Patricia Mary (Pat) Flower (1914–1977) was born in England and moved to Australia with her family when she was 14. She worked in an office and wrote radio plays and sketches during the 1940s. In the 1950s she began writing crime fiction. Her first five books were about Inspector Herbert Swinton, an Australian police detective, and then she moved on to psychological thrillers. By the early 1960s she began writing full time, novels as well as film and television scripts. For more about Flower, see the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/flower-patricia-mary-pat-10207.
Wax Flowers for Gloria (Angus and Robertson, 1958; Sapere Books, 2022) was her first book. Set in a department store in Sydney, where Gloria Spink had worked her way into the owner’s office and she convinced him to marry her. From then on she made his life miserable as well as the lives of the store’s employees, her stepchildren, and any incidental lovers that she decided to take. So when someone finally strangles her while she is under the dryer in the department store’s hair salon, no one is really surprised. Once Inspector Swinton and his staff get Gloria’s full measure, they aren’t surprised either.
Inspector Swinton is a charming addition to the ranks of fictional police investigators. He is anxious to return to his home and his wife every evening and looks forward to spending weekends with their two children. His sergeant Cedric Primrose writes crime thrillers on the side and is always looking for complicated plots in the real-life mysteries he’s handed at work.
Their investigation focuses first on learning who saw her alive last and then on finding who was near the salon after that time but before her body was found. Considering the department store had three floors, dozens of cubby holes just right for hiding, and hundreds of employees, not to mention the shopping public, narrowing the suspect pool was a considerable effort. Readers who enjoy railroad timetables and such will be interested in Swinton’s process.
The Sydney of the 1950s is on full view here. Flower described it with great insight and affection, making me sorry I didn’t experience it first-hand.
She was also brilliant at building a case against one suspect and then tearing it down. Swinton staged a re-enactment to hone in on the killer, who turned out to be a complete surprise, to me at least. A solid mid-century police procedural. Recommended.