W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM – Christmas Holiday. Doubleday Doran & Co, hardcover, October 1939. Reprinted many times.

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY. Universal Pictures, 1944. Deanna Durbin, Gene Kelly, Richard Whorf, Dean Harens, Gladys George, Gale Sondergaard, David Bruce. Screenwriter: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   Raymond Chandler once commented favorably in passing on Somerset Maugham’s 1939 novel Christmas Holiday, which I happened upon at a flea market a week after reading Chandler’s comment. Okay, it has Murder in it, and even a bit of detective work, I guess, but it’s no more a Mystery than Anna Karenina is a Joke Book.

   A young man goes to Paris over the Holidays to sow a wild oat or two, gets set up with a prostitute, and is so moved by her devotion and her personal tragedy that he forgets to sow any oats at all. Seems she was a poor working girl who got married to a nice young man who turned out to be a thief and a killer. And she’s working now as a hooker, partly to help him out in prison and partly because of the guilt she feels over his failures.

   It’s a damfine novel, and I can see why Chandler enjoyed it; the central theme of a decent fellow doing a little bit of good without making a fuss about it must have appealed to him a lot.

   Christmas Holiday was turned into a movie, kinda, by Universal in 1944, one of those films that runs roughshod over the source, then comes out completely different and quite enjoyable by its own lights.

   The basic elements of Maugham’s novel are all there — a sardonic reporter introduces a callow young man to the prostitute wife of a convicted killer; the young man does her a small favor and learns something in the process — but the Universal execs, with the wisdom of their breed, hired writer Herman Mankiewicz to add lots of lurid bits to the proceedings, and got director Robert Siodmack to layer on dollops of sinister noir stylistics. The result is rather a far cry from what Maugham actually wrote, but it’s also an engagingly perverse and chilling film, despite the off-key casting of musical stars Gene Kelley and Deanna Durbin.