Such libraries were the mainstay of the major publishers; only the wealthiest individuals could afford the high cost of hardcover novels. Some publishers, however, realised that if retail prices could be reduced, people would happily buy books instead of just borrowing them. The result was the ‘yellowback’, poorly manufactured novels with cardboard covers which barely held together their contents. Cheap in price as well as production standards, the resulting boom in sales proved these visionaries correct. The yellowbacks competed with the various magazines for the favour of readers and enjoyed one major advantage, where magazines such as The Australian Journal could only publish novels in serialised form, the cheap paperbacks could be consumed in one sitting, a bonus for many readers.
The yellowbacks preceded the pulps which, in turn, developed into paperbacks. In terms of yellowback fiction, one notable local precursor to Alan Geoffrey Yates was Nat Gould, a nineteenth century Dick Francis. Born in Manchester, England, Gould came to Australia as a journalist in 1884 and stayed for some 11 years. This was ample time to immerse himself in the local racing scene and to begin a literary gallop that eventually totalled more than 130 novels. His output was so prolific that upon his death in 1919 there remained 22 titles yet to reach the presses. Dozens of his books had Australian settings, although Gould made no special effort to define the nature of the Australian landscape, character or indeed social order. All his racing adventures were in the yellowback category which, being inexpensive and readily available, ensured the widest possible audience. By the 1950s The Bulletin estimated that Gould’s sales were in excess of 30 million copies.
Arthur Wright covered the same territory and market but whilst Gould trawled widely for his locations, the Bathurst-born Wright stuck mostly to Sydney. Wright had a particular affection for Randwick and Rosehill racecourses which featured in many of his works, including his debut Keane of Kargoorlie (Sydney, Sunday Times Company, 1897), first serialised in a Sydney sports newspaper and A Rogue’s Luck (Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1922). Wright’s melodramas, often mixing romance and adventure in equal parts, did not possess the same breathless treatment of horseracing that Gould so effortlessly displayed, but his plots swung along and provided some interesting descriptions of the country.
The Australian reader of crime fiction was to be better served by Randolph Bedford. Bedford was a journalist who went on to become a member of the Queensland parliament and like Arthur Upfield years later, had a great love of the Australian bush. From his youth Bedford tramped the outback and wrote about his experiences to great effect in such magazines as The Bulletin. In Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1911) he presented a series of short stories set in the bush that had much in common with Sherlock Holmes.
The narrator of Billy Pagan is Henry Fleet, a Watson-like character who acts as devil’s advocate for the reader. Fleet becomes a companion to a drifter scraping a living from prospecting, one Billy Pagan: ‘… a young man, dressed like any score of other men – in a shirt of many pockets and open at the breast; dust-marked tweed trousers, tucked into old wrinkled, travel-worn, brown leather leggings, fastened with leather loops and only one buckle; boots heavy to the sole and light as the upper – so serving to show the extraordinary delicacy of the man’s feet; a soiled Terai hat very wide in the brim; the trousers supported by a leather belt that held watch, compass and aneroid pouches, and knife and pipe sheaths.’
Like a swaggie’s vision of Holmes, Pagan has an almost supernatural ability to detect wrongdoing. In one story Pagan makes a cursory examination of a deserted mine site and concludes that it was worked by two men, one of them being a sailor from a cold climate who has murdered his companion to keep secret their discovery of a gold reef. Pagan and Fleet track the murderer, a Dutch seaman, to the Western Australian mining town of Coolgardie where he is brought to justice.
The stories contained within Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer, are set in mining districts of Western Australian, Tasmania and northern Queensland, and each is filled with writing richly evocative of location and atmosphere. The relationship between Pagan and Fleet has much to compare with Holmes and Watson, and it is regrettable that Bedford did not come to realise the worth of continuing the Pagan adventures.
There seems no logical reason why authors such as Gould, Wright and Bedford became the pulp staples of the railway new-stands, while pedestrian talents such as Hennessey found favour with the more established publishers. One possible explanation is that Hennessey and others like him consciously exploited the form of melodramatic Victorian-inspired adventures which left little room for the development of Australian characters or locations except as exotic backdrops.
Whatever the reason a number of Australian authors began to give British publishers what they wanted. Over the years authors like Arthur Gask, Pat Flower, Margot Neville and Sidney Courtier filled the circulating libraries of Britain and Australia with their books.
Like American western writer Zane Grey, South Australian-born Arthur Gask, spent the early years of the twentieth century as a dentist. In between impacted molars, Gask nutted out a thriller which he eventually titled The Secret of the Sandhills (Adelaide, Rigby, 1921; London, Herbert Jenkins, 1930), subtitled A Mystery of Henley Beach to identify its Adelaine locale. The novel did not readily find an Australian publisher but when it finally appeared sold a thousand copies in a matter of weeks. British publisher Herbert Jenkins picked up Gask’s second novel, Cloud, the Smiter (London, 1926), to begin an association that lasted for more than 30 novels, ending with Crime Upon Crime (London, 1952) published the year after Gask’s death. Many of Gask’s stories feature South Australia although those starring his series character, Detective Gilbert Larose, remained firmly set in England.
Pat Flower came to Australia in 1928 as a teenager. The wife of artist Cedric, she turned to writing in the 1950s with the first of her long stream of novels, Wax Flowers for Gloria (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & Robertson, 1958). Flower’s earlier works do not anticipate the quality of her later writing. Her considerable literary talent was initially overwhelmed by a jokesy approach particularly in the half dozen or so early books that feature her sole series character, Inspector Swinton. The good Inspector was a policeman given to meat pies and suburban domesticity and was little different from the majority of English flavoured police heroes common in Australian crime fiction through much of this century.
Possibly Flower was lampooning this derivative fashion although any evidence of such intent is buried deep. Certainly her sense of humour verged on the heavy handed. Consider, for example, the device occasioned by her married name in the titles. Not only is there Wax Flowers for Gloria but Goodbye Sweet William (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & Robertson, 1960), One Rose Less (Sydney, Ure Smith, and London, Angus & Robertson, 1961) and Hell for Heather (London, Hale, 1962). If this isn’t sufficient, Inspector Swinton is assisted by a young colleague, Detective-Sergeant Primrose.