So Bad a Death

by June Wright

  “I told Cornell to let you have a free hand, but always to be on guard. Your inimitable capacity for meddling helped us to set the trap.”

  “Just the bait,” I commented without rancour.

  We watched the leaping fire for a while in silence. It grew brighter as the daylight faded and the mist came up from the creek to end another perfect autumn day.

  “And he quoted Tennyson at me,” I said. “The old hypocrite.”

  “No, Maggie, you are wrong about Charles Ames. The old man really thought a new order at the Hall would be better. The Squire had corrupted enough of Middleburn.”

  The door of the lounge-room opened. I sat up quickly as Yvonne, flushed and smiling, came in. Behind her was Alan Braithwaite, bearing a tray of glasses in one hand and a gold-topped bottle wrapped in a white cloth in the other.

  “This has a wedding atmosphere about it,” I remarked, and saw Yvonne’s flush deepen. She nodded happily, slipping her hand through Braithwaite’s arm.

  “Champagne always tastes like vinegar and water to me. Is there any beer?” John asked, as he took the long envelope Alan held out to him.

  “This is an important occasion,” I said, frowning at him. “Yvonne and Alan are engaged. What’s this?” John had taken a document out of the envelope and put it on my knee. “That,” said John, “is for being a good girl. The title deeds of the Dower House.”

  THE END

  AN INTERVIEW WITH JUNE WRIGHT (1996)

  Lucy Sussex

  I interviewed June Wright in 1996, when working as a researcher for Stephen Knight’s history of Australian crime fiction, Continent of Mystery. At the time, she seemed a relic from another era. Of her contemporaries, the Australian crime writers active when she began writing in the 1940s: Arthur Upfield, Carter Brown, A. E. Martin, the Goyder sisters (who wrote as Margot Neville), June Wright was the only one still alive, and very much kicking. The previous month I had written to the Goyders’ nephew and received a long and informative letter about his aunts. But it was nothing like meeting the living, talking writer. Here was an opportunity not to be missed.

  As June Wright had not been active as a crime novelist for thirty years, I was not quite sure what to expect. It did not help that my car misbehaved on the freeway, so I arrived rather bothered as well as nervous. The lady who answered my knock belonged to the category of the elegant elderly—well coiffed and, as I would find, as sharp as tacks. She was instantly identifiable from the PR photos of decades earlier, although she introduced herself by saying I probably wouldn’t recognise her. “I recognised your nose,” I said, not altogether tactfully. She laughed: “Horse-faced!” We got on just fine after that. I began by asking June about her background and early history.

  LS: I know from an interview in the Post (28/3/48) with Frank Doherty that you were born June Healy. Doherty remembered you from school as a ‘shy little girl’. Was this true?

  JW: Well, it’s nice to be known as a shy little girl. I think I was rather a pert little girl, from memory.

  I was born in 1919 and I will be seventy-seven within the next couple of weeks. Born in Melbourne, and lived most of my life in Melbourne—Malvern. I had two brothers, one sister. I was the youngest of four. My father was in the public service, in the Audit Office. I started off in the Brigidine convent in Malvern, and then we went to Adelaide, because my father was moved there. I went to the Loreto convent in Adelaide, and then when we came back I finished my schooling at Mandeville Hall.

  There’s been a tremendous upheaval in Australia and I’ve been witness to the extraordinary changes that have been taking place, from my young days to the present time. To visualise that world that I was born into and grew up in and went to school in—it’s absolutely at variance with today’s society.

  LS: Do you recall the crime fiction you read when young?

  JW: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjorie Allingham—the women. [Mignon] Eberhart was a favourite: she was rather a romantic crime writer, but very entertaining. There was a series called the Crime Club, either Collins or Heinemann ran it. If you went to the library, you’d look for a book with the sign ‘Crime Club Book’, because they published only good crime writers.

  LS: When did you start writing?

  JW: I wrote my first story when I was about four . . . I think I always wanted to be a writer. One of my grandfathers, who died before I was born [Daniel Newham] . . . he was the son of the first Church of England clergyman at St Peters, East Melbourne. I came across a manuscript that he had started. It was obviously going to be the great Australian, definitive novel, but he didn’t go on with it. That was an inspiration. I always thought to myself, now I’d love to be able to justify his ambition by finishing something myself and having it published. But I never dreamt that I would get it published.

  LS: In the Post interview, you said you came across the advertisment for Hutchinson’s novel competition [which closed in June 1944] in a newspaper while wrapping up vegetable scraps.

  JW: It was really a stroke of luck. I’d written this manuscript and one night I was preparing the dinner—my husband and I, we lived in Ashburton—and I was putting the potato peelings and the pease pods and things into a sheet of paper. All of a sudden there was a little paragraph. Hutchinson’s of London were offering a competition for all stages and types of writing and there was a section for crime. And I thought: well, this is it! I’ll have a crack at this. So I sent the manuscript over to them.

  I wrote it in longhand, I can’t think onto a typewriter ... I’ve still got the original manuscript here, actually. In those days it was wartime and it was very difficult to get anything typed, but I managed to hire a typewriter. It had a very, very faded ribbon on it, so consequently I had to bang each key terribly hard. It was very badly set out but whoever read it . . . Evidently it caught the reader’s fancy. In time I had an air letter from London. It was the most thrilling experience of my life to get this letter!

  LS: In the 1940s, when you began to be published, there were a few other Australian women writing crime. Margot Neville [the sisters Margot Goyder and Ann Neville Joske] turned to crime writing in the 40s. Did you know about these writers? Read them? Ever meet them?

  JW: Margot Neville, I know that name. I don’t remember them.

  LS: Also Jean Spender, who was the wife of Sir Percy.

  JW: Oh really? That’s interesting, that’s why she was asked ... I went to Sydney for publicity purposes. At that time—this was just after the war—there was a certain Lord Mountevans who came out here with his wife—he was Evans of the Broke, who went down to the South Pole. And Mr Spender was there, and so was his wife. I’ve got a photograph somewhere or other, with me standing alongside them. I didn’t realise that was who she was. It was a very formal luncheon, really it was in honour of Lord Mountevans. I was alongside ... the publicist was getting a little bit of publicity for me. That was how it was. He was the star attraction.

  LS: She was a very striking looking woman, from the photos.

  JW [emphatic]: She was a pretty woman, yes.

  LS: You’ve said that the idea for Murder in the Telephone Exchange came while you were working in the Melbourne exchange, because people said ‘you could write a book about this place’.

  JW: It was, it was quite remarkable.

  LS: Why did you write about it using the form of detective fiction?

  JW: Aha! Here comes the answer. And it is true, too. The Exchange, I found, was a very exciting place to be in, because all sorts of dramatic things could and did happen. I was there when, at the beginning of the war, there was an aeroplane accident and we lost several very important men, including army commanders ... I was there during the very bad bushfires of 1939. We were involved with all those dramatic events. So I thought the best way to convey that sense of drama and urgency was to put it into the context of a murder story.

  LS: The other Australian women crime writers I mentioned earlier were Sydney-based, but you’re definitely a Melburnian. And pr
oud of it.

  JW: Very!

  LS: There’s a very strong sense of place in your writing, similar to Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab.

  JW: Actually this same grandfather I mentioned knew Fergus Hume. See, Melbourne was a very small place—even in my day. We knew everyone and everyone knew everyone else, or knew of them, or knew the family.

  [Here I bring out a photocopy of a page from the 1985 edition of Bookmark (the annual publication of the Australian Library Promotion Council), which reprints two of June Wright’s book covers and also a quote by the author, part of which she reads aloud]: [June Wright believes that Australian novelists] should not be self-conscious about giving their stories local settings ... Good heavens!

  LS: Did you say that?

  JW: Oh yes. Especially then ... this was late 1940s, early 1950s, and the writing in those days was self-conscious.

  LS: They were a bit precious, dragging in the kookaburras?

  JW: Yes, kookaburras and kangaroos down Collins Street. Instead of writing about something and its background, people would almost apologise for the background, or for the setting. In my book I considered that you just want to write absolutely naturally, and if people don’t know what the background is, they can jolly well find out for themselves. And that’s how it should be.

  We were an evolving nation, becoming more sophisticated, more open to world ideas. I tried to introduce that note, that we were on the world stage, as much as any other country.

  That’s another thing that one should always do, you really should write about the things that you know. There’s a story in everyone’s life.

  LS: You published Murder in the Telephone Exchange in 1948, So Bad a Death the following year, and The Devil’s Caress in 1952. Was that all from the impetus of the original acceptance, or did they contract you to write more?

  JW: The contract was for three books, with Hutchinson’s.

  LS: What were the terms of that contract?

  JW: I can’t remember now. The money was lovely, because it came out in English pounds . . . the rate increased by a quarter or a half or something at the time. That was very welcome.

  LS: Your first detective is Maggie Byrnes—single, working at the telephone exchange. She gets mixed up in murder and ends up marrying John Matheson, a policeman. In So Bad a Death, they’re married, with a small son, trying to buy a house in the suburbs . . . Was that a particular suburb, or just any outer suburb?

  JW: No, it was Ashburton. During the war all building stopped, so consequently Ashburton then was more or less an isolated township. The railway line wasn’t there—to get there we used to have to get to Camberwell and take a small train, which travelled across the empty paddocks, which is now Jordanville, all those places. Out here to Glen Waverly, which was the last [stop] on the line. Asburton was the last village really, on the outskirts of Melbourne. It was terribly hard to find a house. Very difficult for young people who got married after the war.

  LS: The striking image in that book is the old estate, very British-style, which is being encroached upon by suburbia.

  JW: That place still exists, in High Street Road. If you drive down, you’ll see a square tower. That was once the homestead for a big area. How I knew about it originally was that many many years ago when I used to go horseriding, they had a riding school there, three sisters called Desailly used to run it. And all that area, for acres and acres surrounding, was just open paddock, around this big house with its square tower. It’s very hard, even in my mind’s eye, to remember all those wide open paddocks.

  LS: Did you feel that Maggie as a protagonist could only go so far, fictionally? You abandoned her after two books.

  JW: Yes. Maggie had come to the end of her useful life. It was [her] use-by date. It was also time to take it out of the first person into a broader canvas, using various other characters. The Devil’s Caress was my first attempt in broadening the writing.

  [June Wright asked me to turn off the tape off this point, while she told me she got tired of people assuming Maggie was autobiographical. That said, she let me turn the tape on again.]

  LS: Good title.

  JW: Rubbish!

  LS: When I took your books out from the library, the checkout assistant said: ‘Good titles!’

  JW: ‘Doubt is the Devil’s caress.’ I don’t know where I came across that quotation. Funnily enough, I’ve always found [it] rather hard to think of a good title.

  LS: Shakespeare.

  JW: Or the Bible. So Bad a Death was a title from Shakespeare.

  LS: I understand it was originally called Who Would Murder a Baby?

  JW: They didn’t like that title.

  LS: The Devil’s Caress is the interim book between your two series characters, Maggie and Mother Paul. You have a young woman doctor as protagonist. Did you research that medical background?

  JW: Yes. At the time I had a woman pediatrician for my children, she was a wonderful doctor. She became very interested in what I had written. She gave me quite a lot of help.

  LS: Stephen Knight described the book as a psychological thriller.

  JW: It was supposed to be, too. I was taking myself a little bit too seriously at that stage.

  LS: I got the impression it was written more hurriedly than the other two.

  JW: Possibly it was, because I had a few more children at that stage. I had to fulfil a contract with the publisher and hurry it along.

  LS: So Bad a Death must be the only novel in which poison is administered via a baby’s dummy. There’s a lot of talk in it about the correct way to rear a child—was this the era of officious childrearing?

  JW: Doctor Truby King reigned supreme in those days, and we were all very conscientious mothers, bringing up our babies and caring for our children according to the book. No doubt that was reflected in the story.

  LS: This leads to your family. You wrote your first three novels despite having four children under six.

  JW: Four children under four. I had a son, and a daughter, and then twin boys. And then after a space of eight years I had another daughter and another son.

  LS: Several times you’ve commented that writing murder fiction was a good way of dealing with homicidal impulses towards children.

  JW: That was another line I used to shoot. Instead of wringing the children’s necks, I’d take it out on the typewriter.

  LS: You had roughly the same number of books as children.

  JW: Six books, six children. Six brain children, six physical children.

  LS: Kathy Lette has stated that every time a woman writer has a baby, she loses one or two books, in terms of time and energy. What do you think of this comment?

  JW: Oh I agree. I agree wholeheartedly, because your vitality as a mother is used on your children, and a similar vitality is needed for writing. It’s an exhausting business. Writing is almost as exhausting as looking after children. It’s an emotional exhaustion.

  LS: In the late 40s and 50s, you had some news coverage in which the journalists seemed quite incredulous that you could write and manage a family at the same time.

  JW: The press was always very kind to me, actually. There was only one occasion when I got bad press and that was a reviewer in Sydney—at one point of the review of the particular book, he suggested it would be a very good idea if I went to bed and let the children have the typewriter. But in those days you didn’t reply to your critics, which I think is good policy. It deprives the public of a lot of fun, of course—witness the Darville/Demidenko saga—but if you don’t reply to a critic they have nothing more to go on, you don’t feed them any more information. My minder wouldn’t let me reply. I was highly indignant, I was going to write a letter demanding an apology, but my minder at the time, he said: ‘No. You don’t reply.’

  LS: This was the PR person for Hutchinson’s?

  JW: Hutchinson’s had an office here in Melbourne, and this man was handling all the publicity. He pointed me in the right direction and stood on
my toe if I was saying something out of place.

  LS: Did you do any radio work at all?

  JW: Oh, quite a lot.

  LS: Did you appear on radio or write for the radio?

  JW: I appeared on the radio, just interview stuff.

  LS: So they were publicising you quite a bit. And you, despite saying that writers should be read and not seen . . .

  JW: . . . Not seen, nor heard, just read.

  LS: But you managed to do it?

  JW: Yes, but it was always an effort. I was on television a couple of times. I was on Tell the Truth. It was an American program in which there were three people, and one of them is the real person. There was a jury and they had to question the three people and find out which was the real writer. That was rather good fun, really, because all I had to do was sit there and look dumb, which wasn’t a difficult job, and these other two women, who were on with me, they lied like mad, you see, and I had to tell the truth. And we won, too.

  LS: Did you tuck this information away for use in Make-up for Murder?

  JW: Yes, quite a lot, because I also did a couple of interviews on Channel 2 and Channel 7. Oh yes, I picked up a bit of background information.

  LS: In your early interviews you described how you wrote—in the evening, after dinner, washing up and putting the children to bed.

  JW: I would sit down and write, or rather struggle to write. It would have been [five days a week]. It’s very hard to remember now. I think I used to set myself a certain number of words every night. See, Murder in the Telephone Exchange, the first one, I ran hot on that. I wrote that in six weeks. But the others became more laborious, and my time was at a premium, so I had to pace myself, give myself so many words to write.

  LS: That would be after a full day of housework, cooking, childcare, which started at 6.30 every day, except for washday, when it was 5.30, you said.

  JW: Deadly dull, when you come to think of it. Which was all the more reason why I wrote, because of that secret world. Wonderful!