature the inimitable Mother Paul. In Faculty of Murder the nun-detective runs Brigit Moore Hall, a fictitious Catholic women’s college at the University of Melbourne (the tower of Ormond College was on the book’s dust jacket). Mother Paul investigates the disappearance of a college resident and the death of a professor’s wife. In Make-Up for Murder the nun-detective is in charge of Maryhill Girls’ School in Melbourne. Mother Paul investigates the murder of a former school student and the disappearance of a famous TV singer. June stopped writing crime fiction a
ltogether after that.

  While having six crime novels published was a great achievement, June hit a couple of literary brick walls along the way. In 1952 Hutchinson rejected her crime novel The Law Courts Mystery, which was set in and around Melbourne’s law courts, because “the readers reported that although your book was likeable, with humour and movement, it was spoilt by the plot, which was unconvincing and rather muddled. Also, the relationship between the characters, even when they have a lot to do with each other, is always too remote and bloodless,” June’s publisher told her. The Law Courts Mystery was never published and the manuscript has now been lost.

  On the basis of three critical readers’ reports Hutchinson also rejected the crime novel that June wrote following Reservation for Murder, which was called Duck Season Death. The first reader said: “There are very good features here, but the author . . . has in effect produced a rather stock-box novel of the whodunit house party variety.” In the second reader’s opinion, “if the author had strewn less red herrings around, her mystery would have been less confused and in consequence improved.” And the third reader said: “The mechanics of this story follow the old lines of the ‘country house’ murder, where everyone is suspect and the final denouement highlights the most insignificant character.” However, June’s book is much better and far more interesting than the readers’ criticisms suggest.

  COVER PAGE OF THE ORIGINAL TYPESCRIPT

  In Duck Season Death Athol Sefton, the publisher of an Australian literary magazine called Culture and Critic, is fatally shot while duck hunting in northern Victoria with his nephew Charles Carmichael, the crime fiction reviewer for Culture and Critic, who then sets out to solve his uncle’s murder by using his knowledge of detective stories. June suggested The Textbook Detective Story as an alternative title for Duck Season Death, and I suspect that her literary guide, the crime fiction reviewer A.R. McElwain, was the inspiration for the character of Carmichael. Furthermore, given Carmichael’s particular occupation, I’m sure that the irony of getting three negative, book-deal-shattering reviews of Duck Season Death was not lost on June—as disappointed as she must have been to receive them.

  The good news is that everyone can now read Duck Season Death—albeit more than fifty years after June wrote it. What a marvellous time capsule this book is of everyday life in Australia in the late 1950s, as well as challenging the detective powers of the reader. Let’s hope that in the best traditions of Sherlock Holmes pastiches June’s family will one day discover The Law Courts Mystery hidden in a trunk somewhere in an attic.

  DERHAM GROVES

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: Shooters and Suspects

  PART TWO: Murder and Motives

  PART THREE: The Impossible Remainder

  PART ONE

  Shooters and Suspects

  I

  The summer had been an abnormally wet one. From the Fisheries and Game Department of the State Government of Victoria came a bulletin to the effect that duck-shooters might look forward to an excellent season’s sport. Dry conditions in the north had sent flocks of chestnut and grey teal, freckled, wood, hardhead and black duck winging their way south to the lush swamps and reedy lakes scattered below the Murray river.

  One of the districts suggested by Game Research officers for the three months of duck-shooting was a radius of fifteen miles centred approximately by the small town of Dunbavin.

  About three miles to the northeast of Dunbavin, the country rose out of its swampy bed in a knoll known as Campbell’s Hill. Nearly a hundred years previously, a squatter from the wild cattle district further inland had built on the rise a pseudo–hunting box. He used to retire there to escape the importunities of Her Majesty’s Colonial Surveyors, and to ease his nostalgia for the grouse moors of his homeland by shooting the plentiful wildfowl. Constructed of sturdy stone, the house had outlasted each subsequent owner who had put it to as many varied and unprofitable uses as there were shoddy additions to its original walls. The present owner, Ellis Bryce, had made it into a hotel catering for duck-shooters.

  Ellis was a man of unending wild-cat schemes which he took for inspirations of genius. Indolent by nature, his enthusiasm seldom went beyond the initial idea. Having bought out the previous owner of Campbell’s Hill, who had been trying to make a go of rice growing, he satiated his genius by talking the local licensing court into a permit to sell liquor and putting up a hanging sign whose gothic lettering read The Duck and Dog Inn. Then he sat back grandly and allowed his sister, Grace, to do all the mundane toil connected with the running of a country pub.

  Miss Bryce was devoted to her widowed younger brother, and had followed him into all his projects, lending the resources of both her energy and her meagre income. She was a faded but wiry little woman, pared down to skin and bone by years of unnecessary bustling and fretting.

  One humid, rainy day towards the end of February, Miss Bryce sat at Ellis’s littered desk in the gunroom checking through the reservations for the opening of the season. Her brother lounged in an armchair in the hall outside, occasionally calling out items which caught his fancy in the local newspaper. He enjoyed pointing up the bucolic journalese by reading in a declamatory manner.

  “‘A delightful afternoon was had by all at the lovely home of Dr and Mrs Spenser, who opened their beautiful grounds for a Garden Fete in aid of our newly formed and enthusiastic Arts and Crafts Group. Wearing a charming gown of burnt sienna marocain figured with lime green leaves, Mrs Spenser—’”

  “Ellis, will you be quiet! How do you expect me to work out the allocation of rooms when you’re—We’ll have the guests arriving and no notion how to place them and all you can do—You don’t seem to realise the amount of work—” Miss Bryce always talked in unfinished sentences, her darting mind in advance of her tongue.

  “They’ll shuffle down all right,” he returned easily. “What is a cloche curvette? Mrs Spenser was wearing a smart brown one.”

  “Probably her old basin felt, done up,” Miss Bryce replied absently. “Ellis, who is this man, Harris P. Jeffrey?”

  “‘Dr Spenser dispensed hospitality with his customary genial bonhomie.’ If his hospitality was anything like the whisky he gave me once, I’d say he dispensed right out of the bottles from his surgery . . . An American, by the sound of his name and the look of the initial. They always seem to have their Christian and surnames the wrong way round.”

  “An American!” repeated Miss Bryce uncertainly. “Oh dear, and we’ve only got the one bathroom.”

  “So what!” Ellis tried out the phrase distastefully, as though ready to make every concession to the visitor’s well-being.

  “Aren’t they rather funny about wanting private bathrooms? I don’t know how many times I’ve told you to install another one, or at least a shower recess. That alcove at the end of the upper passage, and there’s the water tank right outside—Ellis, you must bestir yourself. Now see what has happened—an American coming!”

  Her reproaches blunted themselves on The Dunbavin Post. “‘A distressing disturbance to the peace occurred outside Duff’s Hotel following the cricket match between Dunbavin Eleven and the visiting team from Jumping Creek on Saturday evening last. Sergeant Motherwell—’”

  “I’ll put Mr Jeffrey in the room next to the bathroom,” decided Miss Bryce, as a solution to the problem. “I see we have the Dougalls coming again. Do you think they would mind if I put them in a smaller room this year? The Happy Holiday Agency made a booking for a two-bedroom and it pays to keep their clients satisfied. A deposit paid too—father and son. Miss Dougall could have her usual room of course. What do you think, Ellis?”

  “‘In my twenty years as duty officer in this town, declared Sergeant Motherwell, commenting on the situation which could have got out of hand but for his timely appearance on the scene of the commotion—’”

  “Ellis!” cried Miss Bryce.

  “‘—never heard such violent uncontrolled language.’ Poor old Motherwell! What does i
t matter where you put Pukka and Memsahib? They always complain about something, anyway. Which reminds me—there was a telegram from our old friend, Sefton. You’ll find it on the desk somewhere. He’s bringing his nephew along with him this year.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before? Now you’ve upset—you really are the most inconsiderate—” With a long suffering sigh which had no effect whatsoever, Miss Bryce fumbled amongst the bills, receipts and circulars and found the telegram. ‘Reserve accommodation for self and nephew, Charles Carmichael, from evening 28th February—Athol Sefton.’ As Ellis was now talking to the Duck and Dog’s solitary guest, she did not call out for his advice, but marked in two adjoining rooms on the floor plan she had drawn up. She would tell Ellis later what she thought of Mr Sefton’s impending sojourn.

  The guest—a pale, unobtrusive man called Wilson—had arrived a week earlier. He was evidently not a duck-shooter for he had brought no guns with him; neither had he made any enquiries about local equipment, while he was patently nervous of the two or three water dogs Ellis kept for the use of the guests. Although afflicted with a stammer which made conversation not only embarrassing but tedious, he was no trouble and went off for long walks wearing khaki shorts, which revealed his pale bony legs and a pair of field glasses slung around his plucked chicken neck. Miss Bryce presumed that he was some sort of ornithologist, who did not like to vouchsafe the information because of the terrific effort needed to form the word.

  Miss Bryce’s distraction became further diverted as her roving eye lighted on an open letter lying on the desk. It was written in bold capitals with a few dashes and twirls to make up the rest of the words. The worry lines on her face waxed as she deciphered it. Presently she turned her head sideways to call out to Ellis about it and almost rubbed noses with Wilson, who had come into the gunroom unheard.