Tamam Shud

K
ERRY
G
REENWOOD
is a crime fiction writer best known for her detective series of Phryne Fisher books, recently made into the television series,
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
. She has written a number of plays, is an award-winning children's writer and has edited and contributed to several anthologies, including one about women murderers called
Things She Loves: Why women kill
. She lives in Footscray, Melbourne.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Kerry Greenwood 2012

First published 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Greenwood, Kerry.

Title: Tamam Shud: the Somerton man mystery/Kerry Greenwood.

ISBN: 9781742233505(pbk)

9781742241289(epub)

9781742243818(mobi)

9781742246178(epdf)

Subjects: Dead – Identification – South Australia – Adelaide – Case studies.

Anonymous persons – South Australia – Adelaide – Case studies.

Murder victims – South Australia – Adelaide – Case studies.

Death – Causes – South Australia – Adelaide – Case studies.

Somerton Beach (Adelaide, S.A.).

Dewey Number: 614.1

Design
Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design
Sandy Cull

Map
Di Quick

Cover images
Somerton Man corpse. Courtesy Gerald Feltus

Printer
Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father AW Greenwood, much cherished, much missed. Daddy darling.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

David Greagg breaking down the code

Forensic pathologist Shelley Robertson's analysis of the autopsy

Tamam Shud: A Phryne Fisher Mystery

Bibliography

Resources

Acknowledgments

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.

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.