Pat Flower

• Born: February 23, 1914
• Birthplace: Kent, England
• Died: September 15, 1977
• Place of death: Australia

Types of Plot: Police procedural; psychological

Principal Series: Detective Inspector Swinton, 1958-1966

Contribution

Pat Flower wrote within two mystery traditions: the police procedural and the novel of psychological suspense. Her novels featuring Detective Inspector Bert Swinton, however, have little in common with the gritty realism of novels by such police-procedural writers as Ed McBain. There is a playfulness about the series, evidenced first by the titles, all but two of which allude to Flower’s surname, yet there is also often a disturbing undercurrent to the action that does not disappear with the resolution of the case. Flower enjoys foiling the reader’s expectations; Swinton is not always correct in his deductions. Twists of plot and surprise endings are the norm, and characters tumble in and out of being the most unlikely suspect.

Flower’s psychological suspense novels have their share of surprise endings, but the overall mood is much darker and the novels more successful. In these stories, murder is almost incidental; Flower’s emphasis is not on detection but on the revelation of character. She depicts characters caught in webs of their own making, their images of themselves destroyed by circumstances, their self-delusions exposed; or she portrays seemingly normal people who are gradually revealed to be mad.

Flower is not well known in the mystery field and her books received few reviews, but certainly her novels of psychological suspense deserve more attention than they have yet received.

Biography

Pat Flower was born Patricia Mary Bryson in Kent, England, on February 23, 1914. At the age of fourteen, she moved to Australia, where she spent the rest of her life and where most of her mysteries are set. She created the character of Inspector Swinton with her first novel, Wax Flowers for Gloria, published in 1958. In the 1970’s, Flower turned to novels of psychological suspense, producing eight novels in as many years. Flower was also active in the Australian entertainment industry, writing numerous radio and television plays between the late 1940’s and the 1960’s. One of her plays, The Tape Recorder (pr. 1966), was chosen for inclusion in Best Short Plays, 1969, and was the first play to be produced in color on British television. She won acclaim for her screenwriting, receiving an award for the film From the Tropics to the Snow (1965), written with her husband, Cedric Flower, and earning the Mary Gilmore Award for Tilley Landed on Our Shore (pr. 1968), a one-hour television play. She also published a book of verse, Pistils for Two, in 1963. Flower died in 1977.

Analysis

Comments from the brief reviews that Pat Flower has received for her mysteries have ranged from “unputdownable” to “clever and unobvious” to “a poor show.” Her writing does vary in quality, with her later novels more successful than early efforts. She uses, however, similar techniques in both her police procedurals and her later psychological mysteries. Her plots are complex and take surprising turns, she aims for comic and ironic effects, she avoids the omniscient voice, and she misleads the reader by telling the story from the point of view of an uninformed or psychologically unstable character. Flower is ultimately interested in what lies beneath the surface of events and characters; in A Wreath of Water-Lilies (1960), she writes, “Once the surface gave way anywhere that part of the wall would collapse in chaos. Just as in this situation there were cracks in the surface . . . now the smooth civilized top layer was unreliable.”

Unlike many mystery novels, however, Flower’s mysteries, especially her novels of psychological suspense, do not reassure the reader that order will be restored, that the unjust will be punished and virtue rewarded. Indeed, her suspense novels often end with the disturbing notion that madness lies close at hand. Her police procedurals are only occasionally more comforting; the criminals are usually caught, but in such novels as Goodbye, Sweet William (1959), three murderers, who have, in Flower’s ingenious plot, all independently killed the same man, go unpunished in a curious ironic twist. In Fiends of the Family (1966), three old women share the family trait of being a psychotic murderer. In A Wreath of Water-Lilies, the criminals are caught, but through no effort of Inspector Swinton, the ostensible detective, who has been on the wrong track through most of the book.

A Wreath of Water-Lilies

A Wreath of Water-Lilies breaks other conventions in addition to having a detective who comes up with the wrong answers. In it, Flower combines strong elements of farce with the expected progression of a mystery. Inspector Swinton of the Sydney police is sent to France to handle a sensitive matter involving a French diplomat and the scent of scandal. After he finishes his business and still regretting not being able to meet the great Inspector Maigret of the Sûreté, Swinton travels to Provence on a sightseeing tour. In a small village outside Marseilles, while quietly becoming drunk on Pernod, he meets Martha Tilley, an expatriate Australian who insists that he must stay a night at the château of her employer, Pearl Langham. The next morning, Swinton finds another of Pearl’s guests, Ricard, dead in a pond; he knows immediately that it is murder, though the other guests assume that it was an accident.

The farcical plot elements surface on Swinton’s first night at the château, and Flower makes it clear that this is her intent: Swinton comments that he feels part of “one of those English bedroom farces where the siren turns out to be engaged in some ridiculous business for a foreign power and the trusting, bumbling hero is saved by his own clumsiness and stupidity.” The setting of a country house is perfect for a farce, and characters enter and exit rooms quickly, chatting brightly and drinking to excess. Swinton must endure two ludicrous seduction scenes. Echoing Aristophanes, Flower even introduces a nightly chorus of frogs, a sly comment on the follies of the characters.

The elements of coincidence that make a farce entertaining are, however, deadly to a mystery. Much of the plot of A Wreath of Water-Lilies depends heavily on coincidence: Swinton’s meeting Martha in the village, overhearing bits of conversations, witnessing assignations, and spotting two of the suspects in the village on the day they claim to have spent in Marseilles. The most difficult plot element to accept is that the French police would let Swinton run an unofficial investigation at all, yet they apparently give him their blessing and a reception that borders on adoration. Flower proceeds, however, to turn all these situations to farce as well: Swinton really is the “trusting, bumbling hero [who] is saved by his own clumsiness and stupidity.” He avoids being killed because he believes the murderer when he claims to be a police officer on the trail of an art-fraud ring.

A Wreath of Water-Lilies is ultimately frustrating because the reader must depend on the misled Swinton for clues to the mystery. Flower pokes fun at the conventions of the mystery at the expense of logic. She does provide enough information for the reader to be able to deduce the art-fraud scheme, but Swinton’s misinterpretations of character prevent a logical guess at the murderer. Underneath the farce, too, Flower’s preoccupation with warped psychology surfaces in many of the characters. Pearl is an alcoholic who lives in a fantasy world, complaining of her suffering under a Nazi occupation of the house that never occurred, clutching at the “friends” who abuse her hospitality. Jean, another of Pearl’s guests, is a lonely middle-aged woman who feels out of place among the others’ sophisticated talk of art and wine, and when her one attempt at seduction is cruelly transformed by a note passed under Swinton’s door, she clutches at him in boozy despair. The reader finishes the book uneasy at its portrayal of humankind, despite Swinton’s hearty goodness.

Flower’s novels of psychological suspense are even more disturbing. Several of these novels portray characters on the edge of madness; others portray characters caught in webs of their own making from which they cannot extricate themselves. Flower employs surprise endings to good effect in these novels: Although the turn in the plot catches the reader off guard, the development is nevertheless believable. Murder is usually involved but is not the basis for the novel; there are no detectives following up clues here. Flower often uses an unreliable point of view in these novels, though they are usually written in the third person; the reader only gradually becomes aware that perception is skewed.

Cat’s Cradle

Cat’s Cradle (1973) is told from the perspective of a tubercular invalid who may also be a paranoiac. Rich Jane Fenton has returned to England from Australia to nurse her illness and restructure her life. Soon, however, she becomes dependent on the companionship of a young man she once saw in Australia, and they are married, though he admits being interested in her money. Simon Pacey manipulates Jane into returning to Australia by publicly announcing “their” plans and apparently spreading the rumor that she is mentally unstable. Once back in Australia, Jane begins plotting revenge.

Flower keeps the reader off balance by portraying Simon’s obvious manipulations; it is only as the book progresses that the reader begins to wonder about his object. Yes, he wants money, but is Jane more of a skinflint than she portrays herself to be? Is she interpreting his motives correctly? When Jane murders Mrs. Barnes, her slovenly housekeeper, by pushing her into a pool of water to drown, and when she later kills Simon by thrusting her embroidery scissors into his ear while they are on an outing at the beach, the reader suddenly must reinterpret the entire novel. Jane no longer seems a trustworthy commentator. Yet Jane’s perceptions of persecution may still be entirely correct: At the end of the novel, Monica, Simon’s former wife, volunteers to take care of Jane. She asks Jane’s lawyer to draw up a will under which Monica would inherit, saying that these are Jane’s instructions. Even that, however, is told from Jane’s perspective, and she may be inventing it all.

Slyboots

Slyboots(1974), too, is told from the point of view of an unreliable character. Slyboots is not as successful at building suspense as Cat’s Cradle, but the method of plot development is the same: the slow revelation of events that throw suspicion on the main character’s version of reality. One begins Slyboots thinking that the main character, Rick Coleman, is an opportunist, but he seems sane enough. By the end of the novel, however, he has killed two people, one of them a child, and Flower suggests that he has previously killed several others as well. As the novel progresses, one realizes that Rick seems to be believing his own lies, so that again, as in Cat’s Cradle, the reader must reinterpret everything that has gone before. Though disturbing in its final scene of hallucinatory madness, Slyboots has a sense of closure that Cat’s Cradle does not, which oddly makes it less successful.

Shadow Show

Like Cat’s Cradle, Shadow Show (1976), Flower’s last novel, ends with the sense that the novel is not really over: The plot will continue to work itself out after the reader closes the book. Shadow Show portrays a man who becomes trapped by fear. Richard Ross discovers unethical business practices at his work but does not report his suspicions immediately, because he has no proof. Instead, he visits the man he suspects is running the deal, Athol Cosgrove. Cosgrove apparently has devised a plan to implicate Ross in a burglary of his flat and by extension in the fraudulent dealings. A neighbor boy is accidentally murdered during the plan’s execution, and Ross becomes a suspect in the killing as well. In Shadow Show, none of the characters is mad, but Flower portrays the deterioration of Ross’s ethics under the strain of being a murder suspect. By the end of the novel, Ross, who has self-righteously prided himself on his moral code, has become a liar, a heavy drinker, and nearly a murderer. He has trapped himself with his own self-protective lies.

Flower’s view of the world is a dark one filled with self-deceiving characters and psychological as well as physical violence. Though her books are quite well written and her mastery of the suspense form obvious, little attention has been paid to her work, perhaps because her books are so relentlessly disturbing in their view of human nature. Her police procedurals are often amusing, but in these, and more so in the suspense novels, her vision of what lies below the “smooth civilized top layer” seems to find no redeeming grace there.

Principal Series Character:

• Detective Inspector Bert Swinton , of the Sydney police force, is a moral, somewhat naïve man, not an intellectual. He uses close examination of detail and intuition to solve crimes, though he considers himself an unimaginative man. He is middle-aged and a bit thick about the waist, relies on Australian meat pies for sustenance and comfort, and lives with his wife, Mary, and their family in the suburbs of Sydney.

Bibliography

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains some reference to Flower and helps place her among her contemporaries.

Knight, Stephen. Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction. Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1997. Study of the dominant themes and concerns distinctive to the crime fiction of Australia. Sheds light on Flower’s works. Bibliographic references and index.

Macdonald, Virginia. “Pat Flower.” In Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Discussion of Flower’s crime fiction, its relative merit, and its relation to both British and Australian culture.

Nile, Richard. The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002. Discussion of prevalent features of Australian writing and the cultural and geographic influences on the continent’s literary history; provides perspective on Flower’s work.

Wilde, William H., Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. General overview of Australian literature and culture. Creates a background for understanding Flower. Bibliographic references and index.