Stevens, Joan M - This Game of Murder (1944)

Paper may have been in short supply in wartime Australia, but the cliché mines were in full production, and Joan M Stevens was down there working her heart out. Her narrator is a nameless nurse, living-in at the ritzy Merrilea estate at Toowong, outside Brisbane, and boy, do they need her! The lady of the house is a hypochondriac flirt, the poor relation housekeeper limps, and the narrator herself has a bad case of the galloping had-I-but-knowns. Worse still, the whole household suffers from the delusion that they are in a Victorian melodrama, and the slightest provocation sends them off into dialogue like this:

"Take a pull at yourself, my dear fellow, and remember you are talking to an officer and a gentleman. Alibi, forsooth!"

or this:

"Look! That cur and Marcine! Oh, how can she? That slinky beast is not fit to lick her shoes -- or Michael's!"

or this:

Moonlight flooded the garden, silvering the pale night moths hovering above blossoms, thrusting slender tongues in search of scented nectar.

And this is just the beginning. In the oncoming pages poor Nursie has to deal with:

• A murder game which - of course - turns fatal
• An envenomed dagger
• A drowned blackmailer
• Suicide with weedkiller
• Suicide with prussic acid
• Morphia poisoning
• Attempted suicide by drowning
• A nearly-fatal contrived motor accident
• An impostor exposed as a jewel thief

You name it, it's in there somewhere. Nurse herself is pushed in the river (she swims), gassed (she hears the hiss) and locked in a shed (she climbs out the window). A lassie learns a lot of useful things at Nursing College.

And what of the police? The Brisbane CID clearly realise they have something special on their hands, and send out Inspector Jim Axton -- one of the phalanx of Oxford-educated investigators that every colonial force has at its disposal for occasions like these. Axton ambles cheerily through the carnage, finding a poison phial in the daisies, a joke shop squeaker among the eucalypts, and a luminous dress adorning the begonias, and eventually assembles the few surviving suspects to re-create the crime in the time-honoured fashion. At last the fiend is captured, and expires in a final paroxysm of furniture-chewing:

"For three days and four nights I've led you by the nose -- the nose, do you hear? Pretty clever, eh? The great Inspector Axton, with his nose to the trail of half a dozen red herrings!"

But the final word comes from the killer's diary:

"He can have her when I've finished with her! A honeymoon with death! Ha, ha! The villain laughs! I hate her! I hate him! Pigs! Devils! Snakes!"

Make up your mind, dearie...

Joan M. Stevens' oeuvre seems to have stopped at one book. She probably felt there was nothing left to say. I picture her as somebody's dear old grandmother, drawing on her fading memories of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and casting surreptitious glances at her Mary Roberts Rinehart collection as she painstakingly tries to fulfil her grandson's instructions: "Write a 'tec story, Nanna!"

An E for effort.

Jon.