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.

FP08 0189 004

At various times over the last few months, I’ve been up in the museum loft, with Museum Studies intern Veronica Kooyman, poring over crime scene negatives from the 1950s. As a result of this experience my vision of that decade has been seriously revised. In Australian historiography, the 1950s are portrayed as an optimistic decade of steady employment and rising prosperity … cue grainy newsreel footage of whirring lawnmowers and cheerful nuclear families who have escaped inner city drudgery for the peace and privacy of a brand new bungalow on a leafy tree-lined street.

But as documented by the police, life in the suburbs often turns out to be dysfunctional, threadbare and violent. Photographs of interiors of the period repeatedly expose domestic settings of incredible squalor, dishevelment and clutter. The dingy, bedraggled ‘50s suburban cottage also transpires to be the site of some truly mind-boggling crimes. Their victims are often members of the same family.

At first I felt deep shock at the repeated instances of domestic suicide and murder we were encountering. It seemed as though every packet of negatives from this period contained its own tragic cargo of melancholy aftermaths: corpses in front to of gas ovens, or lying open-mouthed on double beds beside empty poison bottles, or hanging from a rope in a living-room doorway, or slumped in a pool of blood next to a recently discharged rifle.

Now, a month or two on from when we first started to look at this decade in some depth, these images of perpetrators and of victims, of apparently ordinary folks who could not take it anymore and suddenly snapped with terrible consequences for themselves and others have become sadly predictable. As I said at the beginning of this piece, my notion of the 1950s has been thoroughly revised. The ‘50s have lost their innocence for me. A nocturnal melancholy now hovers in the blinding light of a sun dappled lawn, and in the faces of those who occupy the house beyond, “marks of weakness, marks of woe”.

Domestic violence shocks us for a number of understandable reasons. Not least because the home, usually a place of shelter and love, becomes cruelly violated, turned into a site of moral disaster by its touch. And as familiar as I have become with the raw and uncensored evidence of wrongdoing the archive is so full of, I nonetheless continue to be startled whenever I discover an image relating to an assault or homicide in a bedroom. The bedroom normally speaking is a place to shrug off the troubles of the world, to sleep, dream, rest and make love: a setting where our truest, least-guarded, most vulnerable selves desire to dwell in a situation of complete security.

There are few things more ‘loaded’ in their evocation of love gone wrong, or more suggestive of jealousy, rage, and revenge brutally enacted, than the copiously bloodstained sheets and pillowcases of a recently occupied double bed.

If we look closely at the image above, there are traces to be found of the bedroom’s recent inhabitants, a male and female couple. Draped across the metal bed-head several articles of female apparel, underclothes, a ‘slip’, and a zippered dress. While just beyond it, next to the doorway onto the covered verandah, we find a male army uniform – a dangling tunic with corporal’s stripes and a pair of trousers. To the left of the bed, more clothes, and what look’s like a small traveling case.

What has happened here? The image is not dated and lacks documentation. With the true facts yet to be determined, the urge to supply narrative, to surmise and speculate takes hold. It’s the 1940s … wartime Sydney, a soldier comes home … he’s been ‘celebrating’ … perhaps he’s drunk as a skunk … in the privacy of the bedroom with his lover, his wife or his ‘pick-up’ for the night, an argument occurs – it starts off slowly, but mounts in intensity, there’s accusation, blame, justification and retort – a struggle involving a blunt object followed by a hideous explosion, and then finally this: the mutely accusatory aftermath in chilling black and white.

I found this surreal and somber glass plate negative several months ago and immediately set it aside for digital scanning. I discuss some of the thoughts the image provoked below.

1. The discovery of this image triggered a powerful reaction. I felt stunned. There is the illusion of motion in the photograph. The flash creates shadow beneath the body apparently lifting it up off the concrete steps, as if a backwards dive out of life, sleep and dreams has been made.
2. The detectives and the attending crime scene photographer stand back from the victim whose striped pyjamas reveal a dark patch above the waistline – is this blood from a stabbing or gunshot wound? It struck me that the photographer could have stood on the steps, bent over, popped the flash, bathing everything in a luminous cone of light that would have allowed no vestige of evidence to escape.
3. The cameraman has avoided this strategy. The photograph does not allow us to see marks on the body, or blood trails, or footprints or deposits left by the assailant. The decision not go for the ‘close up’ is baffling, because this image is the only one of the murder victim I’ve so far found.
4. From a courtroom/evidence perspective the image makes clear three types of violation – life, nighttime security, and domestic sanctity, all have been shattered by the crime.
5. It also strikes me as an emotional image … “we got out of the car, we came around the corner and we saw that body in these circumstances just there!”. Does the image also contain some of the adrenaline, dread and uncertainty of police work? I think so.
6. The image illustrates – but refuses to explain – a terrible death. Later it will propel the search for motive, identity of the assailant, and the circumstances of the crime.
7. The image reminded me of a still from a surrealist movie. It also recalled the work of night photographers Brandt, Weegee and Brassai. Surrealism’s obsession with bodily contortion, irrationality, violence, and nightmare, hovers as a putative presence. As does the black and white drama of film noir.
8. Perhaps inexcusably I also thought about books and plays. Raymond Chandler called death, “The Big Sleep”. And in Hamlet we get: “… To die, to sleep: To end the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to … To die, to sleep: perchance to dream:/ Ay, there’s the rub/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”