Gideon Haigh must like a challenge if the story of the murder of Mollie Dean is anything to go by. There's not a lot known about Mollie - during her lifetime, or sadly about her violent and vicious death. What little is known is gleaned from small clues left behind, a single photograph, some of her published writing, newspaper reporting and extrapolation of the contradicting societies in which she mixed.

A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA starts out concentrating on those societal aspects. Mollie Dean's life initially took the expected path of the daughter of a respected school teacher and a difficult mother, after a good education, she went into teaching, specialising, and succeeding, based on scant records, with special needs classes in particular. There are elements of her early life, however, that give some clues as to why she yearned to veer from that path. Her father died when she was young, and her mother was, by accounts of friends and family, an awful woman. Pushy, demanding and self-involved, her desperation to control Mollie (and her salary), right down, it would seem, to attempts to marry Mollie off to her own young lover, were obviously part of Mollie's longing for "a room of one's own". The echoes here with Virginia Woolf's essay are obviously relied on heavily by Haigh in drawing out a picture of a young woman, a would be writer and poet, who tries many times to remove herself from a toxic family, seeking comfort, acceptance and validation in the artistic and bohemian circle of artists and thinkers surrounding Max Meldrum and Mollie's own lover Colin Colahan.

Attempting to outline the world that Mollie was trying to find a way in, Haigh has done considerable work in identifying the leading figures in the group, outlining their complicated relationships - friendship and sexual - drawing a picture of two very different worlds. A home life blighted by an overbearing mother, who went so far as to have Mollie followed at times (not from care or concern but control), and the free, easy, and literate life of the artistic community. It's very easy to see how a young woman of that time would be drawn to the artistic group, drawn to life as the lover of a talented, albeit somewhat insipid sort of a man. All of that stacks up against the sad and vicious murder of Mollie, and what now seems to have been the disinterested way in which the investigation was treated.

Haigh approaches these books in a manner which reminds you of the lead of an investigation team. Using genealogical sources, public records source, police records and scant snippets of information gleaned from many sources, he pulls together pictures of the time, and the people. Obviously here he's very hamstrung in being able to draw a detailed picture of Mollie Dean and the murder investigation that commenced after her death because so little remains in the records about her and it. There's plenty of conclusions to be drawn from that, and Haigh, as in his last historical true crime book "Certain Admissions", leaves the reader to their own devices in that area. That lack of detail is probably going to be very frustrating for some readers, and for others, overwhelmingly instructive.

From this account it seems that Mollie Dean was a beautiful, clever, talented young woman who was keen to make a mark and achieve something in her life. Her life was taken from her in the most brutal of manners because somebody wanted to control that. Who did that and why, readers will have to decide for themselves.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/scandal-bohemia-gideon-haigh ( )

Strangely interesting, especially if you are interested in the lives loves and social history of Jazz age Melbourne.

While the story of Mollie Dean's death is a sad grubby story, the story of how a free spirited young woman sought to escape the stifling conventionality and meanness of 1920s Melbourne is quietly fascinating ( )

A sad but inspiring story of a talented and vivacious young woman who inhabited the fringes of Melbourne's Bohemian set in the 20s. Mary "Mollie" Dean was forthright and sexually liberated, and became an object of fascination for those in the artistic and literary scene, gravitating to the maelstrom of feuds, friendships and bed-hopping surrounding the controversial tonalist school. She showed great promise herself as a writer with her poems and short stories being published by several journals, but her life was tragically cut short when she was brutally murdered in November 1930 while walking home late at night. The murder remains unsolved, the chief suspect was a man who her overbearing mother was pushing her to marry, but policed focussed on the suspect in the murder of another young girl, in any case no-one was brought to trial. The author discovered that little trace of Mollie Dean's life remains, just a single photograph, some records from her teaching career, her poems and stories in obscure journals and two haunting nude paintings of her created by her lover Colin Colahan, one of which was painted just hours before her death. However Haigh found that Dean left a lasting impression on those who knew her, and that her death was one of the contributing factors to the breakdown of the artistic set she inhabited. She was also immortalised as a character in George Johnston's popular novel My Brother Jack. I found this a great read, both sad and intriguing, painstakingly researched and well-written. Haigh has managed to bring to life both a talented young woman who was nearly forgotten and the fascinating bohemian scene of Jazz Age Melbourne. Excellent book all round. ( )

Overblown ( )