So Bad a Death (41 page)

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 proud 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!

LS: After
The Devil's Caress
, it was six years before
Reservation for Murder
appeared, in 1958. What happened? I notice you had a different publisher.

JW: Actually it was the same. Hutchinson's split up into various subsidiary companies, and John Long was the one looking after the crime writers. So it really was the same.

I wrote one [book] and they knocked it back, it wasn't suitable. And then I tried somewhere else with it, but I couldn't get it published. It really wasn't good enough, and I knew it wasn't good enough. And then I let it go for a couple of years and then I started on Hostel for Homicide, which was
Reservation for Murder
. Hostel was a much better title, I thought, but the publishers wanted Reservation. They thought [mine] was too American-sounding. Homicide, of course, has become a commonplace word now.

LS: Were they interventionist, asking you to rewrite a lot?

JW: Not a lot, but there was a certain amount of rewriting. I remember after the twins were born, I sat up in bed in St Vincent's maternity hospital, and did the revision there. It was a wonderful opportunity, actually, plenty of time. Plenty of uninterrupted time. That was the great drawback with children, finding the uninterrupted time.

LS:
Reservation for Murder
introduced Mother Paul, your nun detective. The first nun detective was introduced by Anthony Boucher, writing as H. H. Holmes, in the 1940s.

JW: Oh really?

LS: Julian Symons described Mother Paul as ‘Father Brown's niece'. Had you been reading G. K. Chesterton?

JW: No, I hadn't.

LS: Mother Paul is a great character.

JW: She was a dear. I was sorry that I stopped writing, because of her—because it would have been a very interesting time to write about nuns, especially the transition from the enclosed orders out into the outside world, with these feisty nuns that there are around today.

LS: Nuns can be tough characters.