Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

By Kerry Greenwood

In 1948, a man was found dead on an Adelaide, Australia, beach. Well-dressed and unmarked, he had a half-smoked cigarette by his side, but no identity documents. Six decades later, the Somerton Man's identity and murder are still a mystery. From the missing labels from all his clothing to the tiny piece of paper with the words "Tamam Shud" found sewn into the lining of the dead man's coat, this cold case is brimming with facts that are stranger than fiction. Written by one of Australia's best-known and most loved crime writers, this book uses pieces of the author's own past in an attempt to solve this crime, uncovering a new way of writing about true crimeand about herself in the process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781742241289

Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Greenwood was born in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray and after wandering far and wide, she returned to live there. She has degrees in English and Law from Melbourne University and was admitted to the legal profession on the 1st April 1982, a day which she finds both soothing and significant. Kerry has written three series, a number of plays, including The Troubadours with Stephen D’Arcy, is an award-winning children’s writer and has edited and contributed to several anthologies. The Phryne Fisher series (pronounced Fry-knee, to rhyme with briny) began in 1989 with Cocaine Blues which was a great success. Kerry has written twenty books in this series with no sign yet of Miss Fisher hanging up her pearl-handled pistol. Kerry says that as long as people want to read them, she can keep writing them. In 2003 Kerry won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Association.

Book preview

Introduction

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and – sans End.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 23

My mother has a strict regard for truth. She loves facts, history, biography. But my father taught me fiction because he told wonderful stories. Dad was a wharfie and a knockabout bloke, who ran away from his nice respectable middle-class home when he was fifteen to be a shearer; who had been everywhere and done everything; who invented a special tool to replace dolls’ arms; who felt that if a story needed embellishment to make it a good story, then he was the man to embellish it. I listened to his stories with huge enthusiasm, but I never really believed him. You wouldn’t bet your life on my dad’s veracity.

Al Greenwood came back from working in Adelaide and took a job at Melbourne Port as an off-season wharfie. He stayed there for the rest of his working life.

So no one was more surprised than me to find that the Tamam Shud mystery was all true.

In 1948 my father went to Adelaide. He had just got out of the army and had been stringing wires at Woomera Rocket Range as a signaller. He was slim and tanned with a mop of red curls and beautiful brown eyes. A friend of his, a boxer called Ray Dunn (also known as Killer), had had a disagreement with John Wren, the crime lord of the time, and felt that trying his luck in another city for a while might be wise, so he and my dad palled up. They stayed in Adelaide for almost a year.

In December 1948, my dad told me, the body of a man was found at the bottom of the steps on Somerton Beach. He was clean, manicured, well-nourished and well-dressed and had no visible wounds. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing all the labels from his clothes, which attracted immediate attention from the constabulary. And in the fob pocket of his pleated trousers, overlooked at first, was a piece of paper with the words ‘Tamam Shud’ on it. ‘Tamam Shud’ is the last phrase of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the works of a Persian poet translated by Edward FitzGerald, which used to be a popular Christmas gift for relatives one did not know well. My father said that the rest of the book was found in a car belonging to a doctor, parked at the top of the steps down to Somerton Beach. The phrase ‘Tamam Shud’ had been torn out of it and on the back of the page there was an unbreakable code. The autopsy determined that the man had been poisoned but the poison could not be identified. He was buried in West Terrace cemetery and the police kept a body cast, but no one ever claimed him.

All true. I should have twigged, because, unusually, my dad’s story had no ending. No satisfactory solution. Years later, when I was casting about for a mystery to solve for a short story collection called Case Reopened, I remembered Dad’s Tamam Shud story and looked it up. And I found that not only had my dad been accurate, which was not like him at all, but that the case was even more peculiar than he had known.

Kerry as a fruit picker in 1975. Picking grapes was my own connection to Adelaide. For two weeks or more I would work all day dragging a bag of grapes through the rows of vines, happy as the sun was long.

I had my own Adelaide connection as well. I used to go there every summer in the seventies for the fruit picking. I stayed in East Terrace with a friend of mine and enjoyed the city, especially as a relief from all those grapes. But I have always been uneasily aware that under its hypercivilised veneer, Adelaide is an eerie place, where they rather go in for strange killings – Truro, Snowtown, The Family. Murder is universal but Adelaide murder always has a twist. I remember thinking, as I lazed around Central Market, drinking Italian coffee and eating jam doughnuts from the pie cart, that I would love to investigate the history of the city one day and see if I could work out what made it such a fey place.

They are all gone into the world of light. My Adelaide of the seventies is gone, along with my youth and strength. The Adelaide of 1948 is gone, both the authorised version and the one related to me by my dad. The man found on Somerton Beach is gone, cocooned in his mystery. My father has gone, three years dead. In this book I will try to understand all of them and provide some explanations and then I will have to close the book and let them all go.

I cannot tell you how that feels.

Chapter One

Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate

I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,

And many Knots unravel’d by the Road;

But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 31

On 30 November 1948, Mr John Baines Lyons, a jeweller, went for a walk with his wife along Somerton Beach, as was their habit if the weather was warm. It was the last day of spring and hot, so they were strolling along the foreshore at about 7 pm. Near the foot of the steps which led down to the beach they saw a man sitting, supported by the sea wall. As they passed, he extended his right arm and then let it fall. They concluded that he was not dead, although possibly dead drunk, and walked on.

Some time later, around 7.30 pm, a woman called Olive Constance Neill, a telephonist, saw the seated man from the road above the seafront. It was a warm night and there were other people about, including a man in his fifties, wearing a grey suit and hat, who was looking down, possibly at the man on the beach. Miss Neill directed her companion Gordon’s attention to the seated man and said, ‘Perhaps he’s dead!’ Gordon gave a cursory glance, observed that the man might indeed be dead because he wasn’t reacting to the mosquitos, and they passed on. Possibly with other things on their minds.

‘X’ marks the spot. The place where the body was found on Somerton Beach, Adelaide.

At about 6.50 am, the same John Lyons, who must have been a very athletic man, went for an early morning swim. When he emerged from the sea, he met a friend of his and they noticed men on horses gathered around the man Mr Lyons had seen the night before. On inspection, Mr Lyons affirmed that the man was dead. He went home to call the police and then returned to the scene. Brighton Police Station sent their Constable Moss, who found a body in which rigor was already fully established.

The man was lying with his feet toward the sea, still against the sea wall. He was well-dressed but he had no hat. He didn’t appear to have suffered any stab wounds or bullet wounds. No bruises or blood were observed and there was no disturbance of the scene. He seemed to have died, very quietly and peacefully, where he sat. His half-smoked cigarette had fallen out of his mouth and onto his lapel as he slumped but his chin was not even blistered.

And there you have him. Somerton Man as he is called these days.

My dad told me about him as though he was a myth. In a way, he is. Certainly, he has become an object over which many theories have been laid. But he is also himself, poor man – cold as a stone, slouched on the sand like a marooned sailor, with his last smoke dropping gently out of his mouth – and he deserves his dignity. He was somebody’s son. Somebody, somewhere, missed him and mourned for him. I must never write about him as though he were a thing. He wasn’t just a mystery. He was a man.

The police ambulance took Somerton Man to the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace. There, at 9.40 am, the doctor declared that life was extinct, an ancient ritual which must be enacted, even if there is absolutely no chance that life is present – for example, in a person whose head is at least 5 metres away from their body. (In case you think I am exaggerating I should say that this example comes from my own legal experience. Traffic accident.)

Life could hardly have been more extinct in Somerton Man. The doctor who declared him dead suggested that he must have had a heart attack and sent him to the morgue for a post-mortem. The body was processed in the usual way, being stripped and tagged and refrigerated. There was nothing odd about a heart attack victim, so no special notice was taken of the half-smoked cigarette, but the contents of his pockets were logged, as follows:

Railway ticket to Henley Beach

Bus ticket to North Glenelg

American metal comb

Packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum

Packet of Army Club cigarettes with seven Kenistas cigarettes inside

Handkerchief

Packet of Bryant & May matches

He had no wallet, no identity documents, no money and no passport.

My father was convinced that Somerton Man was an American because of his clothes, which he called ‘sharp’ (My dad was pretty sharp himself and had a keen eye for tailoring). Somerton Man was wearing jockey shorts and a singlet, a white shirt with a narrow tie in red, white and blue, fawn trousers, a brown knitted pullover, a brown double-breasted suit coat, socks and highly polished brown, laced shoes. Snazzy.

Somerton Man was a snappy dresser but it was a hot evening and he was wearing very heavy clothes for the weather. My own experience of Adelaide on a hot day is you find yourself wishing you could strip off your clothes at midday and bathe in the sea. Somerton Man was wearing the ensemble of someone who had come from somewhere cold, or who had nowhere to leave a change of clothes, or no lighter clothes into which he could change.

On examination of the clothes, it was found that every identifying label had been removed. This should have been the point at which someone smelt a Rodent of Unusual Size. Various commentators on this case have stated definitively that second-hand clothes always had the labels removed but as one who has dressed in op shop garments since early youth, I know this is not the case. What’s more, according to my more aged relatives, it never has been the case.

Before the seventies, when cheap mass-produced fabrics flooded into the West, clothes used to be much more valuable, by a factor of about ten, and consequently one labelled one’s clothes. In the days before iron-on glue, the labels bearing the name of the garment’s owner were usually sewn onto the manufacturer’s label. When you bought the garment in an op shop, you unpicked the original name tag and replaced it with your own. No used-clothes shop hoping for a profit would ever remove a prestigious tailor’s label from an expensive coat because the label would double the price. The only reason I can think of for removing all the labels is the concealment of Somerton Man’s identity.

Somerton Man had no money in his pockets. If he’d had any, it had gone with his wallet – if he had a wallet. And, to complete our survey of his garments, folded up into a tight little wad in his fob pocket, overlooked during the first survey, there was a scrap of paper torn out of a book that bore the words ‘Tamam Shud’. Of which, much more later.

The infamous note found hidden carefully in the watch pocket of Somerton Man’s coat. Was it a love token rather than a code?

Naked and cold, Somerton Man waited for his attending physician, whose task was to determine how he had died. The doctor in question, Dr JM Dwyer, decided that he had died of some irritant poison and sent samples of his organs – liver, muscle, blood, urine and stomach contents – for analysis. His fingerprints were taken and he was photographed. Somerton Man was now officially a Suspicious Death.

Not only Suspicious, but Unknown. While the forensic tests were performed and Somerton Man rested in his refrigerator, the police set about trying to find out who he was. Detective Strangway of Glenelg Station and his associates began by checking all the missing persons reports on hand but Somerton Man fitted none of them. Then they checked his fingerprints, which were not on record. And after that they went to the papers.

Police are almost always reluctant to make a newspaper appeal because they know they will be buried under the paperwork. Tips will flood in from people who have lost sons, brothers and, particularly, defaulting husbands and lovers all over Australia. Two people were sure that he was Robert Walsh, a woodcutter, but this positive identification was withdrawn when one of them looked at the body again and decided that it wasn’t him. In any case, Walsh

Reviews for Tamam Shud

[drmaf-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great read about an extraordinary mystery that for once really justifies the hoary old adage "truth is stranger than fiction". Greenwood, whose Phryne Fisher books I love, doesnt add much new to the mystery, but her whimsical writing really brings the poignant story of this unknown man to life. Only minor gripe is her rather self-indulgent working of her father into the story, I really couldnt see how it added anything. But a great book nonethless

[smik_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Let me point out first of all that there is only a tiny bit of crime fiction in this book - a short story in the last pages titled Tamam Shud: A Phryne Fisher Mystery in which Greenwood's popular sleuth solves the Somerton Man mystery.The majority of the book covers the Somerton Man mystery and Greenwood uses it as a vehicle for paying tribute to her story telling wharfie father, a mountain of autobiographical detail, and telling us about Adelaide which seems to specialise in peculiar murders.The book was of particular interest to me on two counts: the first related to hearing Greenwood speak at Adelaide Writer's Week yesterday, and the second because of the Adelaide setting, which is of course where I live.The book provides an opportunity for Greenwood to tell us a lot about her background, which we don't get much of in either her Phryne Fisher or Corinna Chapman books.To me it feels a less disciplined book than either of those series, with Greenwood allowing herself to ramble tangentially from topic to topic, in fact over a diverse range of topics.There's a glimpse of Adelaide just after the war, as well as in the 1970s. There are peeks into Greenwood's family history as well as references to her childhood and adult life. There are references to the nature of poisons, the use of ear shapes for identification purposes, to events in world and Australian history, to the murders and disappearance of children in Adelaide, and then to some of the more popular explanations for the death of the Somerton Man.All that "true crime" detail is nicely complemented by the Phryne Fisher story at the end.

[faradaydon_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Refreshingly different way of tackling a tale