FFB: Reservation for Murder - June Wright

THE STORY: As if the plague of anonymous notes being sent to the young women at Kilcomoden hostel were not enough now a dead body turns up in the garden -- the body of a strange man no one has ever laid eyes on before. Mary Allen had the unfortunate meeting with the corpse. Now she and Mother Mary St. Paul of the Cross, the rectress who oversees the running of the hostel, are teamed up with Detective Inspector Stephen O'Mara and Sergeant Wheeler of the Melbourne police plus a mysterious American who goes only by the name Joe in order to find out who the man is and why he was killed outside the women's boarding house. Is it all tied to the nasty poison pen notes? Or could it be related to a burglary that occurred at the hostel several months ago.

CHARACTERS: Reservation for Murder (1958) is Australian writer June Wright's fourth mystery novel but the first to feature her second series detective Mother Paul (let's stick with the shortened form of her name that she much prefers). In this first outing the elderly nun comes across as a mix of Father Brown and Miss Marple. She has the enigmatic speech patterns so often found in the parable laden tales of Chesterton's priest detective, but she is also a manipulative snoop in the manner of Christie's spinster sleuth. Much of her "detecting" is done by inference and instinctive understanding of human nature. She tends to have an eerie skill at getting others to do her bidding with her kind soft voice, subtle ambiguous suggestions, and implied directives. Unfortunately, she is doing much of the real detective work offstage with the police and leaving Mary to grapple with the shady verbal instructions on her own. And in the end there is a lot of non-fair play narrative that the reader is not privy to until the finale. There are a handful of clues to help guide the reader to the correct solution of the killer's identity, the author of the poison pen letters, and the person responsible for some other dreadful deaths, but in the end the we get an arbitrary resolution of the plot with a silly melodramatic boat chase involving a Napoleon of Crime that just comes out of nowhere.

Still the book is truly engaging. Reservation for Murder is one of the many domestic suspense novels with a mostly female cast that were being written in the US, UK and Australia during the 1950s. The emphasis in this story is on the relationships between the many women in the hostel, their petty jealousies, their closely guarded secrets, the friendships and "frenemy" types who show up in the nearly claustrophobic atmosphere of the all female boarding house. The novels and themes of Patricia Carlon, another underrated Australian crime writer, came to mind as I was getting near the end of this one. Wright is definitely more comfortable writing of female maliciousness as is evidenced in the other books that were reprinted by Verse Chorus Press a few years ago and are easily available to the reading public. The cast of characters is truly what makes this a mystery novel worth seeking out.

We have quite a well drawn cast of women here. Mary has two close friends who were my favorites of the bunch: Fenella King and Clare. Fenella is an Eve Arden type, all wise cracks and common sense, while Clare is the "mannish" athlete who adopts an odd Bertie Wooster style of speech peppering her sentences with "eh whats" and "old girls". They're the most fully developed of what often seems a shallow bunch of women. There is a nasty gossip named Verna, truly a sinister young woman and prime candidate as the author of the poison pen notes; two superficial interchangeable blondes called Betty and Jean chittering on mindlessly and obsessed with make up and clothes; mousy Alison Cunningham nearly always feeling sorry for herself; and mysterious new boarder Christine Farrow, slightly older than most of the 20-something women and a moody artiste with a snappish tongue and a dark secret she's not about to reveal to anyone until it's almost too late. They're all very intriguing characters, but can appear a bit like archetypes or even caricatures at times.

The most caricatured of the cast is the Gorgon widow Mrs. Carron-Doyle, a thoroughly unpleasant over-the-hill bully who badgers her female companion Mabel Jones into submission and treats all the young women like servants when poor ol' Jonesy is not to be found. I was hoping she'd end up a victim of the stealthy murderer. No such luck. However, as a sort of consolation prize to the reader she does get her comeuppance at the climactic fancy dress ball towards the end of the book.

The policemen characters are well done too. Sgt. Wheeler is a typical comic cop and appears in only few scenes until the arrival of his superior. For some reason Wright chooses to treat O'Mara, like Mother Paul. He too has a nearly sinister manner of getting others to do his bidding and he enlists Mary's help as a sort of undercover agent who will observe all the women and report back to him any unusual behaviors or incidents at Kilcomoden. The first meeting they have at a Chinese restaurant is both amusing for Mary's introduction to Asian cuisine and fascinating for O'Mara's masterful method of steering Mary away from her distaste at being a spy to seeing how helpful she can be not only to the police but her fellow boarders.

INNOVATIONS: Wright employs the traditional mystery novelist's gimmick of the dying clue in this book. The man stabbed to death in the garden manages to whisper what sounds like "Jess" to Mary just before he dies. Much of the first half of the book consists of Mary's clever ways to get the women to reveal their middle names, talk about their female relatives, and other methods of trying to uncover who this Jess might be. The answer to that mystery is revealed in the final pages and turns out to be of the most original and devious dying message tricks I've come across in quite a while. Not quite on par with Ellery Queen and probably the kind of clever clue that only a woman writer could dream up.

In fact the book is quite a celebration of all things female. I usually tire of books where women's wardrobes are discussed in great detail. But clothes play a very big part in the book. A favorite dress serves as major clue to prove that an apparent suicide was actually murder. One of the women works at a dress designer's fancy salon and the climax of the book is a dance where all the women spend a lot of time getting dolled up. One of the women is such a overdressed disaster that Betty and Jean, the two glamour girls, insist on giving her a makeover almost against her will. They tie her to a chair, pretty up her face and nails, and leave her in a bathroom while her hair sets. But... Something quite horrible happens to that young woman that was the biggest shock in the book.

THINGS I LEARNED: The book takes place in Melbourne and the setting itself was an eye opener. I'd never heard of a hostel managed by an order of nuns that is in essence a profit making boarding house. While it's never mentioned if the money the women pay to the hostel is then used for charity I'm guessing it is. Not only were there several real hostels run by nuns in Australia there are others throughout Europe and the North America. Some I learned only accept Catholics as guests. Now how do you prove that?

EASY TO FIND? Take a wild guess. That's right. Ridiculously scarce. Amazingly I own two copies and I found both of them online within days of one another, including one with the gorgeous DJ shown at the top of this post. Sheer luck, gang. I can see why this book was not one of the June Wright mysteries that was reprinted. It most likely has limited appeal to a primary female audience, though I readily admit I was truly captivated by the characters and was not entirely put off by its feminine outlook and emphasis on clothes, make-up and bitchy catfighting. If you live in Australia chances are you can find a copy in a local library, especially in the Melbourne area where Wright lived. But it looks to me to be very difficult to find this book anywhere else in the world. If you do come across a copy, I'd say it's worth it for the characters, the two shocking deaths that occur after the stabbing of the mystery man and as a good example of a nun detective in the early history of the genre before nun detectives became tiresome clichés.

FFB: So Bad A Death - June Wright

THE STORY: Maggie Byrnes who made her debut in Murder at the Telephone Exchange as a phone operator turned amateur sleuth, is on the case again in So Bad A Death (1949). This time she's married to policeman John Matheson who endures her inquisitiveness with limited tolerance. The newlyweds are in the market for a house and this leads Maggie to her meeting with Cruikshank, the unctuous real estate agent, who works for James Holland, self-appointed "squire of Middleburn".

Holland owns Dower House, a cottage that Cruikshank has been trying to sell for years, and it's a running joke of sorts to show it to prospective clients knowing full well that Holland will refuse the sale. Maggie, self-assured and not a little bit tough, is no match for him. She wins him over and the house is hers. Weeks later "Squire" Holland invites a motley group of his "subjects" to what turns out to be a very odd dinner party and things turn sinister. Holland is not well liked by his family nor the locals and it comes as no surprise when his body is found on the grounds with a bullet in his head. Maggie becomes way too involved in the case and frustrates her husband to the point of exasperation. Over the course of her thorough but entirely unorthodox murder investigation she endangers herself, another woman's child, and her own son. Some amateur sleuths don't know when to stop meddling.

THE CHARACTERS: June Wright has been called Australia's own Agatha Christie. While her plotting can often be intricate it's not a devious or ingenious as Dame Agatha's. And the laudatory comments from new critics and reviewers of her work who purport that she invented the amateur female sleuth are exaggerated to the extreme. Maggie is very much in line with characters like Pam North, Jean Abbot, Anne McNeill, and to a certain extent Haila Troy -- all wives who turn detective alongside their equally nosy husbands. Unlike many of those women Maggie has a stronger, tougher personality. She takes no BS from anyone. Brusque, forward, opinionated and -- dare I say it -- a bully at times, Maggie suffers no fools. She has little room for sympathy in the face of weakness as in this passage where she encounters an enraged and possibly inebriated nurse: "She started to weep in a maudlin fashion. It was disgusting and rather alarming, alone with this foolish woman in the middle of the wood..."

Rather than comparing June Wright's style of detective novel to Christie's work I'd class her with fellow practitioners of domestic melodramas and Neo-Gothics like Ursula Curtiss, Mignon Eberhart (in her 50s period), and even Margaret Millar. The strong female protagonist who recognizes her faults at the eleventh hour and manages to prevent herself from doing real harm as a result of her prying reminds me of the women characters that populate the work of Millar.

The supporting players are highlighted by an assortment of oddballs like the malingering invalid with a waspish tongue Mrs. Power-Potts; her slavish daughter Diane; Ursula Mulqueen who dresses in pink taffeta and cultivates an artificially cheery persona to mask her malaise; Ernest Mulqueen Ursula's rancher father, the most Australian character in the cast; a handsome Lothario with the ludicrous name of Nugent Parsons; and the beleaguered young widow Yvonne Holland who is bullied by her father-in-law while struggling to care for her chronically ailing baby boy.

THE ATMOSPHERE: The depiction of Dower House and the Holland estate are prime examples of the Neo-Gothic oppressive households and the imposing (often haunted) buildings that characterize the old 18th and 19th century Gothic novel. Wright also has a talent in painting frightening pictures and raises a few goose pimples in the formulaic "traipsing through the woods" sequences so often found in this subgenre. The sense of trepidation is well conveyed and she manages to transform the "faux English spinney" surrounding the Holland's Australian estate into a sinister landscape fraught with hidden dangers and prowlers lurking in the shadows. There are a couple of effective scenes when Maggie is looking for evidence and whispered voices and animal noises punctuate the chilly silence.

INNOVATIONS: So Bad A Death touches on two fairly taboo topics in detective fiction -- abortion and child murder. Wright seems to be fairly modern in her understanding of the frustrations of motherhood, the fear of entrusting your children to the care of physicians and nannies, and discussions of the ethics and morality of abortion. These asides into medical ethics also serve as clever bits of misdirection and sway the reader's suspicions while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the real motivations of the villains in what turns out to be an elaborate conspiracy.

One of the best bits is that Maggie's little boy Tony turns out to be a secondary detective, albeit an accidental one. His boisterous play and curiosity lead to the literal uncovering of two key pieces of evidence - one found in the rough of a golf course, the other in a sand pit he was digging in. That Maggie is blithely ignorant of the importance of these items until it's almost too late only serve to underscore Wright's ideas about motherhood and the role of the stay at home wife. Throughout the story we are reminded that Maggie sees raising a child as dreary routine and how often her little boy's behavior is dismissed as not only bothersome but irrelevant. Nothing could be further form the truth. In Wright's mysteries, as in the best whodunits, a seemingly minor incident can prove to be of grave importance.

THINGS I LEARNED: Parthian shot - I have read this phrase many a time and never bothered to look up its origin. It's used to describe a cutting remark or insult made as someone departs or a way to end a conversation rudely. The term comes from an ancient Iranian tribe of warriors known for their archery skill. The Parthian shot was their skillful habit of releasing arrows backwards at their enemy as they retreated on horseback.

Australian lingo often left me in the fog. The word "dummy" is footnoted as being a slang term for a baby pacifier. That was very helpful. But later in the story Maggie picks up a jar of "comforter smear" and I was utterly confused. No footnote for that phrase. Did people actually put some kind of paste on quilts to disinfect them or something? That seemed ridiculous to me. An internet search turned up a very vulgar Twitter comment using both comforter and smear to describe something so disgustingly absurd it made me roar with laughter, but didn't help me to understand what it meant in Wright's book. In the final pages I learned that "comforter" is also a synonym for pacifier and that the comforter smear was a malt extract that was put on the pacifier to make it more tasty. It was crucial to understanding something utterly insidious that the main villain does. To be left in the fog wondering what "comforter smear" was left me feeling a little bit cheated that I couldn't' figure out something on my own that perhaps a British or Australian reader would just take for granted.

EASY TO FIND? Yes, it is! Isn't that good news? So Bad a Death is one of three June Wright mystery novels that have been reissued by Verse Chorus Press. Buy a brand new copy or get one of many cheaper "newer" copies from the many resellers out there in the digital shopping mall we call the internet. I enjoyed this one more than Duck Season Death which I reviewed last year. This book impressed me so much that I went looking for more. I managed to track down a rare June Wright title (not among the reissued titles) purchased from an Australian dealer for a mere $23 and will be reviewing that one next month.

FFB: Duck Season Death - June Wright

Sometimes when someone unearths a forgotten writer and attracts the attention of eager publishers looking for unique material to reprint we as readers not only get new easy to obtain editions of out of print books we get new books never before published.  Such is the case with Duck Season Death, originally written in the mid-1950s by Australian mystery writer June Wright but foolishly rejected by her publisher Hutchinson for being too old-fashioned and formulaic. Odd thing is the publisher's reading committee members' harsh comments praised the writing and humor in the book while summarily condemning Wright for writing what amounts to a rather clever murder mystery. One wonders what they expected a mystery writer to write. In any case, Duck Season Death is now published for the first time in this handsome trade paperback edition with an introduction by Derham Groves, Australian architect professor and crime fiction devotee. Groves re-discovered Wright's mystery novels several years ago and helped bring her back out of obscurity into the light for an exhibit called "Murderous Melbourne." S. H. Courtier about whom I have written enthusiastically was also featured in the exhibit.

Duck Season Death is, as its title suggests, a mystery with a hunting background. It might also be thought of as both a homage and send-up of the standard country house whodunnit. On the surface it does seem to be formulaic with its detestable murder victim, Athol Sefton, publisher of a highbrow literary magazine and an assortment of suspects all of whom hate him for one reason or another providing us with a variety of motives for the murder. The local authorities seem to want to dismiss his death as a hunting accident until Sefton's nephew Charles Carmichael points out that his uncle was shot with a rifle and all the hunters shooting ducks were armed with shotguns. It doesn't help that there are multiple rifles matching the caliber bullet found in Uncle Athol's body and that everyone at the Duck and Dog Inn is a crackshot with firearms.

But Wright does something clever and a bit irritating at the same time.  She makes Charles a book reviewer who has spent his entire journalistic career writing about detective novels for a special column in his uncle's magazine.  His fanciful ideas are scoffed at by the local doctor, the lazy policeman and later a visiting investigator looking into another suspicious death.  He is constantly being told by the law that he has read too much fiction and that a real murder is nothing like those he finds on the printed page. Charles becomes increasingly exasperated with these dismissals and demands that everyone look at the evidence. Murder is obvious, he practically screams at them. Actually he does scream a couple of times. All the talk about book murders versus real life killing gets to be a little too much even though it is clear that Wright intends it for comic effect. By the time we get to page 156 there is this exchange between the two detectives:

"And you're hoping to trace the call?" asked McGrath sadly. "I wish you luck my boy. I've only known that stunt to come off in books."
"Oh shut up about books!" snapped Charles.

Please do! I said smiling to myself. But I kept reading all the way to the somewhat surprising finale.

There is some darn good detection in this novel encompassing old standbys like muddy boots and  ballistics wizardry to highly technical forensic evidence, at least for the 1950s. Mixed into the puzzling murder on the lake is a questionable natural death of Athol's wife, a plethora of family secrets, and some wild accusations that reminded me of the novels of Christianna Brand. Wright manages to pull off some fine character work, especially in the sardonic owner of the hunting lodge Ellis Bryce. She shows a healthy sense of humor sprinkled throughout the mayhem and throws in a nod or two to Great Detectives of mysterydom. In fact, the solution is predicated on one of the most well known rules in detective fiction. The third section is entitled "The Impossible Remainder" and it is only when Charles is reminded of the famous Holmesian maxim "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable must be the truth." that he finally can assemble the clues and come up his nearly flawless solution.  But Wright has one last trick up her sleeve. One twist too many perhaps and not as much of a surprise to this reader, but an admirable job all the same.

Soon all seven of June Wright's mystery novels will be reprinted by Dark Passage Books, an imprint of Verse Chorus Press. Currently three of her books are available in smart looking trade paperback editions. In addition to Duck Season Death, there is Murder at the Telephone Exchange (1948), Wright's debut mystery novel, also with an introduction by Groves and So Bad a Death (1950) with an introduction by Lucy Sussex. All three are available through the usual online booksellers or can be ordered from your own local bookstore. Why not introduce yourself to yet another impressive Australian writer of the late Golden Age of Detective Fiction?

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Reading Challenge update: Golden Age card, space O3 - "Animal in title"