by Peter Corris
Beaumont changed into shorts and a singlet and set off along a fire trail into the bush. He was away an hour and came back moving at the same speed as when he’d left. I was about ready to call it quits. The relationship appeared to be somewhere between fraternal and professional. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t going to do the boy’s tennis career any harm.
I ducked down suddenly when I saw the man moving towards where I was hiding. I was working mentally on a paparazzi story when he stopped a few metres away. He looked quickly back at the cabin, sucked in several deep breaths, bent over and vomited heavily into a pile of leaves. He recovered, used a stick to clean up, and went back to the cabin. I got a much better look at him then and he was somehow familiar. I’d seen him before, or his photograph, but I couldn’t remember where or when.
I went straight to the office, hooked the camera up to the computer and printed out copies of the photographs. I picked out the best shot of the mystery man and made a couple of blown-up copies. I studied the face intently: square jaw, thin mouth, heavy brows, straight nose, thick grey hair worn long. No scars. I looked at it too long so that in the end the feeling of familiarity had gone.
The FBI or the CIA could no doubt have run it against the millions of other faces they have digitally recorded and search for a match. Not an available facility for a one-man operation in Newtown. My best bet was Harry Tickener, a journalist who has worked the streets, boardrooms, courts and parliament in Sydney longer than he likes to recall. Harry’s up with the technology, but he receives so many emails a day you’re lucky to hear back from him within a week. I took one of the photos and went to see him in his Surry Hills office, where he runs an online newsletter that prints stories others are afraid to touch.
Harry groaned when he saw me walk in the door carrying two styrofoam cups of coffee. ‘Jesus Christ, there goes an hour’s work,’ he said.
‘But here’s the best coffee in Sydney.’
He grinned, took the top off his cup and flipped it towards the bin. Missed. ‘Thanks, Cliff. Always good to see you. What’s up?’
I put the photo on his desk, keeping it covered with my hand. ‘Take a quick look at this. Just get an impression and see if a name springs to mind. I felt I knew the face but I’ve studied it too long.’
I uncovered the image. Harry looked at it, blinked and snapped his fingers. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘I’d swear that’s Daniel Murphy twenty years down the track. You’ve found him. Where is he?’
I shook my head. The name triggered the recollection I’d been searching for. Daniel Murphy was an international hockey player who’d killed his wife’s lover. The couple were separated at the time with a young child and Murphy had been told that the lover had a record of child abuse. He shot him, went on the run and wounded a policeman before he was captured. His counsel stressed the mitigating circumstances, but the wounding of the cop counted heavily against him and he was sentenced to eighteen years to serve twelve before being eligible for parole. Murphy had escaped from Goulburn gaol four years into his sentence, injuring an inmate and a guard, and had never been recaptured.
I said, ‘It wasn’t quite twenty years back, was it? What happened to the wife and child?’
‘The wife committed suicide when Murphy was convicted. That’s all I know.’
Usually, when Harry helps, I promise him the story if it can be told when everything sorts out, if it sorts out. The strike rate isn’t that good, but there wasn’t a chance of it happening this time. I thanked him and left him grumbling.
Using the name I had, I trawled through the Sydney Morning Herald database and came up with the information in detail. My recollection was confirmed, with additions: Murphy had emigrated from Ireland to Australia when he was barely more than a youth and had no relatives here. His wife’s maiden name was Wexler. She’d been a street kid with emotional problems and when found dead in her flat from a drug overdose the infant was dehydrated and suffering from various illnesses to do with malnourishment and neglect. It was odds-on that the child had been put in care and fostered out to become, in time, Cameron Beaumont.
I emailed Sydney Featherstone that I was on the job, making progress and that the omens were good. I drove straight back to the mountains and pulled up outside the cabin early in the afternoon. I approached the building and a dog, tethered near the steps to the front porch, began barking loudly. I stood where I was and waited.
Cameron Beaumont opened the door and looked me over suspiciously. Despite my jeans and leather jacket I might still have been a cop. Can’t tell these days.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘To talk to you and Daniel Murphy.’
That rocked him. He looked over his shoulder and his body language directly contradicted what he said: ‘There’s no one here of that name.’
I held up the photograph. ‘Was yesterday.’
Like all great tennis players, he had vision like a jet pilot and he didn’t need to come any closer to see the picture. ‘Who are you?’
‘We can talk about that and a few other things.’
The dog kept barking. I heard hacking coughs coming from inside and then Murphy appeared in the doorway.
‘He’s sick,’ Beaumont said.
I nodded. ‘I know. I saw him chuck his guts up yesterday. You didn’t.’
Beaumont turned his head. ‘Dad?’
Murphy shrugged. ‘Don’t worry, this had to happen some day. You a reporter?’
‘No, I’m a private detective and right now I’m thinking about all this staying private. That is, if you’ll talk to me. You could start by calling the dog off.’
‘Quiet, Max,’ Murphy said. Raising his voice caused him to start coughing again. When he recovered his breath he invited me in. I went past the dog and Beaumont into the cabin. It was a mobile home that had been put up on stumps and ceased to be mobile. It was cramped but everything appeared well ordered and arranged. Several windows were open and there was a fresh eucalyptus scent mingling with the smell of cigarettes. Everything was spotlessly clean except for an ashtray brimming with butts.
‘Make some coffee, Cam,’ Murphy said, ‘and we’ll let the man tell us who he is, first off.’
Beaumont moved towards the back of the room and ran water. Murphy sat on one side of a built-in eating bench and indicated to me to sit opposite. I put the photo on the surface and showed him my PEA licence.
Murphy lit a cigarette. ‘I met a few blokes in your game inside.’
‘You would,’ I said. ‘Hazard of the job. I’ve been there myself.’
I told them my story and then Daniel Murphy told me his. After he escaped from gaol he’d made his way to Queensland, where he worked on fishing boats, and then to Wollongong and into a plastics factory.
‘Little show,’ he said. ‘No one cared who you were or where you came from. I got a driver’s licence in a false name, Medicare card—the works. One day there was a chemical spill—dioxin—and I got two lungs full, thank you very much. Like inhaling that Agent Orange shit. Fucked my lungs first and then it spread. I took a payment to keep quiet about it. Didn’t like doing it, but I couldn’t afford to make a fuss.’
By the time we’d finished the coffee Murphy had worked his way through a few more cigarettes. He asked Cameron to get him a drink and the young man set a couple of cans on the table.
‘Doesn’t drink himself,’ Murphy said as he cracked a can. ‘Smart.’
‘How did you end up here?’
‘I had some money. Went to Sydney and tracked Cameron down. I always meant to do it but I didn’t have the chance till then. Wasn’t easy, couldn’t go through official channels, but I had a few names from people who’d written to me in the early days in gaol. I found him. Doesn’t look much like me, but he’s the spitting image of my dad as I remember him. Show him the photo, Cam.’
Cameron produced a faded, slightly creased photograph of a man in football togs with a 1950s look to them. Murphy was right—the resemblance w
as striking.
‘That’s all I’ve got of him. He was a champion Gaelic footballer. He was IRA and the Brits killed him.’
Cameron had hardly spoken a word. Now he handled the photograph like a precious relic, smoothing it in his big, strong hands.
‘Anyway, when I found out that Cam was a tennis champ I was that proud. I’d had a pretty useless life up to that point and I decided I’d do something with the time I had left.’
‘Dad’s a natural sportsman,’ Cameron said quietly.
‘Was,’ Murphy said. ‘Any ball game, I could play it.’
‘We met up about eighteen months ago when I was battling away in the satellites. His training and help got me to where I am now.’
‘You’ll be well inside the top one hundred after that win,’ I said. ‘I saw it.’
Murphy stubbed out another cigarette and looked at me. ‘I wish I had. I’d give anything to see him play, but it’s too big a risk. Too many people who’d pick me.’
‘You could wear a disguise,’ I said.
Cameron smiled. ‘Yeah, we thought of that, but Dad hasn’t got the breath to get up stairs and that. And he needs to smoke all the time, and …’
‘Couldn’t handle it, Hardy,’ Murphy said, ‘and the way the fucking world’s going with the pricks in charge now, they’d come down on him like a shit shower for having a crim for an old man and harbouring him. Cam’s been seen around here. They’d put it together.’
Murphy and I drained our cans. He fiddled with a cigarette and then put it down. ‘I’ve had chemotherapy and it only made me worse. I haven’t got long. I know how to take myself out peaceably and I’ll do it when it gets too bad. We’ve talked about it—Cam and me. He’ll help me to disappear.’
Cameron’s eyes were wet. ‘And every fucking thing I win’ll be dedicated to him in my mind and in my heart.’
‘The question is, Hardy,’ Murphy said, picking up the cigarette and lighting it, ‘what are you going to do?’
I reported to Featherstone that his intended client was merely doing some specialised training on his own in a bush location. No girls, no boys, no drink, no drugs. Featherstone was edgy about it, but when he heard that a pitch from another management group had fallen on deaf ears, he agreed to go along.
Daniel Murphy died six weeks after our first interview. I’d seen him a few times subsequently, did a bit of ball collecting. Cameron contacted me when his father died and I went up there and helped him with the burial. We put Daniel Murphy deep in the ground in the national park at a place where the birds sing and the insects buzz and the leaves fall softly.
This ABC of Crime Writing was not intended as a ‘how to write crime’ exercise, but perhaps that’s what it is. Things don’t always turn out the way a writer planned. I wanted to provide a kind of tour through the work of crime writers I’m familiar with, drawing attention to some of the key ideas, styles and devices they use to write their stories. I found myself occasionally offering advice, suggestions, a strategy, preferring one way of doing things to another, but that was still a very secondary motive.
Agreeing with Michael Wilding’s injunction that ‘crime fiction is not literature, it is entertainment’, I wanted to be entertaining. So I made fun of certain writers and their characteristics, quoted amusing snatches of dialogue and tried never to be prescriptive or solemn. When I looked through an early draft I realised that I had in fact written my version of a ‘how to write crime’ manual.
I believe that the best and possibly the only way to learn to write crime stories is to read a great many of them. Read for relaxation, enjoyment, perhaps for information, perhaps merely to pass the time. Read, read often and read a lot of different stuff. Read everything you can find of authors you like and sample the work of others you like less. This is certainly what I did. From an early age I read a variety of crime novels, from the pulp of Carter Brown to the polish of Nicholas Blake, from the clue-puzzle cosiness of Agatha Christie to the grime and danger of Dashiell Hammett.
I read vast numbers of the enormous output of John Creasey, who has serial characters the Toff, the Baron and Inspector West. These are essentially polite books. Increasingly, though, I favoured the impolite authors—Peter Cheyney, James Hadley Chase, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Over time I acquired all of Hammett and Chandler—novels and story collections—in green Penguin paperbacks, and all of Macdonald in various paperback editions.
As a break from study as an undergraduate and postgraduate research, which included overseas travel and fieldwork in places like New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Fiji, I read and reread these authors. I remember sharing a cramped space aboard a patrol boat in the Solomons with a touring District Officer and us both pulling out copies of Chandler’s The Big Sleep for our kerosene-lamp-lit, mosquito-net-shrouded night-time reading.
American writer Robert B. Parker, the author of many crime novels, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald, said, ‘When the time came to write I found I could write.’ I suspect he experienced the same thing as me: soaked in the plots, the rhythms, the cadences of the hard-boiled writers, he discovered he could, without too much difficulty, produce his own version, giving it his personal stamp.
So this catalogue reflects my own journey through the rich and diverse field of crime fiction and may provide shortcuts for aspiring writers. It is necessarily selective; no one could cover all the crime fiction available, and well-informed readers will see gaps and prejudices. There is, for example, a subset of the genre with priests as investigators to which I am averse. Not to mention investigators in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, and cat and dog detectives. Readers will see that I have read and drawn on the work of more male writers than female. I find it easier and more satisfying to immerse myself in the male world with its emphasis on violence, graphic description, action and all the fragilities of men.
My preference for the hard-boiled over the runny-yolked is obvious. But there is interest and pleasure to be found every time the social fabric is torn by a homicide and the effort is made to restore it … temporarily.
—PC
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jean Bedford, Linda Funnell, Michael Fitzjames (for the illustration that opens this part, ‘M is for mean streets’) and Michael Wilding
A is for action. This is a matter of balance. Some writers, like P.D. James, have very little; some, like Mickey Spillane, have too much. If the low-action model is adopted, the characterisation, dialogue and descriptions had better be good. They were in James’s early novels but when she padded them out with descriptions of furniture and architecture (‘mullioned windows’ adorn many country houses), things slowed to a halt. Spillane’s violence was overkill, literally.
A woman I was talking to at some book gathering asked me what kinds of books I wrote. I was writing crime, spy and historical stuff at the time and said I wrote action novels. ‘Oh, I hate action,’ she said. Her favourite author? Jane Austen.
A is also for adultery. This has lost its potency as a force in crime fiction. In the past, concealment of it could be a prime motive for a murder. Once the chief ground for divorce, ‘irretrievable breakdown’ has sidelined it. It may still play a part if a prenuptial agreement comes into the picture.
A is also for age. The age of the chief character in a long-running series of books can create a problem for the author. Agatha Christie virtually ignored the problem; Hercule Poirot, a middle-aged refugee from Belgium when introduced in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1917, would have topped a hundred by the time of his final activities in the 1970s. Christie aged him slowly without comment, though admittedly he was pretty old and infirm by the end.
Robert B. Parker chose not to age his chief character Spenser, a private eye, at all. Had he done so he would have been in trouble. Spenser fought Jersey Joe Walcott, former heavyweight champion, when he was, say, twenty and Walcott was in ‘the twilight of his career.’1 Given that, he would have been
in his nineties by the time of his last case in Sixkill (published posthumously in 2011). Spenser is still appearing in a continuation of Parker’s books by Ace Atkins.
John D. MacDonald, creator of Travis McGee, said that an author could credibly age a series character at one-third the natural rate. This is a good working formula.
A is also for alcohol. This is an essential ingredient. I advise giving protagonists a drinking problem, which they struggle, more or less successfully, to control. This provides narrative texture. Reformed alcoholics are also a possibility, especially if they fall off the wagon from time to time, but AA meetings aren’t a lot of fun and the struggle to remain dry can become tedious. The Matthew Scudder novels of Lawrence Block (The Sins of the Fathers, 1976, and following) and the Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke (The Neon Rain, 1987, and following) provide examples.
An incidental alcoholic character is very useful, especially in private-eye novels. The investigator can exploit this weakness, feel slightly guilty about it but still get the job done.
The classic ambivalent comment about drinking is at the end of Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939): ‘On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.’ That’s getting a lot of resonance out of a couple of drinks.
B is for backstory. In most crime novels, especially private-eye books, something in the past, preferably murder, surfaces in the present and causes distress. Investigation therefore involves the past and the present, providing a rich texture and helping to fill up the pages to publishable length.
