Patricia Carlon

Patricia Carlon, who wrote fourteen crime novels and dozens of short stories, was profoundly deaf since age 11, but her impairment did not become widely known until the end of her life. She communicated with her publishers via letter, refused interviews and did not disclose her deafness. As literary critic Susan Wyndham writes, the knowledge of Carlon’s impairment ‘came as a surprise to everyone else who knew “Miss Carlon”, from her long-time London agent and her publishers in Melbourne and New York, to the woman who handled her money at the local bank every Friday’.

She was born in Wagga Wagga and later moved to Sydney, where she lived close to her parents in the suburb of Bexley. She gardened, won local competitions with her cooking and, Wyndham writes, ‘at one time was known as the cat lady of Bexley for all her feline companions’.

Carlon published short romance fiction before developing longer crime novels and thrillers. However, she could not find a publisher for her crime fiction in Australia, and was better known in the US and UK. In the 1990s, American Laura Hruska, founder of Soho Press, republished her novels, as did Wakefield Press. These were followed by republications by Michael Hayward of Text Publishing in Australia.

Wyndham, Carlon’s Australian publisher Michael Hayward, and a handful of PhD candidates have commented on the recurring themes of isolation, immobility and darkness that pervade Carlon’s novels. Susan Wyndham reflects on the impact of Carlon’s deafness when she writes, ‘Although Carlon didn’t write explicitly about deafness, her books are often set in small, isolated towns or empty houses, and among their characters are a blind woman, another paralysed by a stroke and a child locked in a kitchen after her babysitter is murdered. In The Unquiet Night, a woman is imprisoned in a vault where she can hear nothing.’ Here, Wyndham gestures to the terror a deaf person might feel when they call out for help but cannot hear a reply.

Wyndham contacted Laura Hruska, of Soho Press, on Carlon’s death. Hruska noted that Carlon’s deafness ‘made her an “outsider”, an observer, which all good writers certainly are.” Text’s Michael Heyward observed to Wyndham, “It’s so astounding a fact about a writer that once you know it you can’t read her fiction in the same way. She tells stories about children who are unable to make adults understand what’s going on and her narratives create portraits of claustrophobic environments that pertain to what we now know about her.”

In Gothic Matilda: The Amazing Visions of Australian Crime Fiction, Michael Pollak and Margaret MacNabb note that many of Carlon’s female protagonists are outsiders, reflecting Carlon’s experiences of being a deaf woman in a hearing world. They also observe that children are at the centre of her work and ‘are treated with great sympathy and sensitivity’ (p. 37). Her ’empathy for unwanted children’ (p. 45) manifests in the way she represents the circumstances of children ‘thrust out into the world on their own, unloved, not respected’ (p. 42).

It is important to note that the themes of claustrophobia, fear and isolation align with the experiences of a deaf person who is not part of a deaf community and deaf culture. The pressure for deaf people to conform and to ‘pass’ as hearing is immense. Carlon, living and writing in conservative, post-war Australia, went to great pains to keep her deafness a secret. Pollak and MacNabb wrote to Carlon, ‘posing a number of questions about her books, her philosophy and about her background, but she replied sketchily to [their] questions or not at all’ (p. 38).

Deaf writer Fiona Murphy has written about the secrecy that can accompany deafness. In her memoir The Shape of Sound, she describes the weightiness of hiding her impairment. She writes, ‘On the rare occasion when deafness or hearing loss was mentioned in school, I would seize up, as if holding my breath would somehow make me smaller and undetectable. With each passing school term, my fear of being found out intensified’ (p. 30). Her fear manifested in her body, with ‘sweat and spasms’ whenever she imagined having to disclose her deafness’ (p. 32). Fiona’s descriptions of secrecy, of passing and hiding, find a resonance in Carlon’s novels. Perhaps it is not surprising that Carlon was drawn to the crime fiction genre, where there is always a secret that must be found out to resolve the crime.

Other critics have identified similar themes, but without considering how deafness may have informed them. Sydney Smith, reviewing Crime of Silence and The Unquiet Night in the Australian Book Review, writes that ‘[t]hese stories are intensely claustrophobic dramas. Although the outside world is physical enough, it’s the interior world that is described page after page’. As communicating with the hearing world is difficult, deaf writers often turn inwards, contemplating their rich interior lives. Rather than being ‘trapped’, as Wyndham suggests from the title of her article, Carlon’s deafness was immensely generative.

A number of Carlon’s novel titles also relate to sound, for example The Unquiet Night, Hush! It’s a Game, and Crime of Silence, again indicating how, while deafness is not mentioned in Carlon’s writing, it impacted how she thought about and represented particular environments. Critics also do not comment on the resourcefulness of Carlon’s characters as they extricate themselves from situations in which they are trapped. For example, a woman paralysed after a stroke, who can only blink, manages to communicate with her nurse by indicating a blink for particular Scrabble letters; a young girl whose babysitter has been murdered puts up signs for help in the window; while a woman locked in the jewellery safe room in her house pulls bricks from the wall so that she doesn’t suffocate. These actions point to problem-solving skills common to disabled people, and particularly to the use of alternative means of communication that Carlon, as a deaf woman, may have contemplated.

In 2006, Deaf playwright Sofya Gollan and the Australian National Theatre of the Deaf produced ‘The Cat Lady of Bexley.’ Gollan wrote and acted in the play, while the director, Caroline Conlon, was also Deaf (AusStage). Finally, Carlon’s deafness was brought into the light.