1974: The Lost Interview: Remembering Edgar Fenwick
By Julian R. Germoglio (Originally recorded, unpublished, in Sydney, 1934) From The Southern Literary Review, Autumn edition
It is now forty years since Edgar Fenwick disappeared—walked, as legend insists, from his rented terrace in Elizabeth Bay one pale morning in February 1934 and was never seen again. The usual explanations—malaria from Burma, despair, secret exile, murder—have long since hardened into trivia for quiz nights. The books remain: twelve of them, each a minor continent of moral weather, crime told as anthropology, civility cracking like eggshell beneath the pressure of conscience.
In their quiet ruthlessness, those novels changed our idea of crime fiction. They made the detective superfluous, the corpse eloquent, and society itself the chief suspect.
What follows is an interview I conducted with Mr Fenwick in December 1933, when he had just completed The Quiet Treachery of Angels, the last book published in his lifetime. The conversation was never printed. The lawyers thought it libellous; the censors found it “subversive”; the editor found nothing printable except the punctuation.
But Fenwick has been forty years dead (or else spectacularly elsewhere) and the times, we trust, are less fragile. The transcript, yellowed and immaculate, lay among my papers all this while. It is printed here for the first time.
Encounter at Neutral Bay
He arrived for the meeting late, hat pulled low, and carrying something wrapped in newspaper that later proved to be a bottle of Portuguese port. “Conversation”, he said, “is thirsty work”. He was tall, thin to the point of parody, his manner precise but never polite. He had the air of a man who kept his soul’s inventory daily and found the stock disappointing.
We sat by the window; he smoked continuously, as though the act were both prayer and confession. Outside, Sydney shimmered. The year was burning out, and the Depression had turned respectability into a sort of voluntary madness.
“Crime”, said Fenwick, “is the syntax of civilisation”.
“You mistake murder”, he went on, “for an event. It’s not an event; it’s grammar. Every society develops a particular language of wrongdoing, and through it you can read its secret desires. In England, we have crimes of disguise—men pretending to be what they’re not. In Australia, it’s crimes of exposure—men found out for what they are. The weather alone demands honesty”.
“People ask”, he continued, “why my murderers so often escape justice. I reply: because justice has such a talent for missing appointments. She arrives, fluttering her skirts, when the hangman’s already out to lunch”.
He laughed then—a dry rattle of vintage embarrassment.
On Detectives and the Dead
When reminded that his detective, Inspector Vyne, rarely solved anything, Fenwick replied,
“Of course he doesn’t. He’s the reader’s alibi. The detective exists so you can imagine the crime is someone else’s fault. Take him away and you’re left alone with your motives, which are never as tidy as blackmail or revenge”.
He paused. “I do not believe in psychological novels, you understand. My interest is theological—but without the consolation. The dead are the only consistent characters I can find”.
On Society and Sin
“I was told last week”, Fenwick said, “that my books are ‘immoral’. The critics always think morality is something one writes down in capital letters. But morality is what a body feels before it learns to think—like warmth or cold. By the time it’s in a sermon, it’s decomposed. We live in a civilisation embalmed in its own virtue”.
He took a drink of port. “The respectable commit more delicate crimes than the poor could dream of. The poor steal to eat; the rich steal to be admired. I’ve always thought the gallows was wasted on the wrong class”.
On Women and Writing
Asked why his women were so watchful, Fenwick looked startled. “Because they’re in the audience”, he said. “The world we build is performed for them, whether we know it or not. When I write a killer, I imagine a woman watching from the wings, deciding whether to applaud”.
His cigarette trembled as he lit another. “My mother once told me that the only people who truly keep secrets are children and widows. All others see concealment as invitation”.
On Disappearance
Near the end of our conversation, he grew quiet. “You know”, he said, staring at the harbour, “one’s reputation is the only prison built entirely by friends. The door has no lock—yet no one ever leaves”.
I asked whether he intended to write again after the novel just completed.
“No”, he murmured. “The next book I plan won’t require paper.”
“What sort of book is that?” I said.
He smiled. “A vanishing act in several chapters”.
Three months later, he was gone.
Forty Years Later
Re‑reading our exchange now, I’m struck less by his eccentricities than by his accuracy. Ours remains the age he described—still polite, still cunningly criminal, still reading itself for entertainment. The censorship that once considered his words intolerable has long since been outlived by the obscenities of banking and television.
The crime writer’s disappearance has endured partly because it satisfied his theory: he left society to solve itself, which it never will.
Each year, readers rediscover The Quiet Treachery of Angels, marvelling at its discipline and despair. It ends—how could it not?—with the detective staring into the mirror and finding no reflection at all.
I think, reading that, of the last thing Fenwick said, standing at my door in the high summer of 1933, as the cicadas screamed like electric wires:
“Every man”, he told me, “is the bright clue in his own unsolved case. The trouble is, no one wishes to follow it where it leads”.
Editor’s Note (1974):
The Southern Literary Review publishes this interview not to dispel the mystery of Edgar Fenwick, but to honour it—the only mystery, perhaps, that he ever refused to solve.
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