Murder in the Telephone Exchange Read online

  MURDER IN THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  So Bad a Death

  The Devil’s Caress

  Reservation for Murder

  Faculty of Murder

  Make-Up for Murder

  Duck Season Death

  All names, characters and incidents are fictitious.

  Description of the Telephone Exchange and its working is partly imaginary

  DEDICATED TO ‘CENTRAL’ AND TO ALL WHO HAVE WORKED THEREIN

  © 1948 June Wright

  © 2013 the Estate of Dorothy June Wright

  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

  Dark Passage logo by Mike Reddy

  Country of manufacture as stated on the last page of this book

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wright, June, 1919-2012.

  Murder in the telephone exchange / June Wright.

  page cm.

  ISBN 978-1-891241-96-3 (e-book)

  1. Women detectives--Fiction. 2. Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 3. Melbourne (Vic--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.W727M87 2014

  823’.912--dc23

  2013043859

  Contents

  Preface

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  PREFACE

  The crime novels written by June Wright have been unjustly forgotten both in Britain, where they were published between 1948 and 1966, and in her homeland of Australia. They are distinguished by finely drawn settings in and around Melbourne, Victoria, feisty female protagonists and credible social situations, and in my opinion they thoroughly deserve a contemporary reappraisal.

  She was born Dorothy June Healy on the 29th of June 1919 in Malvern, a leafy suburb southeast of Melbourne; and Catholic educated at Kildara College in Malvern and Loreto Mandeville Hall in the adjacent posh suburb of Toorak. She first showed literary promise as a schoolgirl; the respected Australian journalist P.I. O’Leary (1888-1944) awarded her a prize in a children’s writing competition run by The Advocate newspaper in Melbourne. But writing was in June’s blood; her grandfather John Healy (1852-1916) was a well-known Melbourne writer who wrote under the name “The Onlooker.” After leaving school and briefly studying commercial art, June got a job as a “hello girl” or telephonist at the Central Telephone Exchange in Melbourne (she is pictured overleaf operating a switchboard). In 1941 she married Stewart Wright, a cost accountant. They had six children: Patrick, Rosemary, Nicholas, Anthony, Brenda and Stephen.

  When June’s first child Patrick was one year old, she began writing her first crime novel Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948), which was set in her former workplace. Sarah Compton, a supervisor at the Central Telephone Exchange in Melbourne, is bashed to death with a “buttinsky,” a device used by telephone mechanics to butt in on or interrupt telephone conversations. June considered it to be “unique in the history of murder instruments. Just imagine the mess that sort of [thing] would make of anyone’s face,” she gleefully told the author of “Murder on the Brain” (1952). Maggie Byrnes, a spirited young telephonist at the exchange, who June emphatically denied was modelled on herself (I didn’t believe her!), narrates the Dorothy L. Sayers–style whodunit. (At the time, Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935) was June’s favourite detective novel.)

  June Wright in 1939: the model telephonist

  While wrapping up vegetable scraps in an old newspaper, June happened to see an advertisement for an international literary competition run by the London publisher, Hutchinson. She entered Murder in the Telephone Exchange in the Detective and Thriller category of the competition, which was to be judged by Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1971), the author of the Roger Sheringham murder mysteries; John Creasey (1908-1973), the author of the Toff crime novels; and Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977), the author of the Gregory Sallust spy thrillers. “Unfortunately, in the Judges’ opinion, no novel was of sufficient merit to justify the award of a prize of £1,000,” Hutchinson informed June in 1945. “It has been decided, however, that certain manuscripts are deserving of publication, and to those authors who submitted entries considered to have the greatest merit we are prepared to offer an advance commensurate with the standard of the book. As your novel, Murder in the Telephone Exchange, is one of these, we have great pleasure in offering you an advance of £154 […] with an option on your next two novels.” June was thrilled.

  June claimed “Murder in the Telephone Exchange was the first detective novel set in Melbourne since Fergus Hume’s (1859-1932) Mystery of the Hansom Cab published in 1886.” Whether she was correct or not, Melbourne certainly does feature a lot in her book. June saw no reason why Melbourne’s Russell Street police headquarters should not become as well known in crime fiction as Scotland Yard, she told the Australian magazine Woman’s Day; and at a swish lunch to promote Murder in the Telephone Exchange (“Oysters au Natural, Lobster Newburg, Chicken Maryland and Bombe” were on the menu), Sir Raymond Connelly, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne (1945-1948), thanked June for publicising the city in such a fashion. The setting of the murder mystery had to be “a real place, somewhere I knew and knew well, not an imaginary place,” June told me almost 60 years after her crime novel was first published.

  Most book reviewers were full of praise for Murder in the Telephone Exchange, often singling out its quirky local setting, which June described in the kind of telling detail that only an insider could provide. For example, U.M.C., the author of “Have You Read These?” (1948), remarked: “Perhaps it was the Melbourne setting that gave a new freshness to the form. (One almost expected to meet the characters walking down the streets, to hear their voices over the phone.) But I think there were other factors, too: the atmosphere, the plot, the characterization, all are good.” June energetically promoted Murder at the Telephone Exchange in the press, on radio and at a number of literary events. The book was a bestseller, which according to The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, “outsold even Agatha Christie [(1890-1976)] and other world-famous authors in Australia” in 1948. The ensuing royalties didn’t make June rich by any means, but she was able to buy herself a fur coat and pay for the remodelling of her kitchen.

  Many people were intrigued by June’s ability to effectively juggle crime fiction writing and motherhood, which was reflected by the titles of several magazine and newspaper articles, such as “Wrote Thriller with Her Baby on Her Knee” (1948) and “Books Between Babies” (1948). June believed that housewives were extremely well qualified for writing novels, because “they are naturally practical, disciplined and used to monotony—three excellent attributes for the budding writer,” she told The Sun newspaper in Melbourne. She liked to hold up as an example Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when the mother of 10 children.

  June’s second book, So Bad a Death (1949), which also features Maggie Byrnes, was “possibly the best Australi
an thriller yet written,” reported the author of “Brilliant Writer in Magazine” (1949). The book was serialised on ABC radio and also in Woman’s Day. By now, June had four children—Patrick aged seven, Rosemary aged five and the twins, Anthony and Nicholas, aged three—and two bestselling crime novels. How did she do it?

  “With washing to do three days a week, I never get up later than a quarter to seven,” June told The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine in 1948. “On Monday, the biggest wash day, I rise at 5.30, light the copper, and have the washing on the line before breakfast. The twins are dressed in time for their breakfast at 7.30. Then come the other two, who have their meals with us. Monday is kitchen-cleaning day, Tuesday bedroom day. On Wednesday I scrub the back verandah and bathroom, and clean the two play rooms. On Thursday the lounge and study are done. Friday it’s back to the washtub, and the front verandah gets scrubbed. I cook an especially nice hot meal on Saturday morning, but like to sew or garden in the afternoon. Oh yes, I have to spend one night ironing, but I write on the others.”

  June took up writing to make her domestic life more tolerable. “Marriage, motherhood and the suburban lifestyle were not enough—though one would never have dared to voice such sentiments then,” she confessed in 1997. By the same token, she never hid her frustration with domestic family life either. For example, at one stage, So Bad a Death was called Who Would Murder a Baby? When F.M. Doherty of Australasian Post magazine asked June why she had named it that, the then mother of four frankly declared: “Obviously you know nothing of the homicidal instincts sometimes aroused in a mother by her children. After a particularly exasperating day, it is a relief to murder a few characters in your book instead!”

  Hutchinson rejected June’s next book The Law Courts Mystery. Undeterred, she tried a different genre, a psychological thriller called The Devil’s Caress (1952). According to the author of “Oven Fresh” (1952), it made her first two books “read like bedtime stories,” however it was generally not as well received as its predecessors. For her fourth crime novel Reservation for Murder (1958), June created a truly inspired character, the unassuming but strong-willed Catholic nun-detective Mother Paul, who in many respects is a female equivalent of the Catholic priest-detective, Father Brown, created by G.K. Chesterton (1874-1976). Hutchinson turned down the next book that June submitted, Duck Season Death (published for the first time by Verse Chorus Press in 2013). It seems that her publisher wanted more Mother Pauls because her final two crime novels Faculty of Murder (1961) and Make-Up for Murder (1966) both feature the inimitable nun-detective.

  When June’s husband Stewart suddenly fell ill and could no longer work, she gave up writing crime fiction altogether to earn a regular salary. This was a great pity as I believe she could have written many more first-rate detective novels in the same vein as Murder in the Telephone Exchange, which not only tests the reader’s wits, but also is a wonderful evocation of post-war Melbourne. Nor had she exhausted the possibilities of Mother Paul in my view, a detective identified as “special” by a number of crime fiction reviewers. For example, according to J.C. of The Advocate (1961): “Mother Paul is indeed a most attractive personality, worthy to rank with the great sleuths of fiction, even if devoid of the eccentricities possessed by most of them. We shall be very disappointed if we do not meet her again.”

  June passed away on the 4th of February 2012 aged 92. “Maybe I’ll never write a classic,” she once told Lisa Allan of The Argus newspaper in Melbourne. “Maybe that isn’t my role in life. But vegetable I’ll never be, and neither will I toss out any God-given talent simply because ‘I’m only a housewife’.”

  DERHAM GROVES

  CHAPTER I

  This is John’s idea, not mine. It will bear my reluctant signature and is a record of my impressions of the various incidents which occurred during the heat-wave of last February, but the inspiration is John’s. I think his suggestion sprang from the desire to give me something to do besides count the days for my stay in this shameful place to end.

  The whole project fills me with revulsion and the lethargy of one who has survived a crisis only to find another ahead. For that is what I have experienced. I have been through some terrible moments of suspicion, fear and misery. Heaven knows what other words there are to describe the emotions which accompanied me step by step into this room, so bare and expressionless except for the sinister barred window. I reached the peak of those emotions two weeks ago. Now, another summit is waiting to be scaled; for climb it I must, if I wish to survive the results of my own errors. Perhaps this is the way I can do it.

  It is so hot again. The cool change which followed the thunderstorm was only a temporary respite. Even in this stone building I can feel the heat. The bars at the window seem to waver against the hard burning sky. As I reached for the jug of water on the table a moment ago, a bird perched itself on the ledge with its beak slightly open. We stared at each other with envious eyes.

  It was hot then. The newspapers printed paragraphs about record temperatures and bush fire warnings, filling up picture space with snaps taken of bathers, ice vendors and children drinking lemonade. That was before we hit the headlines. But it was during the same heat-wave that crime, as it was so melodramatically phrased, held the upper hand at the Telephone Exchange, so I daresay they went on printing things like that. I didn’t notice them. But I do remember the heat. It seemed part of the whole ghastly business. A background, just as much as the Exchange buildings were themselves.

  I find it difficult to know where to start, and how to express myself in the way I was then. I didn’t feel lonely, embittered and miserable a few weeks ago. Life was full and intriguing.

  My perspective and sense of values were totally dissimilar to the distorted vision from which I am now suffering. Maybe I’ll be able to see straight once I get this off my chest.

  Did you read about the Telephone Exchange murders in the papers? There wasn’t much chance of anyone missing them. Just in case you were not one of those numerous sightseers who parked themselves outside the building and gaped like landed fish, I will give you a brief description of where the crimes took place.

  The Telephone Exchange, which comprises two buildings standing back to back, runs half a block in length. But the frontage being comparatively small renders it a rather inconspicuous place. The old Exchange, facing Lonsdale Street, is a two-storied establishment with Corinthian pillars and other arcanthus decorations, containing aged apparatus for the dwindling manual subscribers in the city and some country stations. At the back of “Central,” like a modern miss shielded by her anxious grandmother, rises the eight-story red brick building which houses the most up-to-date Trunk Exchange in the Southern Hemisphere. We telephonists who have worked there, while dubbing it a “madhouse” or a “hell of a hole,” will always be proud of it.

  Eight floors with a basement, a flat roof and one lift, which had the rather trying tendency to break down on occasions when one was running late, the switchroom and cloakroom being on the sixth and eighth floors respectively. This only happened at odd hours, as by day it was run by old Bill, one of the nicest men who ever lost a limb in the First World War. He was intensely proud of his lift, and would hear no word against it.

  I am trying to remember when I first became conscious of the changed atmosphere in the Trunk Exchange. It was so gradual that its beginning was almost undetectable. The strange behaviour of the Senior Traffic Officer can provide a point from which to start. That was the first significant item that penetrated my consciousness.

  Albert James Scott, or Bertie as he was spoken of except to his face, was in charge of the two Exchanges, Central and Trunks; a dynamic little man with the sense of humour that usually goes with a rotund figure, who changed before our eyes almost overnight. It was his custom to trot about the room, throwing cheery words at traffic officers, monitors and telephonists alike, or to mumble under his breath other words, that began more often than not with the second letter of the alphabet, if any of the
Departmental heads had been tedious. Either he would bang the handset telephones about on his desk, or swoop down to the boards and toss the orderly piles of dockets into disarray if he considered the delay on the lines was too high. But that was his way. Those sorts of thing did not worry anyone. Indeed, if one had been connected with the Exchange for as many years as Bertie such behaviour was normal and quite to be expected.

  Then one day arrived when he did none of those things, but spent most of his time quietly at his desk in the centre of the room, the single line between his eyes obliterated as his bushy brows met in one unbroken bar. I heard Sarah Compton, the monitor in attendance at the Senior Traffic Officer’s table, comment: “Poor old Bertie is getting very grey. I wonder what he is worrying about?”

  He was staring moodily in front of him when, going off duty to my tea one evening, I asked if I could change my all-night shift with the girl Patterson. John Clarkson, a traffic officer, was talking on one of Bertie’s telephones, but he found time to wink at me. He was rather a lamb, with the figure of an athlete and the wrists of a golfer. As a matter of fact I had played with him several times, as the whole Exchange now knew thanks to Compton, who was a regular snooper. I would not have put it beyond her to be jealous. Clark had a very attractive personality.

  Bertie came out of his trance with a sigh.

  “What did you say, Miss Byrnes?”

  “May I change with Miss Patterson on Friday? She is working from four until eleven. I am on all-night.”

  It was quite a normal request. Changing shifts and their ensuing paybacks occurred every day. As I started unbuckling my headset, the pencil that I had slipped over my right ear caught and then fell with a tiny clatter to the floor. Bertie started like a shying horse.

  “Change!” he said loudly. “No more changing until further notice. Miss Compton, tell the staff, please, and get me the Sydney Traffic Officer.”