Salter’s character, Hornsley, is a Sydney C.I.B. detective although he wandered far in the course of his investigations. In Once Upon a Tombstone (London, Hutchinson, 1965), the majority of the action takes place in Austria whilst in Death in a Mist (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957) he unravels a murder in New Zealand. For the most part, however, the scenery she described with a loving attention to detail was that of Sydney. Other Salter mysteries, including There was a Witness (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1960), feature Hornsley and he emerges as one of the finest policemen to grace Australian crime fiction. Long overdue recent reprints of her books will only confirm this opinion. Once Upon a Tombstone and Death in a Mist were re-released by Angus & Robertson in the late 1970s and again in 1988.
The work of Gask, Flower, Neville and a dozen less enduring authors were prime examples of the cultural cringe. The works of Upfield, Courtier and Salter are thus all the more satisfying because they dared to write books with a unique indigenous character set in Australia for Australians.
Another of these marvellous mavericks was A.E. (Archibald Edward) Martin. A journalist who worked with C.J. Dennis on the satirical magazine, The Gadfly, Martin won The Australian Women’s Weekly 1942 novel contest with Common People (Sydney, Consolidated Press, 1944). Martin turned to mysteries in 1944 with Sinners Never Die (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1944; Sydney, New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1945). The central character, Henry Xavier Ford, is an old man in a nursing home for whom a mystery of 50 years past gradually unfolds in a series of flashbacks.
Martin’s quirky characters make him one of the best of the more recent new neglected writers. Another excellent Martin novel, The Chinese Bed Mystery (London, Max Reinhardt, 1955), is set in a circus. His other books include Death in the Limelight (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1946) and The Curious Crime (New York, Doubleday, 1952; London, Muller, 1953). Martin is one of the few Australians to be published in The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (another was Arthur Upfield, who produced his only Bony short story especially for it) winning praise for his stories ‘The Flying Corpse’ and ‘The Power of the Leaf.’ The latter is a worthy example of Martin’s unusual talents, dealing with the efforts of Ooloo, an Aborigine of the Narranyeri tribe, to solve the strange death of a young man.
For every delight there are, of course, dozens of authors who aspired to brilliance but never quite made it. This is not to slight their efforts, but their writing, often prolific, disappeared from view and never surfaced to face any contemporary critical assessment.
One author to suffer such a fate was Eric North, an imitator of the American hard-boiled style and the pseudonym of journalist Bernard Cronin. His Chip on my Shoulder (London, Dennis Dobson, 1956), features a reporter with the Melbourne Dispatch called Merton Ryde. While investigating the death of a close friend Ryde uncovers a drug ring. The novel is packed with Cadillacs, night club chanteuses and similar trans-Pacific touches that must have appeared terribly sophisticated in the 1950s but are now merely uninspiringly derivative. Ryde comes up against two Melbourne detectives known as the Homicide Twins. ‘They were the murder boys of the C.I.B. They lived on raw meat.’ – Leo Darbin was ‘200 pounds of abattoir left-overs’ and his partner, Jim Poddy was ‘as good looking as a wart touched with sulphuric acid’. The attempt to emulate a Black Mask style did not succeed in that novel or the next, Nobody Stops Me (London, Dennis Dobson, 1960) where the hero, Saxon Brent, is as much a caricature in the Australian landscape as Merton Ryde.
Nor were these North’s worst efforts. Consider as an example his earlier Who Killed Marie Westhaven? (Sydney, Midget Masterpiece Publishing Company, 1940) a collection of six very short stories featuring a Chinese criminologist, Dr Lao Sars. Set in Sydney, Sars is a detective savant assisted by Sergeant Smythe of the Metropolitan Police and Brian Tembolt, a reporter with The Evening Comet. The collection, with a cheeky opening notation that the stories were edited by Bernard Cronin, pits Sars against seemingly impossible crimes. With a measure of fantastic scientific skill, Sars always manages to bring the perpetrator to justice to the amazed delight of Smythe and Tembolt.
Just as another Australian author, J.M. Walsh, was fashioned by over-eager publishers into a local version of Edgar Wallace, several years later another local author was being hailed as a major new talent. Charles Shaw joined the staff of The Bulletin in 1939, writing under a variety of pen-names including ‘Old-timer’, ‘Ben Cubbin’ and ‘Cowpuncher’. Another of Shaw’s Bulletin pseudonyms, ‘B.S.’, came from the initials of his much-loved 1936 Bantam Singer car. In the early 1950s he again used his car for inspiration for the name Bant Singer as author of a number of adventures featuring an opportunist called Delaney.
The first, You’re Wrong, Delaney (London, Collins, 1953) concerns Delaney, a war veteran, who works for a sly grog racketeer at the opening of the book. When his boss is murdered, Delaney, considering himself to be the number one suspect, quickly leaves the scene. He is arrested in the small country town of Black Springs where he remains, the local police conveniently not returning him to Sydney. With limited resources, Delaney uses his talent as a pool shark to earn some money only to find himself suspected of another murder.
Shaw’s style had an attractive urgency that was blatently American. Delaney himself is sketched as a man, who while not quite a criminal, fashions a living on the very edge of the law. You’re Wrong, Delaney was very well received in Britain and it wasn’t long before Shaw was being groomed as a successor to Peter Cheyney who had died in 1951. Cheyney, the British sex-and-violence precursor to James Hadley Chase (another Briton) and Mickey Spillane, was a popular and prolific novelist and creator of the Lemmy Caution character. Shaw’s only real similarity to the sordid trinity of Cheyney, Chase and Spillane was his ability to produce effective American-flavoured thrillers; luckily he ignored his publisher’s entreaties to spice up the Delaney stories.
You’re Wrong, Delaney was reviewed by ‘N.K.’ in The Bulletin who qualified his praise for the book by commenting, ‘It is an excellent thing that Australian fiction-writers should sell their work on world markets, but it seems unfortunate if, as in this book, they must lose their own Australian speech in order to do it. One would like to see this author turn out thrillers of equal excellence as regards plot and action, but where Australian characters speak in their own manner. After all, our criminal slang is said to be as rich as any in the world: why deprive the rest of the world of its nuances?’
Shaw wrote a number of novels using the same character, principally Don’t Slip, Delaney (London, Collins, 1954) and Have Patience, Delaney (London, Collins, 1954), but the fevered production and the implied strain of satisfying Cheney’s market took its toll. After Your Move, Delaney (London, Collins, 1958), no further adventures appeared. A shame, considering the originality of the character and the easy style which made his novel Heavens Knows, Mr Allison (London, Frederic Muller, 1952; New York, Crown Publishers, 1952), filmed by John Huston in 1957 with Robert Mitchum in the lead role, a best-seller in Britain, Australia and the United States.