So Bad a Death

  SO BAD A DEATH

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Murder in the Telephone Exchange

  The Devil’s Caress

  Reservation for Murder

  Faculty of Murder

  Make-Up for Murder

  Duck Season Death

  © 1949 June Wright

  © 2014 the Estate of Dorothy June Wright

  Introduction © 2014 Lucy Sussex

  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

  info@versechorus.com

  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.

  So bad a death / June Wright ; introduction by Lucy Sussex.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-891241-60-4 (ebook)

  1. Women detectives–Fiction. 2. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 3. Melbourne (Vic.)–Fiction. I. Sussex, Lucy, 1957- II. Title.

  PR9619.3.W727S67 2015

  823'.914–dc23

  2014044271

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  An Interview with June Wright (1996)

  INTRODUCTION

  June Wright was one of a small but highly talented group of Australian crime writers, active in the mid-twentieth century, of whom some of the most significant were women. They published internationally, maintained their careers and detectives over a number of books, and enjoyed a high public profile. That June Wright achieved such success is particularly impressive in that she was raising six children—in an era when, unlike her nineteenth-century predecessors like Mary Braddon and Anna Katharine Green, she did not have domestic help. June Wright was a housewife superstar well before Edna Everage, and far more gracious in the role.

  It is important to put her into context, firstly as an Australian detective writer. She belonged to a long tradition, hardly surprising given the country’s origins as a penal colony. Crime appears in Australian writing from its beginnings, mostly in the form of what we would now term true crime. Fiction—and in turn the crime genre—slowly emerged over the nineteenth century, fed by reportage, the Gothic, and theatrical melodrama. Form and content began to coalesce in the 1850s, a period of intense interest from prospective colonists hoping for gold. John Lang (1816-64), the first Australian-born novelist—and a lawyer, troublemaker and expatriate—was also the first with a fictional detective. His 1855 The Forger’s Wife included the secondary character George Flower, based on a real Sydney thief-taker, though his methods were more violent than deductive.

  Lang’s most significant followers came ten years later, in the colony of Victoria. For much of the nineteenth-century, police fiction was hampered by class issues—snobbery with violence. Victoria’s brief creation of a cadet system, young middle-class men recruited for an elite police force, made the detective a far less problematic character for writers. The first Australian detective serials appeared in the Australian Journal in 1865, one writer being Mary Fortune (c. 1833-1909), who was married (bigamously) to a police cadet. She would write over five hundred stories in her ‘Detective’s Album’, the longest early detective serial anywhere in the world. Also figuring in the early issues of the Australian Journal was Ellen Davitt’s Force and Fraud, the first Australian murder mystery novel.

  June Wright, although a Melbourne writer, knew none of these antecedents. What she did know was Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, a semi-self-published novel by a New Zealander that first appeared in 1886 in Melbourne (where it was set), and was reprinted in London the following year. It became the biggest and fastest selling detective novel of the 1800s, and a key text in creating the publishing genre of detective fiction. The connection for Wright was personal: her grandfather Daniel Newham had known Hume and had himself attempted a ‘great Australian novel’, never completed.

  Following Hume’s success, most Australian crime writers of the early twentieth century were expatriates. They lived in Britain, and wrote for that audience. Some, like the Geelong-born J. M. Walsh, even rewrote their Australian novels with English settings. As a teenager Wright did encounter a role model in Paul McGuire, who had moved in Catholic intellectual circles in London and continued to write Anglocentric detective novels after he returned to live in Adelaide. In contrast, her most famous peer, Arthur Upfield, was an English emigrant who celebrated the Australian landscape and, in his detective Bony, indigenous people. Other models came from Wright’s preferred crime reading: the queens of crime fiction’s golden age: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and the American Mignon Eberhardt. Although G. K. Chesterton was a fellow Catholic, she did not greatly care for his Father Brown stories.

  Wright was a good student, but tertiary education for girls was not really an option in her family. Instead, she began working at Melbourne’s central telephone exchange, which would supply her with a unique and interesting background for her first book. She married in 1941, and children followed quickly. When she drafted Murder in the Telephone Exchange in 1943, it was very much as an outlet, as solitary brainwork. She wrote it in six weeks during the intervals when her firstborn, Patrick, was sleeping. Pregnant again, she immediately started another novel, but did not have the energy to proceed at that point.

  Upfield had been reprinted by Doubleday in America during World War II, to great success. This had reminded international publishers that, as with Hume, Australia contained crimewriting gold. Several other Australia-based writers found book publication in 1944, notably A. E. Martin (three novels) and ‘Margot Neville’, pseudonym of the sisters Margot Goyder and Anne Neville Joske. That same year, Wright chanced to see an advertisement for the ‘United Nations Literary Competition’ while wrapping up vegetable scraps in newspaper. She typed up and sent off her manuscript, and this led ultimately to the publication of Murder in the Telephone Exchange with Hutchinson in 1948, and a three-novel contract.

  Murder in the Telephone Exchange was written from the perspective of a single woman, Maggie Byrnes, who detects and finds romance in the same narrative. So Bad a Death, published a year later, in 1949, again features Maggie, by now married with a small son. The novel is thus essentially a sequel, but it is in many ways a more skilled book, with Wright learning from the experience of writing. However, the time and energy she could devote to her work were now considerably limited: she had revised Murder in the maternity hospital after having twins. Her household comprised four children, with one twin proving severely mentally disabled, and this preoccupied her; in her memoir she could not recall much about the composition of her second and third novels.

  Just as Wright’s debut hit the target in its depiction of young working women—which proved a factor in its successful reception when reprinted last year—her second novel is similarly acute in drawing female lives. There is much in So Bad
a Death that is autobiographic: a young mother seeking housing during a post-war shortage, as well as distraction from the domestic grind. Wright vividly and recognisably depicts the new suburb of Ashburton; in her memoir she recalls how people tried to identify the characters—unsuccessfully. Something else she captures is the tension of women returning to domesticity from war work, and finding it did not fulfill all of their needs.

  An important point about Wright is that she was unselfconscious in using Australian settings—indeed she seems unaffected by the cultural cringe. Moreover, she based her writing on experience, which gives it a realist edge, even when her narrative is heightened by pronounced Gothic elements. All her novels are about women, chronicled with great acuteness. She does not subsume herself within the persona of a male detective, as did Marsh, or ‘Margot Neville’.

  So Bad a Death was serialised in Woman’s Day, published at the time by the Herald newspaper group, between March and June 1949. (The magazine had previously, in October 1948, written her up under the headline “Books Between Babies”.) Wright benefited here from the good local sales for Murder, and the novelty of being a young mother who managed to look glamorous on a small budget, and also to write. She was described as adopting “marriage and mystery-solving jointly as a career”. The serialisation had illustrations—by colour-blind graphic artist Frank Whitmore—which skilfully evoke the story’s Gothic mood, whilst also recalling Hollywood noir and Hitchcock. The images arguably reference Wright herself, whose publicity photos were striking. The Women’s Weekly may have featured Margot Neville serials, with their Sydney detective, but here was a Melbourne counterpart. Only the previous year Woman’s Day had serialised Christie’s Taken at the Flood. In addition to Wright they also bought short stories from another young Melbourne woman, Jean Turnley, which they ran along with the overseas fare of Georgette Heyer and Alec Waugh.

  Many of the tensions captured in So Bad a Death are also evident in the pages of the magazine itself. Food and fashion feature, but so do the problems of the ‘obey’ clause in the marriage vow and discussions on how to bring up children properly (Maggie is particularly severe on dummies*). Nearly every issue of Woman’s Day featured a woman with an identity that extended beyond domesticity—Hollywood actresses, but also pioneering racing chemist Jean Kimble, and Wright herself.

  So Bad a Death is a subversive book: Wright had wanted to title it Who Would Murder a Baby, and delighted in telling interviewers how writing bloody murders was a good way to avoid infanticide. It also critiques the snobbism of the country house murder mystery with its depiction of an attempt to create a squirearchy in the Antipodes, a would-be Lord of the manor who plays god with the women around him. Patriarchy takes a pounding in the novel, as, more implicitly, does maternal dependency, the ideal of the stay-at-home mother. Like Murder, the novel resonated with women’s lives, then and now.

  After So Bad a Death Wright retired Maggie. It was just about possible to detect with one child, but if Maggie were to be consistent with 1950s norms, she would go on to bear an overwhelming brood. Wright also told me (after asking me to switch the tape recorder off) that Maggie had proved to be too much of a smartarse, and that she was sick of people assuming the character and her creator were the same. Yet they were similar: clever, competent women who managed homes, children and brainwork efficiently. Wright would subsequently create a character who could be a continuing strong detective: the nun Mother Paul. Since she was married to God, her professionalism was not problematic. But what Wright accomplished with Maggie was considerable.

  Before June Wright, Australian detective fiction tended to focus on the male protagonists, the experiences of male detectives, even when it was written by women. Her work changed that, creating a writing space in which titles like The Knife Is Feminine, Charlotte Jay’s 1951 debut, could flourish. Among Wright’s followers into print were the superb psychothriller author Pat Flower (from 1958), Patricia Carlon (from 1961), and of course Jay herself, whose Beat Not the Bones (1952) won the first Edgar.

  LUCY SUSSEX

  * In the USA, a dummy is called a pacifier

  SO BAD A DEATH

  “So bad a death argues a monstrous life.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  I am not a femme fatale. Crime does not dog my footsteps, as one garrulous friend assured me. It was she who applied the first loathsome sobriquet. Neither am I one of those sleuths for whom corpses crop up conveniently. Such individuals should, in the interests of public safety, be marooned on a desert island. Their presence in the community is an incentive to murder.

  No claim is being made to the ranks of amateur detection. I am merely a police officer’s wife who has certain reasons in recording impressions of a homicide case. One is to defend myself against further attacks by friends. The affair was bound to happen some time, and therefore it was just a coincidence that it synchronized with our arrival in Middleburn. Crime waits for no man, least of all for the super-sleuth.

  It is strange to remember that it happened at that particular time of the year. One associates murder with a winter’s wind whining in the trees, or with the electrically charged atmosphere that precedes a summer storm; indeed, our treacherous spring days would have been a more suitable setting. But the violence and mystery which emanated from the Hall, their breeding place, were played against a background of serene days and nights. The leaves of deciduous trees were yellow and starting to fall, and the smoke from chimney stacks rose as straight plumes through the unruffled air. Autumn was the backdrop.

  Such days of glorious weather might bring a poignant nostalgia to some; to others happy memories. To me they are the reminder of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

  One of those nightmare incidents becomes particularly vivid whenever I watch Tony playing in the sandpit John constructed. My heart will thud with a sudden fear of what might have been. I snatch his rotund little body hard against me to beat off the phantom. Then Tony complains plaintively of the uncomfortable grip, and the picture fades.

  Tony makes me forget, but only temporarily. Often during the night I will waken sharply and think I hear his terrified baby call. I will slip quickly and quietly from bed and pad down the hall in my bare feet to the nursery. Each time I fully expect to see that dark-draped figure leaning over his cot once more. But the light from the passage shines on nothing more sinister than the black-stocking golliwog, clasped firmly in one striped-pyjama arm. Only after I lean over the high rail of the cot and listen for his quick breathing, with my own held, and take another look at the double screen on the nursery window, am I satisfied to leave him. I creep back to bed rather sheepishly, confident that I have not disturbed John with my midnight prowlings, until his voice comes deeply through the darkness.

  “Well? No masked kidnappers?”

  “Did I waken you? I thought I heard Tony call.”

  John rolled over. “Now listen, Maggie! It’s high time you stopped this nonsense. Haven’t you heard that lightning never strikes twice in the same place? Forgive the trite phrase, but it is about the best security I can offer you. I do wish you’d stop fidgeting and let us get some sleep.”

  I stopped thumping my pillow into shape and said meekly: “Sorry, darling. I won’t offend again. Good night.”

  John gave a grunt of forgiveness and rolled back. The Holland case was closed as far as he was concerned. Such a prosaic attitude to the recent events which occurred in Middleburn could only be found in one to whom crime was an everyday affair to combat.

  I lay straight and still in the darkness. Sleep was far away.

  “I’ll remember it all for the last time and then put it out of my head for good. I’ll go over every fact, every little incident. That should cure me.”

  II

  Tony had been with us for nearly two years when I decided that flat life was no longer bearable. We must have a house and plenty of yard space in which Tony could indulge his ever-increasing vitality without complaints from the neighbo
urs.

  John looked dubious when I told him of my decision. I would find it difficult to secure a place in these times, he said. The housing problem was acute, and so on. However, I had his permission to go ahead in the search; only make sure before doing anything final that there was an extra room he could use as a study. He wished me luck, with a pessimistic shake of his head.

  “I’ll find a house,” I declared firmly, “even if I die in the attempt.” Which, on the whole, was a rather ironic statement to make. Fortunately I did not know that then.

  As usual John was right. But after many weeks of weary searching I triumphed.

  “Middleburn,” said my sceptical husband, poring over the rough diagram I had made of the house I had inspected that afternoon. “Where the devil is Middleburn?”

  “And you a policeman! Give me that paper for a moment.”

  On the back I sketched a clumsy map showing two of the main highways leading from town which run through a couple of well-known outer suburbs. Between them, marked by large crosses, I made a smaller one.

  “That is Middleburn.”

  “Looks very much out of the way to me. Is there a decent train service to the city?”

  I assured him that there was, and went on to describe Middleburn itself.

  Although classed as a suburb, it had more the aspect of a country village, so isolated was it from its neighbours. The homes and gardens were delightful, set in pretty, rolling country which from many parts commanded fine views of the city in the west and the hills in the east. The houses were small, modern and smart, and inhabited for the most part by young married couples. The tiny shopping centre, set in the main road on the crest of a hill, teemed with smartly dressed young matrons wheeling baby carriages. Strolling along High Street I had to sidestep now and then to dodge groups of young mothers chatting together gaily. My town suit and hat were glanced at curiously. I presented a rather incongruous figure among the tailored slacks and careless bare heads.