There’s not much to go on – but he wants to give it a try anyway, and Julian agrees to help. The love and longing felt by the writer for the object of his affections leaps off the page every letter is addressed “Dearest Milton James”, and Malachi decides he wants to try to find out who sent them and who they were intended for. Malachi is immediately captivated – the sentiments are both beautiful and tragic, given that the letters were written at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Australia. When one of his colleagues mentions that there’s a pile of old letters in Julian’s office that have been around the warehouse for several decades (normally, the stuff that ends up there is disposed of after a year), Malachi is curious, asks Julian if he can read them – and discovers they’re love letters, written from one man to another back in 1972.
Malachi is surprised to find himself actually looking forward to going into work each day.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that his boss is gorgeous – despite the fact his wardrobe seems to consist entirely of various iterations of beige – or that his colleagues are a likeable, quirky bunch he hits it off with straight away.
It’s the job of the Mail Redistribution Centre to try to reunite as much of the ‘lost’ mail – letters, packets, parcels – with either the intended recipient or the sender, and when he helps to forward a birthday card to a little girl from her grandmother, he starts to realise that this can be a really rewarding job. He’s sure he’ll be bored out of his mind and will be chalking up yet another failure… but somehow, he finds himself actually interested in the work he’s given to do. Malachi doesn’t expect to stick it out for the morning, let alone the whole day. Malachi has just been fired (again) – this time, because he stood up for a colleague who was being discriminated against – so his exasperated father pulls a few strings and gets Malachi this job with the warning that he’d better stick at it. When the story begins, Malachi Keogh has been pretty much dragged by his father – the boss of Sydney’s postal service – into the office of Julian Pollard, head of the Mail Redistribution Centre, (which, despite being re-named a while back, is still colloquially known as “the Dead Letter Office”) – the place where all the city’s undeliverable mail ends up. It’s an easy, undemanding listen, with a lot of humour and a lot of heart, and new-to-me narrator Glen Lloyd (a native Aussie, I believe) delivers an animated and engaging performance. Dearest Milton James is a charming and delightfully frothy contemporary romance in which the two leads fall in love while tracking down the author of a series of ‘lost’ letters written fifty years earlier.
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