So Bad a Death (42 page)

JW: And the modern day nun is even more so, because she's highly intelligent, highly sophisticated—in the right sort of way—and has knocked around a bit in the outside world, and yet she's retained a certain innocence and integrity that probably is part and parcel of belonging to a religious order.

What led me into that was that I read an interview with Arthur Upfield. He said that for any mystery story writer, one of the prerequisites would be to select an unusual detective. He had Napoleon Bonaparte. And I thought to myself: Right! I know nuns, I'll make a nun a detective.

LS: You seem a very female-centric writer, finding drama in mother's clubs, hostels, school committees.
Reservation
was described as ‘fresh and original' in its setting, a hostel for businesswomen. Was it a case of writing about what you knew?

JW: Writing about what I knew.

LS: Symons called Mother Paul ‘very readable'—high praise for him.

JW: A very nice comment.

LS: What were your reviews like?

JW: They were all good. There was a man who used to write for the
Herald
, he used to do a crime book review every Saturday. A. R. MacIlwain. He was very rigid in his ideas of how a detective story should be constructed—the reader should be able to solve the crime along with the writer. One book I had something or other—forget what it was now. He took umbrage at this and he wrote me a letter, more in sorrow than in anger, that I'd used a trick. You should never, ever trick the reader. He had his ideas.

LS: Do you have any favourites among your books?

JW: Mother Paul, because she was a composite of many nuns that I knew.

LS: Can you talk a bit about
Faculty of Murder?
Did you have a Melbourne University connection? Were your children going to the university?

JW: That's where I got it all from. A friend of mine who wrote for radio, she lived in a college. St Mary's Hall.

LS: I read that you said you deliberately set the site of your college in the middle of the Melbourne General Cemetery.

JW: That's right, on Cemetery Road. Newman College I called Manning College. There was Cardinal Manning and there was Cardinal Newman, so . . .

Actually that one went down very well with men readers. I was surprised.

LS: It was an early academic mystery, certainly the first in Australia, I believe.

JW: I would say it was, and honestly, I'll have to confess that reading Dorothy Sayers'
Gaudy Night
was partly inspiration for it.

LS: It's set in a fictional college, but I note it looks like Ormond College on the cover.

JW: Well it is. They went to immense trouble in England, whoever did the jacket got pictures of all the colleges around Melbourne University and that's what they did.

LS: So they went to a lot of trouble with the packaging of that one.

[
JW brings out a copy of
Faculty for Murder
and the associated publicity material
—
including a dagger bookmark, complete with blood on the blade and a bloody fingerprint
]

JW: That was the publicist's idea. We had a literary luncheon at the old Oriental Hotel in Collins Street and all the guests at the luncheon got a bookmark. It was a publicity stunt.

LS: But nobody got stabbed in the book! Were you pleased about the packaging—covers, designs—of your books?

JW: Oh yes. Always. I didn't think
not
to be pleased. The first book that came out, it was just unbelievable. Little me, writing a book! Published! People are going to read it!

LS: Why did you stop writing?

JW: My husband had a bit of a breakdown, and then he thought he'd try to run a business, a cleaning business, because he had worked
as an accountant for a cleaning firm. You never make money writing—publishers do, but writers never make very much money. So I thought to myself at the time, now which is it going to be? There's a good chance we could make quite a bit of money, as against pursuing a craft which is very hard and very demanding, very difficult to do—I wasn't finding it at all easy. So I just made a conscious decision that I would give the writing away, and concentrate on helping him establish this business. Which we did and he made a big success of it and we were just in it at the right time. I used to do the books and he used to manage it. We had quite a big staff, so we made quite a comfortable living. And he died in 1989, when we had just sold the business, and left me to enjoy the fruits of it.

LS: You said to me over the phone that you didn't regret giving up crime writing.

JW: No I don't—because I've got back to writing, and writing gives me immense pleasure. And I can afford to publish it myself!

LS: Read any women's crime writing recently?

JW: No. It's a bit like busman's holiday. If you drive a bus you don't take a holiday on a bus.

LS: You said earlier that you thought you wouldn't go back to crime writing.

JW: If it was easy I would, but I've got other interests now. I like writing family history... at the moment I'm doing my own memoirs, and I find that's enough. I do a bit of travelling, I play golf. I have a wonderful life, in fact.