There have also been some remarkable coincidences in my own writing career, notably the day when my Muse suggested South China Sea pirates for a novel I was already writing. I was at court at the time and rather busy. ‘Nonsense,’ I told her. ‘I am already writing this book. I can’t knock off for a month’s research.’ But she persisted, so I said, ‘All right, Muse, I have to pass Sunshine Library on the way home. If I put my hand on a book about South China Sea pirates in the early twentieth century, I’ll do it. If not, not,’ which at least stopped her nagging. On the way home I ducked into Sunshine Library and there in the middle of the returns tray, right in front of my eyes and right under my hand, was The Black Flag: A History of Piracy in the South China Seas in the Early 20th Century by James Hepburn. I borrowed the book and put the pirates into the plot because ignoring something like that could cause my Muse to get huffy and I would hate to offend her.
Whole philosophical theories have been based on coincidence or synchronicity. Think of Jung. Think of Koestler. The world is not ruled by straight logic or exact causality. Not all of the things that look as if they might be connected are connected. Not all of the things that happen at the same time or in the same way have the same cause. Take, for example, the cases that are often cited as being similar in some sense to the enigmatic death of Somerton Man.
The first is the case of Clive Mangnoson, a two-yearold child, who, in June 1949, was found dead in a sack on the beach at Largs Bay, which is about 20 kilometres down the coast from Somerton Beach. Lying next to the child was his father Keith, suffering from exposure. The two of them had been missing for four days. The child had died of unknown causes and the man was unable to give an account of what had happened. They were found by a man who said he had been led to them by a dream. Mr Mangnoson’s wife said that the family had been terrorised by a man wearing a khaki handkerchief over his face, who, after almost running her down, told her to ‘keep away from the police or else’. Mrs Mangnoson subsequently had a perfectly understandable nervous breakdown.
The connection between the Mangnoson case and the case of Somerton Man is that Keith Mangnoson was one of the people who thought he knew Somerton Man’s identity. He had gone to the police and told them that Somerton Man was one Carl Thompsen, whom he had met in Renmark in 1939. So was young Clive Mangnoson killed by unknown means in order to force his father to withdraw his identification? In which case, why did the killer or killers leave Keith alive? Wouldn’t it have been easier to kill the father and allow the child to live? And why go about it in a way that inevitably attracted attention, in the same way as Somerton Man had attracted attention?
It sounds like a fuck-up to me and I entirely agree with the proposition that if you have a choice between seeing something as a conspiracy or as a fuck-up, you should always go with the fuck-up. But there may be something in the idea. Perhaps the idiots who killed Somerton Man so clumsily took out poor little Clive Mangnoson, as well, and drove his father mad. We still don’t know what killed that poor little child but small children are fragile creatures and they have always been easy to kill.
Before that, another body had been found on Somerton Beach. The South Australian Register reports that on 12 January 1881 an inquest was held on a man who was found dead by a couple looking for some privacy in the sand dunes. Witnesses had seen the man, heavily clothed for the weather, walking along the beach on 6 January ‘looking despondent’. Nothing more was known of him until the lovers found him on 10 January, by which time he had decomposed so far as to be unrecognisable. The man had with him a bloody razor and a knife, both of which would be ‘most inconvenient for inflicting the wound on the throat’. The Coroner brought in an open verdict, having decided that there was not enough evidence to point to suicide, although he thought it probable. Like Somerton Man, this man was never identified.
The death of Somerton Man has also been linked to a suicide by poisoning. A certain Joseph or George Saul Haim Marshall was found dead in Mosman in Sydney with a copy of The Rubaiyat on his chest. He was the brother of a famous barrister called David Saul Marshall, who was Chief Minister of Singapore. The presence of The Rubaiyat at both Marshall’s and Somerton Man’s deaths strikes me as coincidental in the highest degree. To my mind, Marshall’s suicide seems more likely to be an example of the Werther Effect. In the late eighteenth century, hundreds of young men read The Sorrows of Young Werther, a long, soggily romantic, Gothic, self-pitying and very boring novel by the poet Goethe, and then killed themselves in the same way that Young Werther did. Similarly, The Rubaiyat might have supported or comforted a potential suicide, since Khayyam’s conclusion is that this life is all there is, and once over, it is over forever – a philosophical position that might convince the suicide that the pain they were feeling would finally stop.
Commentators on the Tamam Shud case have also noted that Jestyn gave Alf Boxall a copy of The Rubaiyat in Clifton Gardens, which is close to Mosman, and that a woman called Gwenneth Dorothy Graham, who testified at the Marshall inquest on 15 August 1945, was found thirteen days later, naked in a bath with her wrists slit but no Rubiayat on her chest. Her death may have been the result of a a suicide pact with Marshall but drawing a connection with the death of Somerton Man seems to be stretching coincidence too far. In short, with the possible exception of the Mangnoson case, the other cases most commonly compared to the Tamam Shud murder seem to shed no light on the death of Somerton Man.
What then, you might ask, can modern forensic science tell us about him? The scientists must be able to tell us something, I hear you insisting. After all, they’d clear it up in fifty-seven minutes on CSI. Well, let’s see.
In March 2009, Professor Derek Abbott, Director of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Adelaide, set up a task force of geeks hoping to solve the mystery. Their website is a joy, even if you know no mathematics, which I don’t. But although their enthusiasm is charming, even they have not cracked the Tamam Shud code – and if they haven’t done it I believe it cannot be done without further information.
When Professor Abbott researched Somerton Man’s Kensitas cigarettes, which had been placed in an Army Club packet, he discovered that the Kensitas were actually the more expensive brand. This seems an odd thing to do. Usually, people transfer cheaper cigarettes into an expensive packet out of swank, on the same principle as decanting cask wine into expensive bottles. (You’re not fooling anyone with that, by the way). On the other hand, it is not uncommon for someone to offer a down-on-his-luck mate a handful of cigarettes to fill up their own empty packet. I have done it myself. It isn’t as insulting as just handing them the whole packet as though it was a charitable donation. So Professor Abbott’s discovery raises the possibility the poison might have been given to Somerton Man in the form of a cigarette. And inhaling the poison might have changed its effects. Maybe an inhaled poison wouldn’t cause one to throw up.