MURDER IN THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
So Bad a Death
The Devil’s Caress
Reservation for Murder
Faculty of Murder
Make-Up for Murder
Duck Season Death
All names, characters and incidents are fictitious.
Description of the Telephone Exchange and its working is partly imaginary
DEDICATED TO ‘CENTRAL’ AND TO ALL WHO HAVE WORKED THEREIN
© 1948 June Wright
© 2013 the Estate of Dorothy June Wright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
A Dark Passage book
Published by Verse Chorus Press
PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293
Cover design by Mike Reddy
Interior design and layout by Steve Connell/Transgraphic
Dark Passage logo by Mike Reddy
Country of manufacture as stated on the last page of this book
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, June, 1919-2012.
Murder in the telephone exchange / June Wright.
page cm.
ISBN 978-1-891241-96-3 (e-book)
1. Women detectives--Fiction. 2. Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 3. Melbourne (Vic--Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.3.W727M87 2014
823’.912--dc23
2013043859
Contents
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
The crime novels written by June Wright have been unjustly forgotten both in Britain, where they were published between 1948 and 1966, and in her homeland of Australia. They are distinguished by finely drawn settings in and around Melbourne, Victoria, feisty female protagonists and credible social situations, and in my opinion they thoroughly deserve a contemporary reappraisal.
She was born Dorothy June Healy on the 29th of June 1919 in Malvern, a leafy suburb southeast of Melbourne; and Catholic educated at Kildara College in Malvern and Loreto Mandeville Hall in the adjacent posh suburb of Toorak. She first showed literary promise as a schoolgirl; the respected Australian journalist P.I. O’Leary (1888-1944) awarded her a prize in a children’s writing competition run by The Advocate newspaper in Melbourne. But writing was in June’s blood; her grandfather John Healy (1852-1916) was a well-known Melbourne writer who wrote under the name “The Onlooker.” After leaving school and briefly studying commercial art, June got a job as a “hello girl” or telephonist at the Central Telephone Exchange in Melbourne (she is pictured overleaf operating a switchboard). In 1941 she married Stewart Wright, a cost accountant. They had six children: Patrick, Rosemary, Nicholas, Anthony, Brenda and Stephen.
When June’s first child Patrick was one year old, she began writing her first crime novel Murder in the Telephone Exchange (1948), which was set in her former workplace. Sarah Compton, a supervisor at the Central Telephone Exchange in Melbourne, is bashed to death with a “buttinsky,” a device used by telephone mechanics to butt in on or interrupt telephone conversations. June considered it to be “unique in the history of murder instruments. Just imagine the mess that sort of [thing] would make of anyone’s face,” she gleefully told the author of “Murder on the Brain” (1952). Maggie Byrnes, a spirited young telephonist at the exchange, who June emphatically denied was modelled on herself (I didn’t believe her!), narrates the Dorothy L. Sayers–style whodunit. (At the time, Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935) was June’s favourite detective novel.)
June Wright in 1939: the model telephonist
While wrapping up vegetable scraps in an old newspaper, June happened to see an advertisement for an international literary competition run by the London publisher, Hutchinson. She entered Murder in the Telephone Exchange in the Detective and Thriller category of the competition, which was to be judged by Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1971), the author of the Roger Sheringham murder mysteries; John Creasey (1908-1973), the author of the Toff crime novels; and Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977), the author of the Gregory Sallust spy thrillers. “Unfortunately, in the Judges’ opinion, no novel was of sufficient merit to justify the award of a prize of £1,000,” Hutchinson informed June in 1945. “It has been decided, however, that certain manuscripts are deserving of publication, and to those authors who submitted entries considered to have the greatest merit we are prepared to offer an advance commensurate with the standard of the book. As your novel, Murder in the Telephone Exchange, is one of these, we have great pleasure in offering you an advance of £154 […] with an option on your next two novels.” June was thrilled.
June claimed “Murder in the Telephone Exchange was the first detective novel set in Melbourne since Fergus Hume’s (1859-1932) Mystery of the Hansom Cab published in 1886.” Whether she was correct or not, Melbourne certainly does feature a lot in her book. June saw no reason why Melbourne’s Russell Street police headquarters should not become as well known in crime fiction as Scotland Yard, she told the Australian magazine Woman’s Day; and at a swish lunch to promote Murder in the Telephone Exchange (“Oysters au Natural, Lobster Newburg, Chicken Maryland and Bombe” were on the menu), Sir Raymond Connelly, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne (1945-1948), thanked June for publicising the city in such a fashion. The setting of the murder mystery had to be “a real place, somewhere I knew and knew well, not an imaginary place,” June told me almost 60 years after her crime novel was first published.
Most book reviewers were full of praise for Murder in the Telephone Exchange, often singling out its quirky local setting, which June described in the kind of telling detail that only an insider could provide. For example, U.M.C., the author of “Have You Read These?” (1948), remarked: “Perhaps it was the Melbourne setting that gave a new freshness to the form. (One almost expected to meet the characters