by Ryan O'Neill
When Claudia was ten, she was awoken by muffled cries coming from her parents’ bedroom across the hall. The terrified child crept to their door and peeked through the keyhole. On the bed she saw her father lying on her mother, who appeared to be struggling for her life. As the distraught Claudia watched, the violence of her father’s attack increased until he collapsed on her mother, who had gone limp. Claudia burst into the room and leapt on top of her father, scratching at his bare back as she screamed, “Murderer!” The hysterical child was carried to her bedroom by her mother, who was flushed and bedraggled but very much alive. Nine months later, Clara Calthrop died in childbirth along with her baby. In A Red Herring Claudia Gunn was to muse that her accusation against her father had been correct, only a little premature.
Alasdair Calthrop was overcome by a great melancholy in the years that followed his wife’s death, and Claudia was left much to herself. The events she had witnessed in her parents’ bedroom had cured her of her ambition to become a detective; she decided instead that she would write about detectives. With her mother dead and her father usually absent, she was free to read all the mysteries she wished. She began with The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, then the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels as they appeared in the Strand Magazine, and also the Australian mystery stories of Waif Wander and James Skipp Borlase. Among the hundreds of pages of juvenilia she produced were dozens of short stories, including “The Sunstone”, a Collins pastiche set during the gold rushes, and “The Swag Bag of Sherlock Holmes”, which proposed that the English detective had travelled to Australia after his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893.
In November 1902, at a ball in Double Bay, Claudia Calthrop was playing the parlour game “Murder” when she met Quincy Gunn. Claudia was the murderer and Gunn her first victim. Gunn was fourteen years Calthrop’s senior, a former sailor who had worked his way around the world before returning to the city of his birth. A number of his nautical sketches had been published in the Bulletin, where he was now employed as a reporter. Gunn was already developing a reputation as a muckraker with his front-page revelations about corrupt customs officials and thieving dockworkers. Claudia was besotted by the handsome and exotic Gunn, who called often at the Calthrop house. In May 1903 Gunn asked Alasdair Calthrop for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Calthrop, in great pain from the prostate cancer that would kill him within a year, refused the match. He told Claudia that he did not trust Gunn, believing him to be a fortune-hunter. Disconsolate, Claudia acceded to her father’s wishes, and Gunn dropped out of sight. He returned to Sydney later that year, however, having researched an article featuring the reminiscences of gold miners around Echunga in the 1850s. After a private meeting, Claudia’s father reconsidered Gunn’s request. The couple were married on 13 January 1904.
The Gunns purchased a large house in Burwood and after months of renovations they held regular parties there, entertaining the cream of Sydney’s society. Quincy was by now political correspondent for the Bulletin and politicians were frequent visitors to their home, which Claudia christened “Mysteriosa”. The Gunns’ weekend gatherings became legendary, and for years Claudia played the part of society hostess, setting aside her writing to help further her husband’s career. Almost every weekend dozens of guests would congregate at “Mysteriosa” to dance, play tennis or croquet, eat fine food, borrow a book from Claudia’s massive library of mystery novels (the largest in the Southern Hemisphere) and take part in the elaborate games she devised for their entertainment. Writers, editors, publishers, artists, composers, musicians and politicians all enjoyed the Gunns’ hospitality, and the connections they made led to Quincy leaving the Bulletin to become editor of Lone Hand and then in 1912 chief editor of the Southern Cross, where he was to remain until his death nearly five decades later.
During the war, when she was not planning opulent parties, Claudia Gunn began writing what would become her first published novel, The Death of Vincent Prowse, but by 1916 work on the manuscript had stalled as Gunn cast around for a detective to solve her mystery. Originally the protagonist of The Death of Vincent Prowse was to have been blind, but Gunn was anticipated in this by the American mystery writer Ernest Bramah and his detective Max Carrados. For months Gunn toyed with the idea of writing about a deaf detective, then a mute detective, even briefly considering a blind-deaf-mute detective, before dismissing the idea as being too difficult to realise. She wondered if her novel would ever be finished. At last, in July 1923, Gunn and her husband went to see Nanook of the North (1922) at a cinema in Kings Cross. In A Red Herring Gunn recalled the birth of her detective:
Watching Nanook hunting the walrus in the freezing Antarctic [sic], I suddenly envisioned an eskimo stalking a different prey in a different locale; no less a murderer in no less than the Australian bush. Thus was Makittuq Arnaaluk born, and the first of the cases he solved was The Mystery of the Writer’s Block.
Gunn completed The Death of Vincent Prowse three months later and submitted the manuscript to Berkeley & Hunt. Publisher Erasmus Hunt had enjoyed some glorious weekends at “Mysteriosa”, and wrote personally to Gunn to express his sincere regret that they would not be taking on her novel. Hunt explained that the market was flooded with English detective novels, and the public would simply not accept a mystery set in Australia, no matter how wonderfully written. Hunt’s private handwritten report on The Death of Vincent Prowse, preserved in the company’s archives, told a different story. He criticised the book for being “an awful mess” and confessed he was still unsure how some of the murders had been carried out. What was more, he thought the author was not certain either. Despite this rejection, Hunt was soon invited back to “Mysteriosa”, where he enjoyed a private breakfast with the Gunns. When the novel was resubmitted six weeks later, it this time found an enthusiastic proponent in Hunt, who generously acknowledged his original mistake in turning the book down.
The Death of Vincent Prowse was published in January 1924. The sales were disappointing, even for a first novel, and the reviews indifferent, with one exception. Walter De Vere, literary critic for the Western Star, devoted five thousand words to ridiculing Gunn’s novel in an article titled “The Death of Decent Prose”, which echoed many of the issues Hunt had found in his original assessment of the novel:
The plot is incoherent; at least three of the murders are left unexplained, and while the reader is assured time and again that the locked room Vincent Prowse died in has no secret entrances or exits, the murderer is later revealed to have escaped through a concealed panel behind a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. The investigating detective is an ass; for all his eating of tuna, the “brain food” that will help him solve the murder, his method of reasoning is neither deductive nor inductive but merely ineffective. The author assures us that Makittuq Arnaaluk is the world’s first Eskimo detective, but I’m afraid he also holds a less noble distinction: he is undoubtedly the world’s worst detective. The greatest mystery in the novel is how it was ever published.
Gunn had entertained De Vere many times at “Mysteriosa” and was saddened by the review. Still, she refused to say an unkind word about the critic, and was one of the first to defend him when De Vere lost his position at the Western Star amid rumours of grossly immoral conduct. At the same time the front wall of his house in Ryde was daubed in red paint with the words “DE VERE RHYMES WITH Q---”. Matters came to a head in June when the police, acting on information received, arrested the critic and charged him with sodomy; eight male prostitutes came forward to testify against him. De Vere was granted bail but returned to an empty house. His wife, Judith, had left him, taking their four-year-old son, Billy, with her. On 22 September, the night before the commencement of his trial, De Vere was found dead in a cheap hotel in Milsons Point. Among his few personal effects was a heavily annotated copy of The Death of Vincent Prowse. Although De Vere was a Catholic, he was buried in a municipal cemetery four days later. The Sydney literati shunned the funeral. Apart from De Vere’s e
stranged wife and son, the only mourners were Claudia and Quincy Gunn.
The publicity surrounding De Vere’s suicide sparked renewed interest in Gunn’s novel, and a second printing in November 1924. By then Gunn had completed two further Makittuq Arnaaluk mysteries, which were published in January and July 1925. A Dish Best Served Cold saw the detective confronted with the case of a retired colonel poisoned by a bowl of gazpacho, and Ice in His Veins featured the puzzle of how a man could freeze solid in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert. The critical reception of these two novels could not have been more different from that of Gunn’s debut. The Bulletin proclaimed A Dish Best Served Cold to be the greatest Australian crime novel since Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and bestowed on Gunn a nickname that she privately thought gauche, “The First Sheila of Crime”. De Vere’s successor at the Western Star went even further, calling the novel a masterpiece. Despite these and other almost impossibly enthusiastic reviews, readers took much longer to be convinced of the merits of Gunn’s writing. Both novels sold fewer copies than The Death of Vincent Prowse had initially, and this time there was no sensational suicide to capture the public’s interest and boost sales. Despite this, Berkeley & Hunt remained loyal to Gunn, with Erasmus Hunt particularly insistent that the company continue to publish her books, no matter how great the financial loss. His fidelity was to be rewarded, eventually. It was not until her twelfth book, Snow Red (1934), that sales of Gunn’s novels started to climb, and her seventeenth, Murder in Muloobinba (1939), that she had her first bestseller, and was given the sobriquet, “The Antipodean Agatha”. Readers did not appear to care that every one of the Arnaaluk stories follows precisely the same pattern. A murder occurs early in the novel, usually in the first chapter. The police, in the shape of Chief Inspector Phineas Blountley-Thicke, are perplexed, and reluctantly call in Makittuq Arnaaluk to consult on the case. Arnaaluk interviews the rapidly thinning group of suspects as the murderer strikes again, usually several times. All the while the detective consumes dozens of tins of tuna in order to stimulate his “thinking box” and mutters the occasional proverb, such as “Only a fool dances on thin ice.” Finally, the last remaining suspects (or, in the case of Death in a Cold Climate (1959), the last remaining suspect) are called together and Arnaaluk reveals the murderer, to Blountley-Thicke’s (if seldom the reader’s) astonishment.
Though sales of Gunn’s books continued to rise throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the novels proved far less successful outside of Australia, with only two out of fifty-nine appearing abroad. A Dish Best Served Cold, mystifyingly retitled Death of an Ice Blonde, was republished by Faber & Faber in London shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. At that time mystery novels were enjoying a boom, but sales of Gunn’s book were unexpectedly sluggish. Similarly, The Case of the Abominable Showman (1941), retitled Murder in the Circus for the American market, was met with little fanfare when published by New York’s Mystery House Paperbacks in 1944. The only overseas review of any of Gunn’s novels was dismissive. Mystery critic Anthony Boucher devoted two sentences to Murder in the Circus in his November 1944 column in the Washington Post: “An arctic detective in the Antipodes can’t catch a cold, never mind a murderer. Less Nanook of the North, more Badbook of the South.”
In A Red Herring, Gunn devotes only a few pages to the years between 1950 and 1959, observing that they were, on the whole, so pleasantly uneventful that they could have been summarised in three words: “We were happy.” Every year on 13 January, her wedding anniversary, another Arnaaluk novel would appear in bookshops around the country beneath large purple signs featuring an attractive model with the slogan, “Start the New Year with a BANG! Start the New Year with a GUNN!” The novel would go through at least three printings and receive unanimously admiring reviews. Quincy remained devoted and supported her through the greatest sadness of her life: that she could not have children. Despite this, the Gunns were content, and their legendary weekend parties at “Mysteriosa” continued to attract the most talented, most famous and most powerful in the country. The decade was capped by Claudia Gunn being made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959.
The 1960s were less kind. Gunn continued to enjoy excellent health, but her beloved Quincy died in his sleep in August 1961. There followed an unseemly spat with Albert Mackintosh, the editor of Northerly, who rejected a poem Gunn had written in memory of her husband’s passing. With Quincy’s death, Gunn withdrew from public life, and there were no more parties at “Mysteriosa”. Berkeley & Hunt brought out a new Arnaaluk mystery every year, although privately Gunn admitted to having had enough of the character, and of the letters she continued to receive from “do-gooders” objecting to his being called an Eskimo instead of an Inuit. In 1964 she confided to her agent, Oscar Musgrave, “Sometimes I wish M.A. would choke to death on a fishbone.” A new generation of reviewers and writers agreed. The novels published after Quincy Gunn’s death were received with antagonism and sometimes outright contempt, despite their being substantially better written, thanks to the editorial guidance of Robert Bush. Gunn’s readers paid no attention to the reviews; sales of her novels reached their peak in 1968 with Cold Comfort Harm.
In 1972 Berkeley & Hunt approached the novelist with a proposal for an authorised biography. After some hesitation, Gunn assented, with the proviso that she could vet the biographer. Initially Stephen Pennington agreed to the project, confident that his lengthy life of Alexander Fernsby would soon be completed. By 1973 Gunn had lost patience with Pennington and instead turned to Will Deverall, a mystery critic and historian who had always looked kindly on Gunn’s novels in his reviews. In June of that year, Gunn invited Deverall to “Mysteriosa” to discuss the project. Satisfied as she was with the deferential Deverall, her decision to hire him was sealed by the presence of his four-year-old daughter, Rachel, who accompanied her father to the meeting. Gunn doted on the little girl and would often look after her during the time that Deverall spent researching in the basement archives of “Mysteriosa”. Deverall completed the final draft of the biography in August 1975. On the last day of that month he went to “Mysteriosa” to personally deliver a copy of the manuscript to Gunn, who had, coincidentally, just finished her latest, and final, Arnaaluk novel, An Icicle for an Icicle. The biographer and his elderly subject had tea and cake together, then Deverall took his leave, telling Gunn he hoped she would enjoy the book.
The body of Claudia Gunn was found in her library the next morning by the butler. She had died at her desk while reading her biography; a heart attack had taken her on the last page. She was buried beside her husband in Cawdor cemetery. Obituaries recalled a kindly, eccentric woman who loved her husband deeply and was dedicated to the craft of mystery writing. An Icicle for an Icicle, which saw the death of Makittuq Arnaaluk, was published in December 1975, later winning the prestigious Gold Bludgeon from the Society of Australian Crime and Mystery Writers, an honour that had eluded Gunn while she lived. Though this would have seemed a propitious time to release Gunn’s biography, Berkeley & Hunt remained tight-lipped on the matter, and it was rumoured that Will Deverall had taken the project elsewhere.
Deverall’s biography, The Mystery of Claudia Gunn: An Unauthorised Investigation, was brought out in September 1977 by New Dimensions following an unsuccessful court case in which Berkeley & Hunt attempted to prevent publication, citing breach of contract. The biography contained sensational revelations about the personal lives of Claudia and Quincy Gunn, including Quincy’s serial philandering, Claudia’s kleptomania and her affair with Vivian Darkbloom, and the Gunns’ brutal treatment of their domestic staff. The most damaging disclosure was Deverall’s discovery of a secret “blackmail chamber” that lay hidden behind a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in the basement archives of “Mysteriosa”. When the Gunns had first renovated their house, they had added dozens of spy holes and secret passages from which they could observe the guests who came to their weekend parties. In twenty-six large fi
ling cabinets, labelled from “Arson” to “Zoophile”, the Gunns had amassed a staggering amount of evidence detailing the immoral and often criminal behaviour of hundreds of Australian writers and editors, critics, reviewers, booksellers, artists, politicians and publishers. The Gunns had used this information to terrorise anyone who stood in the way of Claudia’s literary ambitions and Quincy’s career in journalism. The entries stretched from 1905 to 1961, the year of Quincy Gunn’s death, and presented proof of affairs, fetishes, addictions, embezzlements, manslaughters, assaults, cruelty to animals, espionage, fraud, pimping, prostitution, tax evasion, drunk-driving and vandalism. Many of the Gunns’ victims had been forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy silence, while others had been compelled to grant “favours”, like Erasmus Hunt of Berkeley & Hunt, who had been coerced into publishing Claudia Gunn’s first novel. Some, such as the writer Sydney Steele, had been destroyed. In late 1945 the elderly Steele threw himself and the only copy of his unpublished memoir from the Manly ferry and drowned after the Gunns threatened to reveal his dalliance with his goddaughter, Vivian Darkbloom, if he did not pay them two thousand pounds.