1980: “The Vanishing Author: A Meta-Mystery Solved in M.H.’s Own Ink” in The London Review of Literature Vol. 42, No. 7
By Dr. Evelyn Ordak, Fellow in Modernist Studies, Somerville College, Oxford
In the annals of literary disappearances, few episodes rival the quiet enigma of M.H., the Sydney-based crime satirist whose manuscripts tantalised readers in the interwar years before her abrupt vanishing in 1934—presumed lost at sea off the Greek isles, much like a plot device from one of her own epistolary capers. The parallels with Agatha Christie’s own twelve-day vanishing act that same decade are irresistible: both women, masters of misdirection, both resurfacing (or not) amid whispers of scandal, both leaving a trail of unpublished drafts that outlived their authors. Yet where Christie’s absence spawned headlines and hasty biographies, M.H.’s faded into the footnotes—her oeuvre dismissed as charming trifles, her Sydney exile a colonial curiosity. Until now.
A single, overlooked line in one of her late notebooks—tucked amid the fluttering fans and wilting bouquets of The Criminal Anthology of Courtesy (1929, unpublished in full)—unravels not just a fictional plot, but the riddle of M.H. herself. The passage occurs in an epistolary vignette where a forged billet-doux, scented with heliotrope, declares: “Even your correspondent is himself an invention, penned to deceive the postman—and posterity”. Dismissed by early critics as a playful nod to her forgery-themed intrigues, this sentence gleams retrospectively as the key to a grander sleight-of-hand. M.H. did not drown, abscond, or succumb to ducal solicitors (as family legend insists). She never existed—or rather, she was a meticulously wrought fiction, a character invented by another female writer of the era, who shall remain nameless here out of deference to her lifetime’s discretion.
This unnamed creator—a contemporary of Woolf, Mansfield, and the modernist coterie, yet operating beyond their Bloomsbury hothouse—deployed M.H. as an audacious exercise in genre within genre. Through her “Sydney crime writer”, she probed the elastic boundaries of fiction: crime satire as social vivisection, fairy-tale gothic laced with Regency codes, noble farces rotting into mythic maws. M.H.’s drafts—those proliferating notebooks of shrinking rooms, parasitic primogeniture, and courteous felonies—served as a laboratory for exploding conventions. Courtesans tugged thrones from boudoirs; beauties fled crowds into time-trunks, emerging plain and plotting; dukes’ mausoleums gaped with hereditary hunger. Themes once taboo—female power behind imperial thrones, the wormy decay of aristocracy, education’s stalled march—cavorted freely in M.H.’s ink, unmoored from the social boundaries that constrained her creator’s “respectable” output.
The clue’s elegance lies in its self-reflexivity: just as M.H.’s epistolary forger invents a correspondent to hoodwink the ages, so her creator birthed M.H. to smuggle radical ideas past the gatekeepers. No yacht capsized in 1934; no notebooks washed ashore on Crete. Instead, the creator—perhaps tiring of the masquerade, or sensing the Depression’s chill on satire—simply ceased posting parcels from Sydney. The “disappearance” was the plot’s pivot: M.H. climbs into her own trunk (echoing that 1812 fairy tale of regressive youth), vanishing into metafictional mist. This resolves her mystery far more satisfyingly than Christie’s train-station sleuthing or Oriental hotel seclusion. Where Christie played peep-show with her own celebrity, M.H.’s creator engineered a perpetual absence—a void that amplifies her voice, turning drafts into eternal palimpsests.
Evidence mounts subtly. M.H.’s “correspondence” with English cousins (Tunbridge Wells sisters cautioning ducal lawyers; Malayan missives of rubber-barons’ ruin) mirrors the creator’s own epistolary habits, transplanted to antipodean exile. Her obsessions—primogeniture as gaping prison, St. Paul’s as marital mausoleum, Greenwich cuckoos folding sexes into harmony—prefigure postmodern conceits decades early, suggesting a ventriloquist far ahead of her time. Publishers’ letters (Harrington & Sons, 1933) urge “explosive noble comedy” amid sales surges; family epistles fret royal favouritism post-“disappearance”. All props in a hall of mirrors, where the crime writer solves her own vanishing: invention as the ultimate alibi.
This revelation recasts M.H. not as marginal curiosity, but vanguard of meta-fiction—a Trojan horse for women writers chafing at genre’s chains. Her creator, unnamed in life to evade the solicitors of propriety, gifted us a character who writes herself out of existence, leaving readers to chase shadows. In 1980, amid our deconstructionist din, M.H. emerges vindicated: her “stories” were always about authorship’s deceit, society’s small crimes the merest feint. Christie returned to tea and typewriters; M.H. dissolved into pure text—the perfect crime, eternally unsolved until now. One wonders if the nameless author, from whatever posthumous parlour she observes, approves this exhumation. Or perhaps she, too, was invented.
Dr. Ordak’s forthcoming monograph, Drafts of Dissolution: The Fictive Lives of Interwar Women, expands on these theses.
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