The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Someone is attempting to knobble two outsider runners for the Melbourne Cup, the race that stops the Australian nation. The only reason can be that the horse’s owners are vying for the affections of Diana Ross, heiress to a vast fortune. Who is the villain? One of the horse’s owners, jealous Senor Alverey, wealthy Argentinian landowner, or the mysterious Hellburg, mastermind of Melbourne’s criminal underworld - only Tom Pink can find the culprit. Tom Pink, the diminutive jockey enters the seedy underworld of Melbourne at the height of the Depression, to find the truth of the mystery that killed his best friend.

  THE GREAT

  MELBOURNE CUP

  MYSTERY

  Arthur Upfield

  Introduced & Edited by

  Stuart Mayne

  ETT IMPRINT

  Exile Bay

  An IMPRINT book

  Imprint is a division of ETT Imprint

  PO Box R1906, Royal Exchange NSW 1225, Australia

  First published in 1996.

  This first digital edition published in 2016

  Copyright © William Upfield 1933, 1996, 2016

  Introduction © Stuart Mayne 1996.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the Publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-925416-62-6 (eBook)

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 A Strange Side Bet

  2 When You Are Ready

  3 A Sporting Run

  4 I’ll Try It

  5 In A Hurry

  6 A Man And Three Horses

  7 The Doctor

  8 Silly Little Fool

  9 His Chance

  10 The Stranger

  11 Will Do Well

  12 The Letter

  13 The Mysterious Mr. Leader

  14 A Good Trainer

  15 They’re Off!

  16 Taken For A Ride

  17 The Parade

  18 21 Starters

  19 Met Trouble

  20 Knifed!

  21 Too Old

  22 Very Strange

  23 The Police

  24 Mother Hubbard

  25 Dented Three Heads

  26 Poisoned Needle

  27 A Piece of Scalp

  28 In Grave Danger

  29 The Scorpion

  30 The Hooded Man

  31 The Aftermath

  Glossary

  Introduction

  The horse racing track has always acted as a lure to the crime author. The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery is set during the racing season leading up to and following the running of the Melbourne Cup. Arthur W. Upfield (1882-1964), giant of Australian crime fiction—by virtue of his creation of the part Aboriginal detective, Napoleon Bonaparte—successfully put his pen to the task that inspired the likes of Nat Gould, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and Dick Francis.

  Horse racing has always held an important place in Australian culture. Through the early days of colonisation, especially the early days of Melbourne, to the 1930s, horse racing out stripped the popularity of cricket and Australian Rules Football. Even today horse racing is the second most popular spectator sport in Australia, after Australian Rules Football.

  The first race meeting at Melbourne was held on 6-7 March 1838. The track for this race started at the present site of the North Melbourne railway station and ended at the foot of Batman’s Hill, where Spencer St. railway station now stands.

  The next year the same race meeting was held on the ground called ‘The Racecourse’. After a name change The Racecourse became Flemington Racecourse, named after a local butcher, Bob Fleming. This racecourse is the present site of the Melbourne Cup, raced on the first Tuesday of November every year.

  Many Australians, whether they lived in the country or in the city, have always gambled on a race horse. Indeed, The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery begins with a once popular form of race meeting, the country picnic race meeting. Like a country cricket match, the picnic race meeting was less serious than city events. The emphasis of the picnic race was on community togetherness, rather than high stakes betting or valuable cups. When owners try to run their horses ‘dead’ at these meetings the scam becomes a comic spectacle, rather than a villainous plot.

  The business that horse racing became in early Australia offered many opportunities for corruption. Rigged races with horses exceeding their previous form by way of a double, or ring in; promising horses being ‘nobbled’ and fixing the jockey’s weights have all been popular forms of corruption in horse racing. By no means have these practices been isolated to Australia, but in this country the verve and popularity of the sport of horse racing has led to these illegal means taking predominance in the Australian psyche. Newspapers, still now, report racing scandals as front page headlines in Australia. Recently, a ring in has been prominently featured in national newspapers. All types of racing scams are old and tested, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

  Upfield mentions some of the recent contemporary schemes of the day in relation to the action of The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery. In fiction, as in fact, racing scams draw high minded indignity from both the punters and owners of affected horses alike; horses are doped, people spy on horses in training, a jockey is ‘taken for a ride’ and horses are run ‘dead’. The horses Kambull, Gunroom and Cevantes, in chapter 14 were real horses and were nobbled. Much of the contemporary flavour of Australia and Melbourne during the depression of the early 1930s is gained by the weaving of fact and fiction throughout this novel.

  In 1931 Upfield left his beloved outback, where he had lived since arriving in Australia in 1910, and began living in Perth, West Australia to make his living as a writer. At the end of 1932 he was in Melbourne, Victoria working as a staff writer at The Herald newspaper.

  By 1932 Upfield had published five novels through London publishers Hutchinson and was beginning to make a name for himself as an adequate writer of thriller and romance novels. He was becoming a well known Australian author, but the most probable reason Upfield was given a job at The Herald in Melbourne was that in 1932 the author had been a prominent player in a sensational murder case in West Australia.

  Upfield had met a man called Snowy Rowles while working the rabbit fences of West Australia’s wheat belt. Rowles used Upfield’s descriptions from The Sands of Windee to kill two men, dispose of their bodies and steal their property. Snowy Rowles was hanged in Perth on 13 June 1932.

  Newspapers serialised Upfield’s novels as a lead up to the murder trial, and Upfield wrote a serialised novel, Breakaway House for the Perth Mail in 1932. At the end of 1932 Upfield was hot property for the newspapers of Australia, another novel was commissioned for serialisation. Mr. Jelly’s Business was published in Melbourne’s The Herald during the summer of 1932. Mr. Jelly’s Business was the only serialised novel Upfield wrote that was published in book form during his lifetime.

  The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery began its life as a newspaper serial in the spring of 1933 and remained so until re-discovered during research. Upfield had three weeks before the serial was to be published to begin the novel and it was written over the period of eight weeks (the novel was half completed when the serial began publication). Upfield was told by his editor that the novel had to encompass the Melbourne Cup and that the running of the fictional Melbourne Cup be published on the day of the ‘live’ race.

  In the manner of his usual writing style Upfield began the novel by using his extensive knowledge of the outback and bush towns to give his fiction foundations. Mount Lion is a fictional township, and is also mention
ed in the novel The Sands of Windee, but is based on a real township. Mount Lion can be traced to a town called Tibooburra in far western NSW, 24 miles from Milparinka. The fictional Bulka station and homestead can be traced to a station called Wompah, which lies 30 miles north east of Tibooburra. Milparinka and Wilcannia are small towns in north-western NSW, visited by the author during his days in the bush. Upfield believed in rooting his fiction to the real world, particularly since his stories were so exotic to many city dwellers.

  The author then carried this process further to include fictional and non-fictional horses in the novel. The horses he mentioned as being victims of doping at Albury and Caulfield are real and contemporary of The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery. The other horses mentioned in the novel, with the exception of Carbine, are fictional. It is an important element of Upfield’s fiction that he lay foundations for his novels in contemporary society. In this way Upfield mirrors some of the desperation for finding solutions to the mystery of The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery with actual events in Australian racing of the period.

  Days before the 1930 Caulfield Cup, Phar Lap, that paragon of Australian champion racing horses, and his legendary companion, Tommy Woodcock, were assaulted while on an early morning walk in the streets beside the race track. Men in a large, black American car fired revolver shots to scare Phar Lap, when this did not work the men fired at the horse, missing it, before racing away. The culprits were never found. By April 1932 Phar Lap was dead in America, after convincingly winning the Aqua Caliente Handicap in Mexico. A depression affected population in Australia would never accept that Phar Lap had not been poisoned by interests in the American racing scene. The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery must have reminded a Melbourne audience, with Phar Lap’s death a recent memory, of mysterious identities trying to control their favourite sport.

  The characters of The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery are identifiably Upfield; full of individual idiosyncrasies to distance them from the crowd: Tom Pink, the alcoholic jockey and stuttering ‘coulda been’; Old Masters, whose first name remains a mystery throughout the novel, is a gruff and affectionate man. His habit of clearing his throat is a particularly strange and unique character trait Jack Barnett the horseman who swam three horses over a flooded creek when he couldn’t swim himself, a man who would walk an acquaintance around a fire until he was blistered by its heat.

  While Upfield held very strongly to the strength of individual characters in his novels they were certainly built around formulas of crime fiction of the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction; criminal masterminds and gangs hold the good folk of Melbourne in terror. Upfield works this aspect of the crime thriller with consummate irony. Mother Hubbard has her cupboard, but this cupboard is full and it reeks of a seedy and corrupt place. Not particularly nice for young children.

  Tom Pink is a great ruffian character, the way he manipulates Mother Hubbard, and the way he chews off people’s ears. He is one of Australian crime fictions great hero-villains; unlike Raffles, Tom Pink is firmly placed in the murky underworld of Melbourne. Tom could be accurately described as a ‘terrier’—he chews ears, attacks by stealth, and does not let go. He is slightly comical, conjuring images of a small mongrel dog clinging tenaciously to the ankle of its victim.

  One of Upfield’s great strengths lies in his evocation of contemporary speech. All his novels reflect a commitment to recording spoken language accurately. His books describe the attitudes of these characters through what they say. Tom’s language and stuttering are all rooted in the society of the 1930s, where a child’s education could end as early as 12.

  The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery represents a significant gap in the early novels of Upfield’s work. The novel does not include Upfield’s popular detective Napoleon Bonaparte but shows evidence of Upfield’s early development as a writer of popular fiction. The style is coarse and fast, in keeping with the turf novel. Upfield made it, the novel was printed on time.

  Stuart Mayne

  Diana Ross

  1

  A Strange Side Bet

  ‘Sorry, don’t know the signature.’

  ‘But hang it, man, I’ve told you I am staying with Mr Tindale, of Bulka.’

  ‘Yes, I ’eard you, but I don’t know you.’

  Roy Masters, son of a wealthy Melbourne merchant, regarded the round flaming face of Mr Bumpus the hotel licensee of Mount Lion. Here on the Mount Lion racecourse, west New South Wales, he had dropped a small bundle on a funeral hack named Sunny Jim and consequently now was short of ready cash when yet two races had to be run.

  ‘Come on, Bumpus, you goin’ to be all day?’ drawled a lank man with a grey walrus moustache. ‘Cash the gent’s cheque an’ get on with your job. If it was a Elder Smith cheque you’d kiss it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I knows their cheques,’ snarled Mr Bumpus.

  ‘A-a-nd I n-n-knows this gent is s-s-staying at Bulka,’ put in a remarkably hairless person.

  ‘There y’ar, Tom knows the gent, Bumpus. If you ain’t dry. I am,’ announced the walrus man.

  Mr Bumpus became undecided. Anyone staying at the Bulka station most certainly was a personage, and all his life Mr Bumpus had refrained from being unobliging to personages.

  ‘S-s-stiffen the crows, Bumpus! D-do-something,’ urged the hairless one.

  ‘Yairs, ’e wants a shot of electricity,’ drawled the walrus. ‘Pity ’is old woman wasn’t here to liven him up.’

  ‘Bumpus - Mr Masters’ cheque will be alright,’ came on steely tones from behind Roy. The man and the voice appeared to equal the voltage of the electric ‘shot’ prescribed by Walrus, for Mr Bumpus visibly started.

  ‘Certainly Mr Tindale, certainly,’ he said hurriedly, and accepting the cheque with a smirk, he dashed for the cash register.

  ‘Hey! Kiss that cheque afore you put it away,’ Walrus implored, thereby raising general laughter, during which Roy turned to his host.

  ‘Thanks. I’d run out of cash and on your advice I applied to Mr Bumpus,’ he said.

  ‘I should have given you a chit.’ The pale lean face of one of the wealthiest squatters of western New South Wales broke into a slow smile, and the slate-blue eyes twinkled. ‘There are more goats—animals not men—in Mount Lion than Treasury notes. You see, our general currency is in cheque. Yes, Bumpus! Two guggle-guggles, please.’

  ‘What is your opinion of Better ’Ole in the next race?’ Roy asked.

  ‘So so. Anything will win,’ Tindale prophesied, stroking his short iron-grey moustache whilst calmly examining the dark alert face beside him. The liquor ‘guggled’ whilst it flowed from the bottle he held. ‘I feel more confident, however, that my own horse will not win the last race.’

  ‘Oh! I thought he looked a better stayer than Darling.’

  ‘Granted, but he’s not up to his true form today. And Darling’s appearances are deceptive. As a matter of fact, I have just backed Darling for a small amount.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem much good backing anything,’ Roy stated impatiently. ‘You can never get a decent odds at these country meetings.’

  ‘No, but we get a lot of fun,’ the squatter pointed out ‘Up here we attend the races in a holiday spirit, we do not regard racing as a serious business.’

  Roy chuckled when they turned from the bar.

  ‘I can agree with you on that point. Seen Dick lately?’

  Mr Tindale was lighting a cigarette, which may have accounted for the distinct pause, before saying:

  ‘I left him talking to Diana in the stand. Alverey was with them, yet seemed to be not of them.’

  ‘Ah! Well—perhaps it is none of my business, Mr Tindale, but am I right in understanding that Alverey proposed to Diana a few days ago?’

  ‘He did. The foolish maid rejected him.’

  ‘Why foolish? He’s devilish handsome and all that, but—well—he’s not British, you know.’

  ‘Dear me!’ sighed the older man. ‘Dear me! Rabid nationalism appears to be increasing everywhere. The fact tha
t Alverey is a foreigner cannot be held against him, whilst entirely in his favor is the fact that he is worth four millions in pounds, not dollars, or francs, or cents.’

  Roy’s murmured exclamations inferred disagreement, and, another man claiming his host’s attention, he slipped away to rejoin his friend of years and the girl he loved.

  Again in the brilliant May sunshine he had completely forgotten the coming race and Better ’Ole, even though the four bookmakers were shouting the horse’s name. He was too absorbed to hear the shouted odds, the dull persistent roar of the crowd. His mind was too occupied with what Tindale had said about Diana and Dick and about Alverey, who, although with them, seemed to inhabit the chilly world in which lived all third parties. Yes, it was necessary to know at once, if Dick actually loved Diana.

  Two years had Dick and he intimately known Diana, Mr Tindale’s ward, and heiress to a fortune created from the China trade. Most successfully had the squatter hidden this splendid specimen of Australian beauty; as it were, producing her to Melbourne society, and the public in general, per the medium of the illustrated weeklies, after her education had been completed and he had conducted her on a world tour.

  That was when Diana was twenty-one and from the evening Dick and he had been presented to her at a ball, he had loved her. And Dick—jovial old Dick—did he love her too? Strong friends though they long had been, his love for Diana had been a thing too sacred to discuss with his friend. And now Alverey was with Diana and Dick, yet seemed not of them. Depression rested heavily on him, and then, when a cheery voice spoke against his ear, strangely lifted.

  ‘What are you going to back in this one,’ demanded, rather than asked, a powerfully built man some twenty-seven years old, a man whose face was square, whose features were rugged, whose eyes were a violet-blue and whose hair was auburn.

  Roy said, seriously:

  ‘Nothing, Dick. But I want to talk to you about a subject of greater consequence than backing a horse. Let’s find a quiet place. Come on—they’re off and we haven’t much time before the last race is run.’