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Tropical noir…PhD candidate Mary Kilcline
Cody’s research not only explores the first
trial of a white woman for murder in colonial
Malaya but also the broader implications
for society at the time.
Image: iStockphoto

In 1911, the staid colonial world of British Malaya was rocked by sensational news.

One Sunday evening in April, a schoolmaster and his wife went to Evensong at St Mary’s Anglican Church, Kuala Lumpur. Afterwards, they dropped in to the Selangor Club for a chat with fellow colonials before returning home. Later that night as she sat alone writing letters on her verandah, a European man called to the house.

Moments later he was dead, his body riddled with bullets.

At the magistrate’s hearing, the woman claimed that he had tried to rape her and that she shot him in defence of her honour. However, the judge felt there was more to it than that and committed the 23-year-old wife and mother to stand trial for the capital crime of murder.

“This was the late imperial period, and for colonials in Malaya it was a time of familiarity with rule, a time of prosperity and order,” says PhD researcher Mary Kilcline Cody, who is close to completing her thesis in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

“The trial of the only white woman to be charged with murder in British Malayan history upset the constructed imperial image of the day and caused frenzied speculation locally and internationally.

“The white Europeans of Kuala Lumpur found themselves unwilling participants in a public scandal, a scandal that was played out in the unwelcome glare of media notoriety.”

Kilcline Cody admits that while her curiosity was initially sparked by a need to discover the truth behind this extraordinary crime and trial, her scholarly interest lay in what it said about colonial white society of the time.

“My thesis operates on two levels,” she says.

“In one sense it is a kind of a cold case murder mystery — not a whodunit but rather a whydunit.

“We know who did the shooting because she admitted it, but we don’t know why. Why was this young woman, who was by all accounts an ordinary wife and mother, impelled to shoot her victim six times at point blank range? Was her behaviour the result of an explosion of rage, or the irrational act of a woman momentarily bereft of her senses, or, were there other motivations?

“At the same time, the thesis is a social and cultural analysis of a unique historical event and of what that event tells us about the white European society in which it occurred. Contemporary colonial ideas of masculinity, femininity and justice as well as concepts of race and legitimacy are highlighted through the lens of the trial.”

Kilcline Cody says her research interests are offbeat but her supervisor, Dr Ian Proudfoot, an eminent Malay World philologist, encourages her scholarly penchant for odd topics and for nitpicking.

 “Ordinarily Asian Studies theses analyse aspects of the lives of local people in an Asian setting but Mary’s work is original because it analyses aspects of the lives of white people in what is to them an alien Asian setting,” Dr Proudfoot says.

Like any good detective, Kilcline Cody began her enquiries by exploring the original records, firstly in the National Library of Australia and then in the archives of the Public Records Office and the British Library in London, the National Archives in Kuala Lumpur (Arkib Negara Malaysia) and libraries in Singapore.

“As well as the archival research, it was very important for me to visit the sites featured in the case to gain something of a sense of the place, a personal experience of the locale. While the scene of the crime is no longer in existence and although much has changed in the past 100 years, some of the colonial settings in Kuala Lumpur remain largely untouched, including St Mary’s Church, the Selangor Club and the Court.”

With the archives yielding official records, correspondence, and further material, Kilcline Cody created a dramatis personae or playlist of the main characters in the trial, including the judges, the witnesses, the lawyers and others.
 
“A holy grail of history writing is to find out about ordinary people. Elites leave records behind but ordinary people hardly ever do.

“In trials, people stand in a public forum and account for themselves, their lives, their reputations. That is why trial records are so illuminating because they provide access into lives that otherwise would be closed to us.”

Little by little Kilcline Cody pieced together biographies of the main characters involved and by tracing their interconnections she crafted an original picture of life in the colonial community of Kuala Lumpur.

According to Kilcline Cody, this particular historical approach is more usually applied to medieval European records, and although very time consuming, “it allows the human to be put back into the humanities.”

As a historian, she draws heavily on statistics and tables for data about trends in population, health, and so on.  But as a writer, she wants to deal with actual people who have real names and addresses and real lives and jobs and aspirations.
 
“Micro-history combines both, including offering faithfulness to the historical record, and a capacity to balance the more meta-narrative approaches to history writing.”

Her investigations have resulted in a thesis that provides new insights on the murder case and on the nexus between history and fiction in Maugham’s approach to story telling. In addition, the thesis questions previous assumptions made about the lives of colonials in the later British imperial period.

While she is reluctant to give the game away before her PhD is completed in 2010, and a publisher is found, Kilcline Cody is prepared to state that the trial does reveal that “there was a worse crime than murder in British Malaya in 1911.”

Maugham’s The Letter was eventually taken up by Hollywood in 1940 and the Warner Bros film starring Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall was nominated for 7 Academy Awards.