JULIAN LEATHERDALE Death in the Ladies’ Goddess Club. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
The author of Palace of Tears and The Opal Dragonfly returns with a new historical novel that encompasses murder and an exotic all-female club in 1930s Kings Cross.
Julian Leatherdale’s third historical novel is a lavish escapade through Sydney’s Kings Cross in 1932 – the year the Harbour Bridge was opened and a politically tumultuous time for the city. Beginning with all the intrigue of a classic murder mystery, Death in the Ladies’ Goddess Club becomes an erotically charged thriller and, beneath all the glamour and glitz, a sobering portrait of a society still reeling from the First World War.
The colourful world of the narrative spins around 26-year-old ladies-page journalist and aspiring crime writer Joan Linderman, a serious but adventurous young woman who is at heart a ‘nice, middle-class girl from the suburbs’ for whom ‘poverty and crime were a novelty, a thrill that made her body shiver with delicious dread’.
When one of the working girls who lives in her boarding house is gruesomely murdered, Joan turns amateur sleuth, but she is as much a woman in search of herself, defining her own ambitions and making sense of the stark contrasts of the bright lights and grim realities that surround her in the Cross, as she is of the threads of pain that run through her own family, with one brother killed in the war and another badly scarred psychologically.
The cast of characters are just as vivid and interesting, from Joan’s flamboyant flatmate Bernice and all her bohemian confreres – aspiring writers and artists, prostitutes and libertines of all kinds – to Joan’s wealthy, over-entitled Aunt Olympia and her cold-fish quasi-fascist husband, Gordon, literally sitting above it all.
Joan’s observations are borne of curiosity and deeply felt, often speaking from the past to ask questions of today:
Why were women always victims or vixens in men’s eyes, wives or whores, muses or mistresses? Always stand-ins, mascots for something else: liberty, revolution, motherhood, purity, piety, beauty, eros, art? Could men never just see women as people first? As strong or weak, ashamed or brazen, self-sacrificing or self-interested like themselves?
And her insights are often nicely pointed:
It would be instructive, Joan thought, to see how many of these male bohemians had wives tucked away in the suburbs to tend to their hearth and children.
Leatherdale’s reconstructions of the past are always richly detailed and he doesn’t disappoint this time, with wonderful descriptions of the city:
She worked her way through the throng flowing around the Cenotaph, competing cross-currents of bankers and insurance men in dark suits and grey trilbies and typists and ladies-who-lunched in bright dresses, shawls and autumn bonnets rushing through the granite and honeyed-sandstone canyon of Martin Place.
And many memorable descriptions of the Cross:
The whole peninsula on which the Cross sat was laid out beneath them with its colourful mishmash of villas, mansions, hotels, shops and rows of Victorian terraces punctuated by the glossy canopy of trees, with the harbour beyond turning gold and crimson in the gathering dusk.
As well as the street-level grittiness of : ‘the six-road junction jammed with its discordant daily chaos of cars, trucks, buses and trams, shepherded by the lone figure of a traffic cop’.
Sydney’s interwar literary and art scene is woven naturally into the story, too, via Joan’s curiosity and personal creative yearnings, and we’re treated to meeting the poet and novelist Zora Cross, a particular influence upon Joan, and glimpses of the Lindsays, Marion Piddington, Eleanor Dark and Kenneth Slessor.
But it’s the tantalising centre of the novel’s plot – the Ladies’ Goddess Club and its bacchanalian heart – that is the most delectable treat. Drawing its inspiration from ‘ancient Greece and, more specifically, the cult of Dionysus’ this, too, is redolent of the times:
Following the cataclysm of the Great War and loss of faith in Christian civilisation, a generation of Australian artists hungered for a cultural renaissance rooted in the remote and pagan past…
What soon became clear to most female bohemians, however, was that this vision of an antipodean Arcadia recruited women in mostly supine roles as bare-breasted nymphs endlessly available for male pleasure and as muses for their creativity. What intrigued Joan about the Ladies Bacchus Club was that it was for women only…
And here lies the wild pulse of freedoms – artistic and sexual – that Joan might otherwise never have experienced had she not stepped into this realm:
Her nerve endings unfurl beneath her skin like tree roots snaking through soil, like tendrils unfolding into air and light, sparking with the electric flow of sap; she is a dryad, a free-spirit anchored in the earth, thrust into the sky, in union with the whole forest. And then, her blood, her nerves, her hair surge upwards with a great gush, her skin and bones dissolving into a shower of windblown sparks, her eyes seeing all the night sky at once, the black dome glistening with stars horizon to horizon over her, under her, inside her and she is, for one brief moment, a goddess.
Joan’s ordinary love-life is rather less spectacular, with the complex, Communist, war-wounded Hugh – who isn’t all he seems, and Joan can’t pinpoint why. But no-one is quite what they seem in this game of shadows that leads us through a multitude of unexpected shifts and twists involving blackmail at the top end of town, cut-throat gangsters, breathless coke-fuelled casual sex, and masks of many different kinds. Not too many readers will see the ending of this whodunnit coming.
Those readers who’ve loved Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher and Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair series will devour Death in the Ladies’ Goddess Club. But this novel offers something different from the usual historical murder-mystery fare: it’s kaleidoscopic and at times fabulously chaotic, in some senses over the top with a high C, and in others perhaps far more real.
Julian Leatherdale Death in the Ladies’ Goddess Club Allen & Unwin 2020 PB 400pp $29.99
Kim Kelly is the author of nine novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and The Blue Mile. Her latest, Walking, was published in February 2020. Find out more about Kim at: kimkellyauthor.com
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What a thoughtful review – thanks for giving such a strong impression and atmosphere of Julian’s novel!