Murder in the Telephone Exchange. June Wright

the characterization, all are good.” June energetically promoted Murder at the Telephone Exchange in the press, on radio and at a number of literary events. The book was a bestseller, which according to The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, “outsold even Agatha Christie [(1890-1976)] and other world-famous authors in Australia” in 1948. The ensuing royalties didn’t make June rich by any means, but she was able to buy herself a fur coat and pay for the remodelling of her kitchen.

      Many people were intrigued by June’s ability to effectively juggle crime fiction writing and motherhood, which was reflected by the titles of several magazine and newspaper articles, such as “Wrote Thriller with Her Baby on Her Knee” (1948) and “Books Between Babies” (1948). June believed that housewives were extremely well qualified for writing novels, because “they are naturally practical, disciplined and used to monotony—three excellent attributes for the budding writer,” she told The Sun newspaper in Melbourne. She liked to hold up as an example Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when the mother of 10 children.

      June’s second book, So Bad a Death (1949), which also features Maggie Byrnes, was “possibly the best Australian thriller yet written,” reported the author of “Brilliant Writer in Magazine” (1949). The book was serialised on ABC radio and also in Woman’s Day. By now, June had four children—Patrick aged seven, Rosemary aged five and the twins, Anthony and Nicholas, aged three—and two bestselling crime novels. How did she do it?

      “With washing to do three days a week, I never get up later than a quarter to seven,” June told The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine in 1948. “On Monday, the biggest wash day, I rise at 5.30, light the copper, and have the washing on the line before breakfast. The twins are dressed in time for their breakfast at 7.30. Then come the other two, who have their meals with us. Monday is kitchen-cleaning day, Tuesday bedroom day. On Wednesday I scrub the back verandah and bathroom, and clean the two play rooms. On Thursday the lounge and study are done. Friday it’s back to the washtub, and the front verandah gets scrubbed. I cook an especially nice hot meal on Saturday morning, but like to sew or garden in the afternoon. Oh yes, I have to spend one night ironing, but I write on the others.”

      June took up writing to make her domestic life more tolerable. “Marriage, motherhood and the suburban lifestyle were not enough—though one would never have dared to voice such sentiments then,” she confessed in 1997. By the same token, she never hid her frustration with domestic family life either. For example, at one stage, So Bad a Death was called Who Would Murder a Baby? When F.M. Doherty of Australasian Post magazine asked June why she had named it that, the then mother of four frankly declared: “Obviously you know nothing of the homicidal instincts sometimes aroused in a mother by her children. After a particularly exasperating day, it is a relief to murder a few characters in your book instead!”

      Hutchinson rejected June’s next book The Law Courts Mystery. Undeterred, she tried a different genre, a psychological thriller called The Devil’s Caress (1952). According to the author of “Oven Fresh” (1952), it made her first two books “read like bedtime stories,” however it was generally not as well received as its predecessors. For her fourth crime novel Reservation for Murder (1958), June created a truly inspired character, the unassuming but strong-willed Catholic nun-detective Mother Paul, who in many respects is a female equivalent of the Catholic priest-detective, Father Brown, created by G.K. Chesterton (1874-1976). Hutchinson turned down the next book that June submitted, Duck Season Death (published for the first time by Verse Chorus Press in 2013). It seems that her publisher wanted more Mother Pauls because her final two crime novels Faculty of Murder (1961) and Make-Up for Murder (1966) both feature the inimitable nun-detective.

      When June’s husband Stewart suddenly fell ill and could no longer work, she gave up writing crime fiction altogether to earn a regular salary. This was a great pity as I believe she could have written many more first-rate detective novels in the same vein as Murder in the Telephone Exchange, which not only tests the reader’s wits, but also is a wonderful evocation of post-war Melbourne. Nor had she exhausted the possibilities of Mother Paul in my view, a detective identified as “special” by a number of crime fiction reviewers. For example, according to J.C. of The Advocate (1961): “Mother Paul is indeed a most attractive personality, worthy to rank with the great sleuths of fiction, even if devoid of the eccentricities possessed by most of them. We shall be very disappointed if we do not meet her again.”

      June passed away on the 4th of February 2012 aged 92. “Maybe I’ll never write a classic,” she once told Lisa Allan of The Argus newspaper in Melbourne. “Maybe that isn’t my role in life. But vegetable I’ll never be, and neither will I toss out any God-given talent simply because ‘I’m only a housewife’.”

      DERHAM GROVES

CHAPTER I

      This is John’s idea, not mine. It will bear my reluctant signature and is a record of my impressions of the various incidents which occurred during the heat-wave of last February, but the inspiration is John’s. I think his suggestion sprang from the desire to give me something to do besides count the days for my stay in this shameful place to end.

      The whole project fills me with revulsion and the lethargy of one who has survived a crisis only to find another ahead. For that is what I have experienced. I have been through some terrible moments of suspicion, fear and misery. Heaven knows what other words there are to describe the emotions which accompanied me step by step into this room, so bare and expressionless except for the sinister barred window. I reached the peak of those emotions two weeks ago. Now, another summit is waiting to be scaled; for climb it I must, if I wish to survive the results of my own errors. Perhaps this is the way I can do it.

      It is so hot again. The cool change which followed the thunderstorm was only a temporary respite. Even in this stone building I can feel the heat. The bars at the window seem to waver against the hard burning sky. As I reached for the jug of water on the table a moment ago, a bird perched itself on the ledge with its beak slightly open. We stared at each other with envious eyes.

      It was hot then. The newspapers printed paragraphs about record temperatures and bush fire warnings, filling up picture space with snaps taken of bathers, ice vendors and children drinking lemonade. That was before we hit the headlines. But it was during the same heat-wave that crime, as it was so melodramatically phrased, held the upper hand at the Telephone Exchange, so I daresay they went on printing things like that. I didn’t notice them. But I do remember the heat. It seemed part of the whole ghastly business. A background, just as much as the Exchange buildings were themselves.

      I find it difficult to know where to start, and how to express myself in the way I was then. I didn’t feel lonely, embittered and miserable a few weeks ago. Life was full and intriguing.

      My perspective and sense of values were totally dissimilar to the distorted vision from which I am now suffering. Maybe I’ll be able to see straight once I get this off my chest.

      Did you read about the Telephone Exchange murders in the papers? There wasn’t much chance of anyone missing them. Just in case you were not one of those numerous sightseers who parked themselves outside the building and gaped like landed fish, I will give you a brief description of where the crimes took place.

      The Telephone Exchange, which comprises two buildings standing back to back, runs half a block in length. But the frontage being comparatively small renders it a rather inconspicuous place. The old Exchange, facing Lonsdale Street, is a two-storied establishment with Corinthian pillars and other arcanthus decorations, containing aged apparatus for the dwindling manual subscribers in the city and some country stations. At the back of “Central,” like a modern miss shielded by her anxious grandmother, rises the eight-story red brick building which houses the most up-to-date Trunk Exchange in the Southern Hemisphere. We telephonists who have worked there, while dubbing it a “madhouse” or a “hell of a hole,” will always be proud of it.

      Eight floors with a basement, a flat roof and one lift, which had the rather trying