Stories of Conviction: Maurice Shadbolt

Frank Devine was Editor-in-chief of the Australian and New Zealand editions of Reader’s Digest from 1971 to 1981.

Maurice Shadbolt, who died in his native New Zealand on October 10, aged 72, was one of the most prolific freelancers to write for Reader’s Digest. The few writers who surpassed his 54 published articles were mostly on staff or on retainers.

Maurice wanted none of that. When, I approached him in 1971 to write for Reader’s Digest, he said OK as long as it didn’t get in the way of his work as a novelist. We agreed that when he felt a novel coming to the boil he would tell me and I wouldn’t bother him until he signalled he was ready for some more journalism.

Digest readers locally and around the world were well rewarded by this stop/go regimen. Maurice, who loved to travel and could seldom resist invitations to Lapland or Cappadocia or to cruise the Danube, wrote articles that appeared in dozens of editions of Reader’s Digest and 19 languages.

But you could take the boy out of New Zealand only in short bursts. His 11 novels and four collections of short tories never strayed from New Zealand themes and locations. And his soul reposed permanently in a slightly ramshackle wooden house in Auckland – which Digest fees helped smarten up from time to time. Behind it was a separate writing hut, perched on the brink of a steep slope, down which the garden swept to the edge of an elegant arm of Manukau harbour.

Maurice fished avidly in his bay and smoked his copious catch in an amazing Heath Robinson “factory” of underground burning-pits and curling tubes and pipes that fed smoke into an old refrigerator set up in the garden.

Maurice was an urbane, handsome man of deceptively sombre appearance. When an idea – his own or somebody else’s – appealed to him, his rather saturnine countenance lit up as if, in the Loony Tunes manner, somebody had turned on a light bulb in his head. He was warm and passionate, as his article about Katherine Mansfield (reprinted here) demonstrates. He could be pigheaded, too.

There was no way I could talk him out of writing about Arthur Allan Thomas, a young New Zealand farmer serving a life sentence for allegedly murdering a husband and wife on their nearby farm. The case against Thomas had seemed unconvincing to many New Zealanders – including the then prime minister, Robert Muldoon. Shadbolt wanted to write about the anomalies. No way, I told him. That was the newspaper story, one with no end.

Maurice wouldn’t give up. He visited Thomas in prison and talked to him for hours and insisted I also talk to Thomas while Maurice sat by silently. When that long conversation ended, we raced off and spent most of the night comparing notes, looking for contradictions in Thomas’s twice-told tale.

We found none and Maurice wrote “Who Killed the Crewes?” which demonstrated that the killer could not have been Arthur Allan Thomas.

Seventeen days after the Digest story appeared, Thomas was pardoned.

The mystery of the murders was never officially solved. But Maurice had a novelist’s gift for delivering information obliquely to the attentive reader. Those who read the last half dozen paragraphs of “Who Killed the Crewes?” very, very carefully may have seen a finger pointing.