Description

Ida: Searching for The Jazz Baby – true crime from the 1920s

Ida: Searching for The Jazz Baby is a poetry collection that dives into the 1920s underworld history of Melbourne Australia. The collection explores the life and times of Ida Pender, girlfriend, associate, true crime accomplice, wife and widow of the notorious Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor.

Who was Ida Pender?

Ida Pender was a name that author Frank Prem encountered in a psychiatric hospital where he worked as a student nurse in the 1970s. She was:

• a dancer, known to her family as ‘babe’; and
• a ‘jazzer’ who escaped from her bedroom at night to dance at the ‘Palais de Dance’ in St Kilda; and
• the girlfriend (at 16 yeears f age)  and later wife, of notorious underworld and gand figure of Melbourne’s 1920’s, Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor.
• She was
• the true crime accomplice, waiting in the getaway car while robbery was committed; and
• the possessor, according to her police Wanted poster,  of ‘shapely legs; and
• a gangster’s widow, single mother and flat broke at 23 years of age.

She was The Jazz Baby.

Other Work by Frank Prem

Other Free Verse poetry books by Frank Prem include:

• Small Town Kid – a memoir of growing in rural Australia in the 1960s and 70s.
• Devil In The Wind – the voices of victims and survivors the Black Saturday Bushfires in Victoria (Australia) in 2009.
• The New Asylum – a memoir of a lifetime spent in psychiatry.
• A Specialist at The Recycled Heart – Speculative fiction written in sparse free verse. The worlds at your feet.

Picture-Poetry Books by Frank Prem include:

• Sheep On The Somme – poetry to accompany images taken on The Somme and Western Front during the first World War
• Voices In TheTrash– in which the objects found in a Trash and Treasure Barn tell their stories.
• Children’s books The Beechworth Bakery Bears and Waiting For Frank-Bear– in which the Teddy Bears resident at the Beechworth Bakery introduce themselves and their lives to young readers.