Flower sketched the idle moneyed. Further reinforcing the English tradition, many of her plots unfold in country houses or fashionable city apartments. Whilst her characters, certainly those of Swinton and Primrose, are nothing new, Flower did introduce some remarkably ingenious, though hardly credible, plot devices. In Goodbye Sweet William, for example, the final twist has the guests at a house party apparently murdering their host whilst the victim in fact dies of entirely natural causes.
Flower did, however, tire of such facetiousness and early in her career abandoned Inspector Swinton in favour of psychological mysteries. Her new maturity was realised in such novels as Cobweb (London, Collins, 1972; New York, Stein & Day, 1978) and Odd Job (London, Collins, 1974; New York, Stein & Day, 1978). Crisscross (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein & Day, 1977) is a particularly masterful tale of madness, written from the perspective of a badgered husband. Her last novel, Shadow Show (London, Collins, 1976; New York, Stein & Day, 1978) was released just two years short of her death.
Margot Neville was the pen name of two sisters, Margot Goyder and Anne Neville Goyder Joske who collaborated on a string of thrillers beginning with Lena Hates Men (New York, Arcadia House, 1943; as Murder in Rockwater, London, Geoffrey Bles, 1944) and finishing with Head on a Sill (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1966). The Neville heroes, Detective-Inspector Grogan and Detective-Sergeant Manning, who appeared in all but two of the novels, followed the same well travelled path as Flower, although as a general rule, Neville is far ahead.
Murder and Gardenias (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1946) was one of the early mysteries that established the Neville reputation. The story opens with an examination of the residents of a fashionable Sydney apartment building. A body of a young man, stuffed into a chest, is discovered in one of the apartments. The residents and their relationships display varying degrees of complexity and it is up to Grogan and Manning to fathom the tangled relations and unmask the killer.
Murder and Gardenias displays Neville’s eloquence and ability to balance a large number of characters. A later Neville, Drop Dead (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1962) uses much the same setting. Claude Nevinson, a successful and philandering restaurateur, falls to his death from the balcony of his mistress’ apartment which is in the same building as those of Nevinson and his wife and the wife’s lover.
Whilst certainly superior to those of Pat Flower, the Margot Neville novels were startlingly similar in approach. The writers managed to take the traditions of the English police mystery and transplant them into an Australian setting. They succeeded only because the structure of the English mystery was maintained; there was certainly no attempt made to generate a genuine feel for the surroundings. When the Flower and Neville characters look out over Sydney Harbour, they could easily be viewing the Thames. And the sombrely attired wallopers from the Sydney C.I.B. could pass for representatives of Scotland Yard. Flower and Neville paid homage to a peculiar British form which had no room for bush pubs or Aborigines. Yet given their immense commercial success it is not surprising that they saw little need to introduce much local colour.
Sidney Courtier was more than willing to use recognisably Australian settings and characters. Although a teacher by occupation, Courtier could well have devoted his entire career to writing. Beginning in the late 1930s, he survived in the netherworld known only to the freelancer until the publication of his first novel, The Glass Spear (Sydney, Invincible Press and New York, Wyn, 1950; London, Dakers, 1952). It introduced the first of Courtier’s two series characters – Ambrose Mahon, a superintendent with the Sydney C.I.B. The Glass Spear is an excellent introduction to this consistently entertaining writer. Set on an isolated outback station just after World War II, the country locale was a device that Courtier was to continually utilise in later novels.
Mahon is never directly assigned to the cases he eventually solves. He just happens to be in the right place at the right time. In The Glass Spear he is holidaying with friends. In Come Back to Murder (London, Hammond, Hammond & Company, 1956) he revisits a country town where he was once stationed as a sergeant, whilst in A Shroud for Unlac (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1958) he is attending a woolshow. In Mimic a Murderer (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1964) Mahon is fortuitously at the scene for no better reason than to accelerate the development of the plot.
Courtier’s work is amongst the most interesting of all Australian writers in that he concerned himself with recognisable and unique, if occasionally bizarre, Australian locales. Death in Dream Time (London, Hammond, Hammond and Company, 1959), for example, featuring Detective Inspector C.J. ‘Digger’ Haig of the Brisbane C.I.B., is set in an Aboriginal theme park in far north Queensland. ‘Alchera, the Dream Time Land ’, has been established by the eccentric Austin Flax in a rainforest jungle. Hordes of tourists assemble daily to tour the nine life-like dioramas explaining the beliefs of the Arunda Aborigines. Haig is on the scene to investigate a traffic accident that turns out to be a murder and draws his suspects from a group of the park’s creditors.
Had Australian crime writing developed any apparent local flavour through these decades? Did it say anything about our nation or our collective identity? To both questions – the answer is probably not. With the exception of Arthur Upheld and Sidney Courtier, there was little difference between English and Australian crime writing. It was as if the majority of local novelists had decided that the best way to assure lasting fame, and sales, was to parrot their British and, to a much lesser extent, American counterparts.
It could also have been the result of conservative publishers mindful of the enormous market for English country house mysteries, particularly after World War II, and determined to foster authors to meet the demand. But while this area of crime writing was popular, it did not necessarily follow that such tradition could easily be transferred to Australia. To be fair, it could be argued that crime fiction has generally veered toward entertainment rather than social comment. The formulas are fairly well drawn in each of the sub-genres, whether it be Gothic, detective or police procedural, and readers rail at any interruption to the action.
Whatever the reason, a large number of Australian authors were producing English-flavoured mysteries with little or no relation to our society. The Active police detectives called to investigate genteel crimes were invariably similar, as if each author used identical style sheets. The Sydney C.I.B. was overrun with make-believe detectives and the trend continued into the 1970s with the work of Charles Whitman. In such works as Doctor-Death (London, Cassell & Company, 1969), Death Out of Focus (London, Cassell & Company, 1970) and Death Suspended (London, Cassell & Company, 1971) Whitman worked his series characters, Detective-Sergeant Douglas Gray and Detective-Inspector Bob Lindon of (you guessed it) the Sydney C.I.B. through the same tired routines that had hardly changed in decades.
An exception to the tired police formula was Elizabeth Salter who wrote some intelligent puzzle-mysteries concerning Detective-Inspector Mike Hornsley. Salter was a major literary talent, a biographer of some note (including studies of Daisy Bates and Robert Helpmann) and, obviously, a fan of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. From 1957 until 1964, she lived in London, where she was private secretary to Dame Edith Sitwell (writing The Last Years of a Rebeclass="underline" A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London, Houghton Mifflin, 1967) and Edith Sitwell (London, Oresko Books, 1979). Most of her series of detective novels were written during this time.