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AJ Blythe: Welcome to the Down Under Mystery Club.
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AJ Blythe: I’m AJ Blythe and joining me is fellow mystery author Ava Ness.
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AJ Blythe: Every week we dive into curious cases, cracking good reads and all things mystery.
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AJ Blythe: Grab a cuppa, settle in and let’s get sleuthing.
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AJ Blythe: Thanks for tuning in.
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AJ Blythe: I’m AJ and across the microphone from me today is the one and only Ava Ness.
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Ava Ness: Oh hello AJ.
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Ava Ness: I think you also are the one and only.
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AJ Blythe: Thank you.
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AJ Blythe: In a moment, I’m going to outline an Australian mystery.
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AJ Blythe: I’ve done the research.
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Ava Ness: And I’m coming in blind.
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AJ Blythe: After we’ve discussed the case, we’ll talk about the mystery novels the case brings to mind.
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AJ Blythe: Now this week’s case is 1 I’ve always been fascinated with.
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AJ Blythe: The story starts with a well-dressed man slumped against a seawall on a quiet beach, completely undisturbed, as if he were merely asleep.
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AJ Blythe: His leather shoes are highly polished, a suit is neatly pressed,
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AJ Blythe: and a half-smoked cigarette rests gently on his shirt collar.
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AJ Blythe: But it is clear the man is deceased.
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AJ Blythe: Pockets contain no wallet, cash or ID card.
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AJ Blythe: Every single label has been meticulously cut out of the clothing.
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AJ Blythe: Investigators found unsmoked cigarettes, matches, an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a used bus ticket from Adelaide, half a packet of Juicy Fruit gum,
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AJ Blythe: and a distinctive aluminium comb made in America.
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AJ Blythe: To the public, this was the beginning of Australia’s most baffling post-war cold case, the internationally renowned mystery of the Somerton Man, sometimes referred to as the Tamam Shootcase.
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AJ Blythe: For over 70 years, the discovery of this body on Somerton Beach in Glenelg, south of Adelaide, on the morning of December 1, 1948, sparked a global fascination.
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AJ Blythe: Theories ranged from a Cold War Soviet spy to a black market racketeer or a spurned lover.
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Ava Ness: Okay, so I do know a little bit about this then.
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Ava Ness: I do recall having seen some of the news coverage.
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Ava Ness: But I didn’t know that’s what the mystery was called.
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Ava Ness: And I don’t know, I didn’t know all those details.
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Ava Ness: Like that’s fascinating.
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Ava Ness: So the tags were cut out of his clothes.
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AJ Blythe: It’s a real puzzle.
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AJ Blythe: It’s almost like something that you’d read in a cozy mystery because.
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AJ Blythe: It’s sort of legendary for the puzzles that it has because there’s all these bizarre forensic clues.
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AJ Blythe: There are uncrackable ciphers and ancient Persian poetry.
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AJ Blythe: What I’m going to talk about is all this sort of eerie evidence that was left behind.
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AJ Blythe: And we’ll look at the mysterious code, the false leads.
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AJ Blythe: And we’re also going to touch on what might be a modern DNA breakthrough for this mystery man.
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Ava Ness: Okay.
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Ava Ness: I do love that people are so creative with the
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Ava Ness: with the theories for these kind of mysteries.
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Ava Ness: But in this one, it’s almost like they were being set up to find them.
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AJ Blythe: I know, That’s the thing about this one is that we’re not making these up, that the clues I’m about to go through were all there and this is what made it so puzzling and the reason it became an international mystery because it had these links to other countries around the world and also, you know, the spy element.
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AJ Blythe: When the investigators first examined the body, the complete lack of identification was the first big red flag that something odd was going on.
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AJ Blythe: He was in peak physical condition.
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AJ Blythe: He had unusually strong calf muscles and distinct toes.
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AJ Blythe: Yet fingerprints match no records in Australia, the UK or the United States FBI files.
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Ava Ness: Okay, I just have to jump in.
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Ava Ness: He had distinct toes.
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AJ Blythe: Yeah, and I couldn’t find out exactly what that was, but apparently there was something about his toes.
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Ava Ness: Okay.
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AJ Blythe: There was no foreign substances.
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AJ Blythe: Pathologists noted internal organs showed acute congestion, which is the state consistent with the effects of an undetectable poison.
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Ava Ness: That’s fascinating.
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AJ Blythe: And then on January 14, 1949, so about six weeks later, staff at the Adelaide railway station discovered a brown suitcase with its labels removed.
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AJ Blythe: Inside was a collection of odd items, clothing manufactured and fitted in America, a type of thread only available overseas, and two hidden blades, one a cut down kitchen knife and the other a sharpened pair of scissors.
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Ava Ness: This is unbelievable.
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Ava Ness: This is actually real.
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AJ Blythe: This is all fair dinkum.
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AJ Blythe: This is real.
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AJ Blythe: Yeah, I know.
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Ava Ness: This is like something out of a movie.
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AJ Blythe: Yeah, which is why it really got the curiosity of people around the world because not only were they looking overseas to try to get answers, but it really is something that you’d only read in a book or see on the big screen.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, that’s amazing.
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AJ Blythe: There were three items in the suitcase that had missed that whole purging of names.
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AJ Blythe: T Keane, spelt K-E-A-N-E, was on a tie, Keane, with an E, on a laundry bag, and Keane, spelt without an E, on a singlet.
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AJ Blythe: And so they went searching for people named with Keane, with an E or without, but it turned up nothing.
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AJ Blythe: So months into the stalled investigation, a pathologist re-examining the clothing made another discovery.
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AJ Blythe: Hidden deep inside a tiny, sewn in secret pocket of the trousers was a tightly rolled up scrap of paper.
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AJ Blythe: Printed on it was a complex script and there were two Persian words, and I’m probably saying them incorrectly, so apologies, Tamam Shud, meaning ended or finished.
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AJ Blythe: Now, detectives trace that scrap to a rare New Zealand edition of an ancient book of poetry called, and I’m definitely going to say this wrongly, the Rubaiye of Omar Khayyam.
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AJ Blythe: A local man soon came forward claiming the book had been left in the rear footwell of his car around the time of the death.
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AJ Blythe: When police looked at the inside back cover under ultraviolet light, the mystery expanded.
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Ava Ness: And it couldn’t possibly expand.
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Ava Ness: Come on.
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AJ Blythe: I feel like I’m making this up, but you know, anyone listening who wants to check, I will have all the, you know, references to the research and everything at the bottom of the script on my podcast webpage.
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AJ Blythe: Scrolled in pencil were a series of indentations forming 5 lines of capitalised letters.
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AJ Blythe: It looked like a sophisticated, uncrackable wartime cipher.
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AJ Blythe: Now I’ll put the full cipher in the script, but I’ll just read one line out for the moment.
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AJ Blythe: It was a series of block letters and the first of the five lines read.
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AJ Blythe: W-R-G-O-A-B-A-B-D.
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AJ Blythe: And the rest of the lines are very similar, very nonsensical.
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AJ Blythe: And beneath the code was a faintly written, unlisted phone number.
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AJ Blythe: That number led detectives straight to a young nurse named Jessica Ellen Thompson, who lived just 400 metres from where the body was found.
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AJ Blythe: She claimed not to know the man, but mentioned an unidentified man had visited her house the year before.
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AJ Blythe: And she also provided a clue.
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AJ Blythe: She had once given a copy of the Roubaix to a man named Alf Boxall.
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Ava Ness: So hang on, let me just go back.
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Ava Ness: So she claimed that unidentified man had visited her at a house a year before.
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Ava Ness: But why does she remember that in relation to this?
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Ava Ness: Do we know?
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AJ Blythe: No, I guess that, you know, it might have struck her that some man visited her, I guess.
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Ava Ness: Yeah.
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Ava Ness: I just feel like everything’s just another, I feel like I’m in the middle of the pages of a book here.
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Ava Ness: I know.
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Ava Ness: I’ve got so many questions.
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AJ Blythe: Summarizing my latest read.
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AJ Blythe: Believing they had finally cracked the case, police worked on the assumption the dead man was Boxall until Alf Boxall turned up alive in Sydney, still holding his copy of the book.
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Ava Ness: This is unbelievable.
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AJ Blythe: When shown a plaster death mask of the Somerton Man,
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AJ Blythe: Jessica Thompson, the nurse, appeared horrified yet denied ever knowing him.
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AJ Blythe: Decades later, her family would reveal she likely took significant secrets to her grave.
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Ava Ness: That’s what I was thinking.
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Ava Ness: There’s got to be something more going on with her.
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AJ Blythe: There has to be.
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AJ Blythe: Because of the missing labels and the proximity to a top secret military weapons testing range at Woomera, the case remained A frustrating enigma for decades.
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AJ Blythe: This changed when an Adelaide academic, Professor Derek Abbott, decided to apply modern genetic technology.
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AJ Blythe: Abbott tracked down hairs that had become trapped in the original plaster death mask.
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AJ Blythe: He worked alongside a forensic genealogist, Colleen Fitzpatrick, and they extracted DNA from the ancient hair roots and spent years building a massive family tree containing over 4,000 people.
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AJ Blythe: In mid-2022, a historic, definitive breakthrough was achieved.
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AJ Blythe: They finally gave Somerton Man a name, Carl Charles Webb.
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Ava Ness: It’s such an ordinary name for something like so extraordinary.
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AJ Blythe: I know, and far from being an international spy, Carl Webb was a 43-year-old electrical engineer and instrument maker from Melbourne who had vanished from his family.
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AJ Blythe: Archival records painted a picture of a quiet loner who loved betting on horses.
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AJ Blythe: And experts are now saying that mysterious code at the back of the book matches shorthand notation for horse racing fields.
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AJ Blythe: Now, I haven’t been able to find how that matched.
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AJ Blythe: Maybe my research wasn’t broad enough, but I couldn’t quite work out how they derived that assumption.
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AJ Blythe: He was also known to write his own poetry, which might explain why he had the Persian book of poems, the Rubiye.
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AJ Blythe: And they believed that the final piece of the suitcase puzzle fell into place when researchers discovered that his sister was married to a man named Thomas Keane with an E.
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AJ Blythe: Potentially Carl was wearing his brother-in-law ‘s clothes when he travelled to Adelaide.
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Ava Ness: Well, this is very disappointingly ordinarily explained.
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AJ Blythe: I know, it is.
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AJ Blythe: I mean, I guess it officially addresses like decades of speculation regarding his ancestry, because despite the Persian poetry found in his trousers, genetic mapping has proven that he had European descent and was born and raised in Victoria.
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AJ Blythe: And the Persian text was simply a quote from a book of poetry that he valued.
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AJ Blythe: However, this DNA hasn’t been officially confirmed, so we need the coroner
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AJ Blythe: to actually go through the process.
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AJ Blythe: So the case has been reopened.
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AJ Blythe: The body had been exhumed and the coroner is going to hand down their findings on the identity of the summited man.
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AJ Blythe: It’ll be five years after he was exhumed, but it should be later this year.
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AJ Blythe: Then we will know potentially for sure
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AJ Blythe: whether or not this is Carl Webb or whether the mystery of the Somerton Man still remains open.
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Ava Ness: Well, I kind of hope it’s not Carl Webb because Carl Webb, horse racing guy from Victoria is just not very interesting compared to everything else that we’ve just talked about.
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Ava Ness: But then also why did Jessica look so surprised to see him?
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Ava Ness: It’s still a mystery.
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AJ Blythe: It is still a mystery.
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AJ Blythe: And
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AJ Blythe: I guess it’s that the perspective you’re coming from, you find a deceased man who’s probably cut the labels off his clothing because that isn’t his name.
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AJ Blythe: So he’s got hand-me-down clothing, but maybe didn’t want it to show us such, so he’s cut the labels off.
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Ava Ness: Yeah.
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AJ Blythe: Probably knows he shouldn’t be gambling or is suspicious that people are going to steal his horse racing tips.
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AJ Blythe: So he’s hidden the bits of paper.
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AJ Blythe: He happens to like poetry.
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AJ Blythe: It just happens that the last bit of poetry that could be associated with him was Persian.
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AJ Blythe: So when you look at it,
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AJ Blythe: knowing or potentially knowing that he was just this unassuming man from Melbourne with a very regular day job, you can kind of look at all those clues and go, well, actually, they’re very easily explained.
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AJ Blythe: But when you find them on their own, your brain immediately goes to this extreme.
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AJ Blythe: There are ciphers, there’s hidden clues, there’s identifications deliberately removed.
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AJ Blythe: his internal organs from the autopsy implied poison.
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AJ Blythe: So it’s very interesting, the before and the after, how you can actually give all those clues a different meaning.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, and probably a bit of a product of its time as well.
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Ava Ness: I mean, it’s only just post-World War II, wasn’t it?
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AJ Blythe: Yeah, it was.
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AJ Blythe: So he was found on the beach in 1948.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, so there still would have been, you know, a lot of
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Ava Ness: those sorts of ways of thinking and a lot of people coming out of the war with a lot of trauma and a lot of baggage that potentially influenced the way that was looked at.
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Ava Ness: But you couldn’t blame them.
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AJ Blythe: No.
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Ava Ness: I mean, I’m pretty sure if this happened today that people would pretty much think the same thing.
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AJ Blythe: Absolutely.
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AJ Blythe: If we found somebody today, I guess the only difference is that DNA is now a thing that is very readily available and can be done fairly quickly if the priority is high enough.
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AJ Blythe: But yeah, you’re right.
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AJ Blythe: Back in 1949, they would have been able to do fingerprints and they could have done the autopsy and some basic testing, but it really wouldn’t be what would happen today.
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AJ Blythe: If it happened today, I think we’d have answers much faster.
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Ava Ness: Yeah.
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AJ Blythe: They’d also be able to do digitize his face, send it around the world in no time, going, does anyone know this man?
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AJ Blythe: And getting answers that way.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, that’s true.
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Ava Ness: You know, there definitely is technology now to formally identify him faster, but I still think the circumstances, if it happened today, wouldn’t likely be that much different.
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Ava Ness: You know, you can imagine the internet going wild with something like this.
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Ava Ness: I mean,
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Ava Ness: there’d be a million theories and explanations for even for the identification, ways that might have been tampered with or adjusted.
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Ava Ness: Like I think it’s just got so many elements of a great mystery.
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Ava Ness: It will be kind of disappointing if it all does come to just be pretty ordinary.
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AJ Blythe: Oh, I completely agree.
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AJ Blythe: I’ve heard of Summit and Mann.
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AJ Blythe: I don’t remember when I was a child and
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AJ Blythe: I just found it fascinating because of the same reason that everybody else did.
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AJ Blythe: There’s all of these clues and ciphers and all the classic little elements that I loved in the mystery books I was reading.
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AJ Blythe: And so I’ve just followed the case along every time something’s kind of popped up about it or any new take on it.
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AJ Blythe: I’ve always read it because
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AJ Blythe: I found that such an interesting thing that decades and decades and decades passed and they still didn’t have an identification or any clue as to why he was peacefully deceased on a South Australian beach.
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Ava Ness: And so did the new investigation discover how he died.
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AJ Blythe: No, it’s just been trying to identify who he is.
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AJ Blythe: Now whether the coroner’s report is going to look at that a little bit more.
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AJ Blythe: In 2021 they did exhume his body and I’m assuming the coroner perhaps is being able to get more testing done because I would assume that from 1949 to now there would be a lot more
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AJ Blythe: poisons and things that could be tested for, but there’s also the issue that a lot of poisons degrade over time.
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AJ Blythe: Some are fast acting and some aren’t.
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AJ Blythe: So whether they can find traces in his system still, I’m not sure.
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AJ Blythe: It also depends, I guess, how he was treated before he was buried.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, because that’s just probably the poison angle is a bit difficult to prove either way now.
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AJ Blythe: Yeah, that’s right.
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AJ Blythe: He does have a gravestone and he’s actually, on it says Somerton Man, so that’s actually how he’s been identified on his gravestone.
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AJ Blythe: I think that the DNA that has been used was from the death mask.
00:16:38.000 –> 00:16:50.000
AJ Blythe: It would have to be his hair that was in there, but I guess by exhuming the body, it means that they can actually take materials for testing from his body as opposed to relying on a secondary source.
00:16:50.000 –> 00:16:51.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, okay.
00:16:51.000 –> 00:16:53.000
AJ Blythe: So I guess that’s going to be part of it.
00:16:53.000 –> 00:17:04.000
AJ Blythe: I’m really keen to hear what the coroner’s report has to say and I’m sure it will make the news when it does come out because this has been such a big international case.
00:17:04.000 –> 00:17:06.000
Ava Ness: Well, we might have to do a follow up episode.
00:17:06.000 –> 00:17:20.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, I think we might have to because perhaps once they know for sure and for certain if it is or isn’t Carl Webb, they might be actually able to find out a little bit more about why he was there or maybe his links back to
00:17:20.000 –> 00:17:29.000
AJ Blythe: Jessica or any other parts of the story that seems so obscure, like why the book was in a wheel well of somebody else’s car.
00:17:29.000 –> 00:17:30.000
Ava Ness: Yes.
00:17:30.000 –> 00:17:34.000
AJ Blythe: And what the suitcase was doing at the train station.
00:17:34.000 –> 00:17:35.000
AJ Blythe: So a few things like that.
00:17:35.000 –> 00:17:38.000
Ava Ness: I mean, he could have been robbed, he could have been anything, you know?
00:17:38.000 –> 00:17:39.000
AJ Blythe: Oh, that’s right.
00:17:39.000 –> 00:17:46.000
AJ Blythe: So maybe he left it there and I don’t know how far it was from the train station to the beach and went for a walk and just passed away.
00:17:46.000 –> 00:17:51.000
AJ Blythe: But it doesn’t seem like his family have been able to
00:17:51.000 –> 00:17:53.000
AJ Blythe: provide a lot of information to the story.
00:17:53.000 –> 00:17:54.000
Ava Ness: No.
00:17:54.000 –> 00:18:01.000
Ava Ness: So, that’s interesting too, isn’t it, that they didn’t put out a missing person report?
00:18:01.000 –> 00:18:04.000
Ava Ness: I mean, this is Adelaide though, and it was the 40s and he was from Victoria.
00:18:04.000 –> 00:18:10.000
Ava Ness: I mean, I could see how that could potentially not have, I’m sure men went missing all the time.
00:18:10.000 –> 00:18:11.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right.
00:18:11.000 –> 00:18:14.000
Ava Ness: And there wasn’t the ways to track people now.
00:18:14.000 –> 00:18:15.000
Ava Ness: then that there is now.
00:18:15.000 –> 00:18:16.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, okay.
00:18:16.000 –> 00:18:20.000
Ava Ness: There’s still some mystery elements in there that might not get solved.
00:18:20.000 –> 00:18:29.000
AJ Blythe: I don’t think we’ll ever know the full story, but I think in finding Somerton Man’s identity, it will go quite a distance towards giving some answers.
00:18:29.000 –> 00:18:37.000
Ava Ness: Well, I’m glad that, well, not glad because we don’t know whether it’s going to be confirmed to be him or not, but if it is, then at least he’ll have a proper gravestone.
00:18:37.000 –> 00:18:38.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, that’s right.
00:18:38.000 –> 00:18:42.000
Ava Ness: And his resting place will be, you know, no longer unmarked.
00:18:42.000 –> 00:18:45.000
AJ Blythe: The family will know what happened to him and where he is.
00:18:45.000 –> 00:18:50.000
AJ Blythe: And I guess the rest of it will just always have that question mark over it.
00:18:50.000 –> 00:18:51.000
Ava Ness: Indeed.
00:18:50.000 –> 00:18:54.000
Ava Ness: Well, let’s stay tuned and see what happens.
00:18:54.000 –> 00:18:59.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, and we can add a PS to this when we do find out what the coroner has to say.
00:18:59.000 –> 00:19:00.000
Ava Ness: Sounds good.
00:19:00.000 –> 00:19:04.000
AJ Blythe: But for now, case closed.
00:19:04.000 –> 00:19:07.000
AJ Blythe: I’m not the only person fascinated by this case.
00:19:07.000 –> 00:19:11.000
AJ Blythe: So before we discuss the fiction that echoes the Somerton man,
00:19:11.000 –> 00:19:20.000
AJ Blythe: I have to mention a non-fiction book that I feel we do have to discuss and that was written by Phryne Fisher author Kerry Greenwood.
00:19:20.000 –> 00:19:24.000
AJ Blythe: Tamam Shud, the Somerton Man Mystery was published in 2012.
00:19:24.000 –> 00:19:36.000
AJ Blythe: Because Kerry Greenwood was fascinated by the case her entire life, she decided to apply her investigative storytelling skills to the real police and coroner files.
00:19:36.000 –> 00:19:52.000
AJ Blythe: She walks you through the bizarre elements, the American tailoring with missing labels, the hidden tamam shoe scrap of paper, the mysterious book cipher, attempting to approach the real-world cold case through the lens of a veteran mystery writer.
00:19:52.000 –> 00:19:55.000
AJ Blythe: Now, Kerry doesn’t come to a conclusion.
00:19:55.000 –> 00:19:58.000
AJ Blythe: When she wrote the book, his identity still remained a mystery.
00:19:58.000 –> 00:20:06.000
AJ Blythe: But she does introduce Phryne Fisher in the book at the end, who has a short story for the last chapter and sets out to solve the case.
00:20:06.000 –> 00:20:09.000
AJ Blythe: What books does this case make you think of, Ava?
00:20:09.000 –> 00:20:16.000
Ava Ness: Well, before we say that, as soon as you said that Kerry Greenwood had written that book, that straight away I thought, this does sound like a Phryne Fisher case.
00:20:16.000 –> 00:20:18.000
Ava Ness: Exactly sounds like it.
00:20:18.000 –> 00:20:19.000
AJ Blythe: Does, doesn’t it?
00:20:19.000 –> 00:20:23.000
AJ Blythe: And I wonder how much that particular mystery
00:20:23.000 –> 00:20:30.000
AJ Blythe: has influenced some of her Farine Fisher stories because she was fascinated by this particular case.
00:20:30.000 –> 00:20:34.000
AJ Blythe: I mean, she had to have been to the point where you actually do that research and write the book.
00:20:34.000 –> 00:20:40.000
AJ Blythe: But apparently she was known for being completely fascinated with this particular story.
00:20:40.000 –> 00:20:49.000
AJ Blythe: I mean, when you think about it, ciphers, unidentified, you know, characters, you know, labels cut off clothing, physical
00:20:49.000 –> 00:20:55.000
AJ Blythe: discrepancies or physical parts of the body that give clues to who they might be or what they might have been doing.
00:20:55.000 –> 00:20:59.000
AJ Blythe: It all adds up to something that she would have definitely had Friday investigating.
00:20:59.000 –> 00:21:01.000
Ava Ness: Absolutely, absolutely.
00:21:01.000 –> 00:21:05.000
Ava Ness: And then the other book I was thinking of is Stephen King.
00:21:05.000 –> 00:21:06.000
AJ Blythe: Okay.
00:21:06.000 –> 00:21:07.000
Ava Ness: The Colorado Kid.
00:21:07.000 –> 00:21:09.000
AJ Blythe: I don’t know that one.
00:21:09.000 –> 00:21:10.000
Ava Ness: Has a lot of other elements.
00:21:10.000 –> 00:21:13.000
Ava Ness: So I think it’s off the coast of Maine.
00:21:13.000 –> 00:21:16.000
Ava Ness: A man’s found dead and there’s no identification on the body.
00:21:16.000 –> 00:21:26.000
Ava Ness: And then there’s all these sort of baffling circumstances about his death and it seems like an impossible crime and it’s got a lot of similarities to this.
00:21:26.000 –> 00:21:34.000
Ava Ness: But I still think that this is going to be better than any fiction book that we talk about in this episode.
00:21:34.000 –> 00:21:35.000
AJ Blythe: I really do.
00:21:34.000 –> 00:21:37.000
AJ Blythe: I’m not sure that you can get past the truth.
00:21:37.000 –> 00:21:42.000
AJ Blythe: I think this is a case of factors, you know, much stranger than fiction.
00:21:42.000 –> 00:21:46.000
AJ Blythe: I had a couple and I thought that I really have to give a shout out to Dorothy L Sayers.
00:21:46.000 –> 00:21:54.000
AJ Blythe: because one of the queens of mystery and the very first Lord Peter Wimsey book, which was called Whose Body?
00:21:54.000 –> 00:22:02.000
AJ Blythe: And it follows Lord Peter Wimsey as he unravels A perplexing mystery that begins with the discovery of an unidentified corpse in a bathtub.
00:22:02.000 –> 00:22:13.000
AJ Blythe: Obviously, by the end of the book, we do know who the unidentified body is, but it does have all those sort of strange elements of suddenly this man is deceased in the bathtub.
00:22:13.000 –> 00:22:18.000
AJ Blythe: I also have another one which is a little bit different to a standard mystery.
00:22:18.000 –> 00:22:21.000
AJ Blythe: It’s called The Guest List by Lucy Foley.
00:22:21.000 –> 00:22:22.000
Ava Ness: Oh yes, I know this book.
00:22:22.000 –> 00:22:29.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, and if you aren’t familiar with it, it’s set on a remote stormy Irish island.
00:22:29.000 –> 00:22:34.000
AJ Blythe: There’s A glamorous celebrity wedding and of course a massive storm cuts off the island.
00:22:34.000 –> 00:22:41.000
AJ Blythe: So you’ve got that classic locked room style mystery because no one can come on the island, no one can come off the island.
00:22:41.000 –> 00:22:47.000
AJ Blythe: A body is discovered and of course panic ensues because somewhere amongst them is a murderer.
00:22:47.000 –> 00:22:56.000
AJ Blythe: The thing is that makes this book so much different to a normal mystery is that the reader doesn’t know who the victim is until nearly the end of the book.
00:22:56.000 –> 00:23:00.000
AJ Blythe: The chapters alternate between different guests perspectives.
00:23:00.000 –> 00:23:08.000
AJ Blythe: So you have to guess not only who has motive to kill, but who the unidentified body is going to be.
00:23:08.000 –> 00:23:20.000
AJ Blythe: That is quite an intriguing one, but it does have that same, a body is discovered and the reader, or in this case with a summoned man, the public don’t know who it is until right near the end of the case.
00:23:20.000 –> 00:23:22.000
Ava Ness: It’s a really great read.
00:23:22.000 –> 00:23:23.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, it is.
00:23:23.000 –> 00:23:26.000
AJ Blythe: And it’s so different, I think, to the structure of what we’re used to.
00:23:26.000 –> 00:23:33.000
AJ Blythe: So it’s a little bit unexpected in that you’re having to guess both the murderer and the murdered victim.
00:23:33.000 –> 00:23:38.000
Ava Ness: Like I said, I think there’s so many elements of the real story that you see in lots
00:23:38.000 –> 00:23:45.000
Ava Ness: of different mystery and thriller novels but there’s probably nothing that can compare to it in itself.
00:23:45.000 –> 00:23:46.000
AJ Blythe: No.
00:23:46.000 –> 00:23:56.000
Ava Ness: But yeah you definitely do see lots of bits and pieces of this story in so many books and not just in murder mysteries as well in quite a lot of thriller books.
00:23:56.000 –> 00:24:01.000
Ava Ness: That whole idea of what happened, here’s the clues, need to piece it together.
00:24:01.000 –> 00:24:11.000
Ava Ness: Thinking of our lovely friend Emma Gray’s book, Pictures of You, where a young woman wakes up and has amnesia and needs to piece together what happened to her.
00:24:11.000 –> 00:24:16.000
Ava Ness: Always just such an interesting story to be able to piece things backwards.
00:24:16.000 –> 00:24:18.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right, absolutely.
00:24:18.000 –> 00:24:26.000
AJ Blythe: And I think that makes it even more intriguing for the reader because you’re really having to search the words on the story to try to find the answers.
00:24:26.000 –> 00:24:27.000
Ava Ness: That’s right, that’s right.
00:24:27.000 –> 00:24:34.000
Ava Ness: And it’s just a bit like what happened when you were just explaining the case in itself and the questions that I was asking you.
00:24:34.000 –> 00:24:41.000
Ava Ness: It just makes you keep asking more and more questions as you go along and then you’re just unpicking the story.
00:24:41.000 –> 00:24:46.000
Ava Ness: undoing the layers until you get to what actually happens in the case.
00:24:46.000 –> 00:24:48.000
Ava Ness: So that’s where the fun is.
00:24:48.000 –> 00:24:49.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, that’s right.
00:24:49.000 –> 00:25:00.000
AJ Blythe: And I think that’s why we all cling to wanting to know what happened to the Somerton Man, because like in a mystery book, we want to know what happens at the end and we get that closure, but we don’t with the real life mystery.
00:25:00.000 –> 00:25:07.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, And I guess there’s like some similarities with the poisoning case in the UK a few years ago as well.
00:25:07.000 –> 00:25:08.000
AJ Blythe: Which one was that?
00:25:08.000 –> 00:25:18.000
Ava Ness: The one that happened down in, I can’t remember what it’s called, it was the poison that was, there’s a man on the bench and he had the poison.
00:25:18.000 –> 00:25:21.000
AJ Blythe: Yes, that’s right.
00:25:21.000 –> 00:25:22.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:22.000 –> 00:25:29.000
AJ Blythe: You know, it has all those thriller movie elements and you want to know the answers.
00:25:29.000 –> 00:25:30.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, okay.
00:25:29.000 –> 00:25:34.000
Ava Ness: The big question now is why has no one ever made a movie about this?
00:25:34.000 –> 00:25:35.000
AJ Blythe: I don’t know.
00:25:35.000 –> 00:25:37.000
AJ Blythe: I just think it’s screaming for it.
00:25:37.000 –> 00:25:38.000
Ava Ness: Does.
00:25:37.000 –> 00:25:38.000
Ava Ness: It does.
00:25:38.000 –> 00:25:40.000
Ava Ness: The story just writes itself.
00:25:40.000 –> 00:25:41.000
Ava Ness: It’s all there.
00:25:41.000 –> 00:25:42.000
AJ Blythe: I know.
00:25:41.000 –> 00:25:47.000
AJ Blythe: I did have one other book that I thought might be worth mentioning by Laura Jo Rowland.
00:25:47.000 –> 00:25:52.000
AJ Blythe: It’s called The Woman in the Veil and it’s a Victorian cosy mystery #4.
00:25:52.000 –> 00:26:01.000
AJ Blythe: And it’s set in 1890 London and a unidentified woman is washed ashore on the banks of the River Thames and she has
00:26:01.000 –> 00:26:03.000
AJ Blythe: cuts on her face.
00:26:03.000 –> 00:26:05.000
AJ Blythe: And when she wakes up from the coma, it’s a similar sort of thing.
00:26:05.000 –> 00:26:08.000
AJ Blythe: She has total amnesia and can’t remember her name.
00:26:08.000 –> 00:26:11.000
AJ Blythe: And so they call her Sleeping Beauty.
00:26:11.000 –> 00:26:15.000
AJ Blythe: The public get very behind this Sleeping Beauty case.
00:26:15.000 –> 00:26:21.000
AJ Blythe: And so three different parties come forward to claim her, I guess, as their own.
00:26:21.000 –> 00:26:23.000
AJ Blythe: She recognised one of the claimants.
00:26:23.000 –> 00:26:29.000
AJ Blythe: So the crime scene photographer, who are the main characters of the series, reunite them.
00:26:29.000 –> 00:26:31.000
AJ Blythe: But then one of the claimants is murdered.
00:26:31.000 –> 00:26:41.000
AJ Blythe: And so now the photographer and her little team have to untangle Sleeping Beauty’s true identity to stop a killer before they end up in the gallows themselves.
00:26:41.000 –> 00:26:42.000
Ava Ness: Oh, so many stakes.
00:26:42.000 –> 00:26:43.000
Ava Ness: I love it.
00:26:42.000 –> 00:26:52.000
AJ Blythe: It’s a lovely, cozy, but it has that same sort of feel to the Somerton Man that somebody washes up on the beach as such, you know, and no one knows who they are.
00:26:52.000 –> 00:26:56.000
AJ Blythe: But of course, by the end of the book, everything gets tied off in a lovely big red bow.
00:26:56.000 –> 00:26:59.000
AJ Blythe: So you know the whole story.
00:26:59.000 –> 00:27:01.000
Ava Ness: Okay, no, but definitely my imagination is now
00:27:01.000 –> 00:27:02.000
Ava Ness: running wild.
00:27:02.000 –> 00:27:04.000
Ava Ness: I’ve got lots of ideas brewing.
00:27:04.000 –> 00:27:08.000
Ava Ness: I have to spend the afternoon jotting down some ideas, I think.
00:27:08.000 –> 00:27:11.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, I think this case just, there’s so much.
00:27:11.000 –> 00:27:22.000
AJ Blythe: And I think that perhaps the final word for today’s episode should go to the person that Kerry Greenwood’s book is dedicated to, which is her father, Alf Greenwood.
00:27:22.000 –> 00:27:27.000
AJ Blythe: And apparently he said to Kerry when she was talking about this case.
00:27:27.000 –> 00:27:30.000
AJ Blythe: It’s because it’s a mystery, see, little mate.
00:27:30.000 –> 00:27:33.000
AJ Blythe: Stories where you know the solution, you forget about them.
00:27:33.000 –> 00:27:38.000
AJ Blythe: But if you don’t know, if you can’t know, well, they stick in your mind.
00:27:38.000 –> 00:27:45.000
Ava Ness: That is absolutely true of not just this mystery, but a lot of the other ones that we have talked about on this podcast.
00:27:45.000 –> 00:27:47.000
AJ Blythe: Absolutely.
00:27:47.000 –> 00:27:51.000
AJ Blythe: Now, dear listener, spend the week in the company of a fantastic book.
00:27:51.000 –> 00:27:55.000
AJ Blythe: We’ll see you right back here next time for our next case, Picnic at Hanging Rock.
00:27:55.000 –> 00:27:57.000
AJ Blythe: Happy reading.
00:27:57.000 –> 00:27:58.000
Ava Ness: Bye.
00:27:58.000 –> 00:28:00.000
AJ Blythe: Thanks for joining the Down Under Mystery Club.
00:28:00.000 –> 00:28:05.000
AJ Blythe: If you enjoyed the show, follow so you never miss an episode and share it with a fellow mystery lover.
00:28:05.000 –> 00:28:11.000
AJ Blythe: We enjoy hearing from you, so drop us a comment at ajblythe.com forward slash podcast.
00:28:11.000 –> 00:28:14.000 AJ Blythe: Until next time, club adjourned.