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INTRODUCTION

The crime novels of Australian author June Wright (1919–2012) have been unfairly forgotten, and in my view thoroughly merit a fresh reassessment. The mother of six children had six books published by Hutchinson in London between 1948 and 1966. “June demonstrates herself to be both mentally and physically fertile,” observed the outspoken journalist Beth Thwaites in The Truth newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria. Interesting locations, spirited female characters and believable social settings are characteristic of all of June’s murder mysteries.

After June’s first child, Patrick, was born in 1942, “to combat the lack of mental exercise, I haunted the local lending library for reading matter,” June recalled in 1997. “But, owing to the war, there was not a large supply . . . I read all of the novels by Frances Parkinson Keyes and a new authoress called Monica Dickens. Dynastic epics covering generations of English family life soon dried up. Agatha Christie was a favourite; Mignon Eberhart, a skilled performer of the ‘Had I but known’ school, more so. That’s it, I thought after a period of re-reads. I’ll write my own!”

Being an avid reader of crime fiction, June knew precisely how to proceed. “You must drop your clues, like stitches, on the way out, and pick them up neatly in a pattern when you’re coming in,” she told the Australian magazine Woman’s Day in 1948. “The clues give the reader a chance and you mustn’t fool him with any misleading trickery. You must have a plausible plot and the murderer must get an honourable mention early in the book, although you never let the reader into his mental processes. There must be no coincidences or unaccountable solutions.”

June had to juggle writing with looking after her husband, Stewart, and their six children: Patrick, Rosemary, Nicholas, Anthony, Brenda and Stephen. Six nights a week (her one night “off” was spent ironing clothes!), after the children had gone to bed, she escaped to her study to write for two or three hours, come what may, when “the dozens of ideas she has while peeling potatoes and washing nappies spill from her brain into print,” wrote Lisa Allan of The Argus newspaper in Melbourne. “And therein are the two essential ingredients for writing [June] says—patience and perseverance. ‘It’s easy to dash off 200 inspired words, but the other 80,000 to finish the book aren’t always so quick in coming.’” Writing about 1,000 words in longhand per night, the first draft of a book usually took June three or four months to complete, “unless something cataclysmic happens to the family in the meantime,” she told the author of “Housewife’s Recipe for Murder” (1958).

June’s first crime novel, Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948), was set in the Central Telephone Exchange in Melbourne, where she had worked as a telephonist during World War II. In this book Sarah Compton, a supervisor, is bashed to death with a “buttinsky,” a gadget used by telephone mechanics to interrupt telephone conversations. Maggie Byrnes, a gutsy young telephonist at the exchange (like June was), narrates the fast-moving whodunit, which outsold Agatha Christie’s novels in Australia in 1948. (Verse Chorus Press reissued Murder in the Telephone Exchange in 2014.)

Most book reviewers were full of praise for June’s maiden effort. However, she was completely floored by the following slap on the knuckles from A.R. McElwain, the influential crime fiction reviewer for two widely read daily newspapers, The Advertiser in Adelaide, South Australia, and The Herald in Melbourne, whom June later described as “a devotee of the detective story and a zealous guardian of its mores.” “Above all, Miss [sic] Wright must never again aggravate the honest student’s blood-pressure by resorting to a low, inexcusable trick to lead him off on the wrong track—right there on page one at that,” wrote McElwain in his review of Murder in the Telephone Exchange. This led to a friendly exchange of letters between the author and the reviewer. McElwain encouraged June to read The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) edited by Howard Haycraft. “It is the best anthology of practically everything good that has been written about detection stories and contains criticism and hints by all of the dons of the craft,” he said. June henceforth regarded McElwain as her literary guide.

JUNE WRIGHT IN 1952

So Bad a Death (1949), June’s second murder mystery, also features Maggie Byrnes, who is now married to John Matheson, a police inspector whom she met during the investigation of Sarah Compton’s murder. In this book the newlyweds rent “Dower House” in Middleburn, a fictitious Melbourne suburb, which was based on Ashburton, the real Melbourne suburb where June lived at the time. Despite Middleburn’s outward gentility, it proves to be a hotbed of crime. So Bad a Death was serialised on ABC radio and also in Woman’s Day.

June’s third book, The Devil’s Caress (1952), is more of a psychological thriller than a whodunit. It features Marsh Mowbray, an attractive young GP, who is unwittingly pitted against her boss, Katherine Waring, a Senior Honorary Physician at the hospital where she works, and Katherine’s husband Kingsley, a leading Melbourne surgeon, while staying at the Warings’ beach house at Matthews, a fictitious hamlet on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. “Mrs. Wright’s reportage is as ever brisk and competent,” commended A.R. McElwain in his review of The Devil’s Caress. “But I eagerly await the day when she concentrates more upon genuine, plausible detection and less upon melodramatic situations.”

For her fourth crime novel, Reservation for Murder (1958), June created the unassuming but strong-willed Catholic nun-detective Mother Mary St. Paul of the Cross – Mother Paul for short. She was based on Mother Mary Dorothea Devine (1900–1990), a Sister of Charity who was the head of the maternity ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne when June gave birth to twins there in 1946. In Reservation for Murder Mother Paul is in charge of Kilcomoden, a hostel for office girls and secretaries near Melbourne, which is also the scene of a murder and an apparent suicide. John Long, an imprint of Hutchinson, published this book. Writing didn’t make June rich; the royalties from Reservation for Murder paid for new sliding doors in the Wrights’ living room.

June’s fifth and sixth crime novels, Faculty of Murder (1961) and Make-Up for Murder (1966), also feature the inimitable Mother Paul. In Faculty of Murder the nun-detective runs Brigit Moore Hall, a fictitious Catholic women’s college at the University of Melbourne (the tower of Ormond College was on the book’s dust jacket). Mother Paul investigates the disappearance of a college resident and the death of a professor’s wife. In Make-Up for Murder the nun-detective is in charge of Maryhill Girls’ School in Melbourne. Mother Paul investigates the murder of a former school student and the disappearance of a famous TV singer. June stopped writing crime fiction altogether after that.

While having six crime novels published was a great achievement, June hit a couple of literary brick walls along the way. In 1952 Hutchinson rejected her crime novel The Law Courts Mystery, which was set in and around Melbourne’s law courts, because “the readers reported that although your book was likeable, with humour and movement, it was spoilt by the plot, which was unconvincing and rather muddled. Also, the relationship between the characters, even when they have a lot to do with each other, is always too remote and bloodless,” June’s publisher told her. The Law Courts Mystery was never published and the manuscript has now been lost.

On the basis of three critical readers’ reports Hutchinson also rejected the crime novel that June wrote following Reservation for Murder, which was called Duck Season Death. The first reader said: “There are very good features here, but the author . . . has in effect produced a rather stock-box novel of the whodunit house party variety.” In the second reader’s opinion, “if the author had strewn less red herrings around, her mystery would have been less confused and in consequence improved.” And the third reader said: “The mechanics of this story follow the old lines of the ‘country house’ murder, where everyone is suspect and the final denouement highlights the most insignificant character.” However, June’s book is much better and far more interesting than the readers’ criticisms suggest.

COVER PAGE OF THE ORIGINAL TYPESCRIPT

In Duck Season Death Athol Sefton, the publisher of an Australian literary magazine called Culture and Critic, is fatally shot while duck hunting in northern Victoria with his nephew Charles Carmichael, the crime fiction reviewer for Culture and Critic, who then sets out to solve his uncle’s murder by using his knowledge of detective stories. June suggested The Textbook Detective Story as an alternative title for Duck Season Death, and I suspect that her literary guide, the crime fiction reviewer A.R. McElwain, was the inspiration for the character of Carmichael. Furthermore, given Carmichael’s particular occupation, I’m sure that the irony of getting three negative, book-deal-shattering reviews of Duck Season Death was not lost on June—as disappointed as she must have been to receive them.

The good news is that everyone can now read Duck Season Death—albeit more than fifty years after June wrote it. What a marvellous time capsule this book is of everyday life in Australia in the late 1950s, as well as challenging the detective powers of the reader. Let’s hope that in the best traditions of Sherlock Holmes pastiches June’s family will one day discover The Law Courts Mystery hidden in a trunk somewhere in an attic.

DERHAM GROVES