Morton met author Peter Doyle at the museum this week and the two traded tales of con men and card sharps. Doyle relayed tricks on the Sydney scene while Morton brought the international perspective on Australian confidence men and women who operated in Europe in the 20th century.

One such criminal character was Sidney “Pretty Sid” Grant (above), who was photographed by Sydney police in 1921. Grant’s New South Wales Police Gazette entry from 1923 is captioned “Confidence man (notes for gold)”. He mastered the con trick known as “the hot-seat” during his travels in Europe.

From the late 19th century, Australia exported a series of high-class con men and card sharps who for the next 50 years swindled the gullible English, French and Germans with their tales of infallible betting systems, unbeatable horses, sudden inheritances and lost lucky rosaries. By their sleight of hand, and aided and abetted by their womenfolk – who posed as their sisters, daughters and wives – they extracted fortunes from foolish poker players and over-amorous gentlemen. By the end of World War II, Scotland Yard believed that, of the 216 international confidence men working the European capitals, 58 were Australian born. In the 1960s there was a new invasion. In place of the confidence men came teams of high-class thieves known collectively as the Kangaroo Gang, who stole to order anything from jewellery to a baby chimpanzee from a zoo.

Saturday’s talk will explore these enthralling stories that also feature in Morton’s latest book Kings Of Stings: The Greatest Swindles From Down Under. Visit the HHT Online Shop to get your copy

To win tickets for this event visit the Historic Houses Trust Facebook page

Speaker: James Morton
James Morton is a former defence lawyer in England and is one of Britain’s leading expert on crimes and the author of the Gangland Series.

A window in the upstairs bedroom rattles in its frame, and the shamus knows that his enemies are coming for him. It’s a gentle but potent image, as though the house itself had taken a sharp breath. It’s from Dashiell Hammett’s story, the ‘House on Turk Street’. It replays one of the oldest riffs in crime narrative: the seeming complicity of built places in the crimes that happen within them.

Violent domestic crime explodes within and into space – emotions hitherto unspoken become suddenly manifest. Bodies move haphazardly around rooms, stumble against furniture, trip here, collapse there, come to rest awkwardly on a bed, on a floor. That hitherto sweet refuge now is part of the crime. A witness and a participant.

“MAN AND WIFE FOUND DEAD / Flat Tragedy at Waverley.” So reports the Sydney Morning Herald of Thursday, 4 May, 1944. Maurice Reuben John Anderson, a pilot officer and Alice Cabella Anderson, his wife, had been found the night before in the bedroom of their Birrell Street flat, dead from gunshot wounds.

Lights had burned all through the previous day, and a radio had continued to play. Early in the evening a neighbour peeked through a window and saw that things were wrong. He phoned the police. The report goes on:

Four detectives went to the flat, climbed in a window and found the bodies lying on the bedroom floor.

Investigations led the police to form the opinion that while Mrs Anderson was seated on a chair in the lounge she was shot.

A trail of blood indicated that as she jumped up from the chair she knocked it over and then staggered towards the door.

The detectives think that Anderson caught hold of her, knocking the wireless set against a sideboard. He then dragged her into the bedroom and as she slumped dead on the floor he shot himself. He fell across his wife’s body and the revolver was found under him.

With the discovery not happening until Wednesday evening, the Herald reporter would have been hard pressed to make the deadline for Thursday’s paper – traditionally on the streets at midnight. Yet the description he got from the police accords perfectly with the photographic evidence: the sprays and smears of blood, the wireless knocked against the sideboard. The bodies in the bedroom too are arranged exactly the way the police had described; the barrel of Anderson’s pistol can be seen poking out from under his right trouser cuff.

The Andersons, who had moved in only a week before, had been in buoyant spirits earlier that day. They had hung out the washing together. We can see from the photos that the table has been modestly laid for bread and tea. There’s an untouched slice of (apple?) pie, a tobacco tin and a spent match on a plate. There are framed portraits of the Andersons on the mantel shelf. At some point things had gone badly wrong. These photos appeared in City of Shadows, listed as “no details known”. Only much later did we turn up a reference in the NSW Police Gazette, which lists the killings as the murder of Alice, by Maurice, followed by the latter’s suicide. In the absence of any hard information, the most common interpretation that readers of City of Shadows gave the pictures was indeed a crime of passion murder-suicide.  An accusation or admission of infidelity perhaps, followed by the killings.

Our eyes are drawn as much to the objects and the setting as they are to the shocking subject at the centre. Every humdrum item and piece of bric a brac is given equal value in the composition, and so invested with a charged, but unspecified importance. Figure and ground are in near equilibrium. The traces of everyday domestic routine and the petty emblems of marital life present an obvious, mocking counterpoint to the corpses. A movie art director would probably consider it way too heavy handed. Yet there it is.

One last thing: the photographs highlight the claustrophobic dimensions of the domestic space.  There was an acute wartime housing shortage in Sydney at the time, and many perfectly respectable couples were forced to squat in derelict houses, or camp out in Moore Park, or sleep rough elsewhere. We might wonder how much the space itself contributed to the events. Dashiell Hammett’s gumshoe is at first baffled by the House on Turk Street, where nothing is what it first seems. In the end though the house itself comes to his aid, and warns him of the mortal danger. Not so the house on Birrell Street: it seems to have had it in for the Andersons.