With Frankenstein and Dracula as their figureheads, it is easy to forget just how versatile Hammer Film Studios actually were, with comedies, war films and even a couple of Robin Hood movies amongst their filmography. One of their early specialities was the crime thriller, which they focused on particularly in the 1950s, with a trilogy of Dick Barton films, the last Saint and a Sexton Blake film (which I really, really must find somehow) and it is crime they returned to here.
Played out in real-time, on just three sets, the film snares the viewer’s interest and won’t let it go. The irony of a man as authoritative and stiffly regimental as Fordyce being plunged into a situation in which – for once – he has no control neatly demonstrates just how much power he has so instantly lost. In Gore-Hepburn, he is confronted with a ruthlessness just as rigid and impersonal as his own and it is almost as if this Colonel is an even darker version of himself. It is, effectively, the Ghost of Christmas Future who speaks to Fordyce suavely from across his desk and, like Scrooge, he becomes a changed man because of it.
The film’s yuletide setting emphasises this moral – a time of goodwill, spiritual rebirth and the importance of family and friends – but, for me, it could have been clearer just why Fordyce goes on to be so grateful to his staff. They help in a minor way but I think they could have done more if the charity of others is what the filmmakers were pointing towards.
However, even if this ending is a little inarticulate, the scenes before it more than compensate. The robbery scenes, in particular, are thrilling and there is reliable support from Richard Vernon and an underused, but always welcome, Norman Bird.
Cushing and Morell had, of course, played Holmes and Watson in Hammer’s 1959 hit The Hound of the Baskervilles and much enjoyment comes from watching these two fine actors spar again in what is essentially a two-hander. Morell must have been at particular ease as he had played his character in the television version broadcast several months earlier (under the somewhat anaemic title The Gold Inside).
It seems strange today, but many TV series of the time – such as several stories from The Francis Durbridge Serial – would see a film studio recast and reshoot a television production on a slightly bigger budget. Sometimes, this meant seeing the (condensed) material in colour or, at least, on a much bigger screen than the small one in the corner at home. Cushing himself would participate in such a feature when he took on the role of The Doctor (or, more properly, ‘Dr Who’) in the two Dalek films.
Biographer David Miller wrote in Peter Cushing: A Life in Film that the actor seemed more theatrical and mannered here than usual. I would prefer to think of the performance as intense, which is no surprise as Cushing always gave his all to a role, without any indication of irony. Perhaps he considered it a novelty to play a less than heroic character. Elsewhere, in The British ‘B’ Film, writers Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane list Cash on Demandas one of the best examples of its kind, calling it, “both tensely compelling and humanely rewarding.â€
Happily, it’s on YouTube, so Cash on Demand won’t be demanding any cash from us, though it would certainly be worth it.
THE SHIP THAT DIED OF SHAME. General Film Distributors, UK, 1955. Continental Distributing, US, 1956, as PT Raiders. Richard Attenborough, George Baker, Bill Owen, Roland Culver, Bernard Lee, Virginia McKenna. Screenplay by John Whiting, Michael Relph & Basil Dearden, based on a story by Nicholas Monsarrat. Directed by Basil Dearden.
This is an offbeat British noir with a touch of the supernatural, though underplayed and understated, that is unmistakable. George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough) and Bill Randall (George Baker Wexford, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service himself and as George Lazenby’s voice when he is posing as a member of the Royal College of Arms) and Birdie Dick (Bill Owen Compo of The Last of the Summer Wine) serve together on a Royal Navy Motor Gun Boat (a P.T. Boat in American jargon) raiding the French coast and attacking German installations at night and rescuing downed pilots in the Channel.
When Bill’s wife (Virginia McKenna) is killed in the cottage where they live in a bombing raid his rather jolly swashbuckling war comes to and end. With the war at an end Bill finds himself at sixes and sevens until he runs into George who has a plan to buy their former boat and indulge in a bit of harmless smuggling.
Smuggling and the British efforts to avoid excise taxes is a common theme in British history and literature from du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, Graham Greene’s The Man Within, and J. Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet to more comic takes like Geoffrey Household’s “Brandy for the Parson,†and Compton Mackenzie’s Whiskey Galore, and the theme only grew more common with the wartime shortages and black-market during and after the war where shortages lasted well into the prosperous Fifties.
George and Bill, with Birdie insisting on coming along, begin rather harmlessly and revive some of the spirit of their wartime adventures. Fooling Customs Inspector Sam Brewster (Bernard Lee, M from the James Bond films) and foiling pirates led by smooth baddie Major Fordyce (Roland Culver) are a throwback to the best days of the war when they struck quickly and silently along the French coast.
Bill can almost forget the pain of what he lost, almost pretend that he has really escaped from the emptiness of his life.
But George is greedy and seeks out Major Fordyce who can guarantee them higher pay and bigger risks. Attenborough was always equally adept at playing meek innocents and rather shady characters.
Those risks come in the form of smuggling a man out of England, a dangerous mission attempted in a heavy fog and with a new element, sudden trouble with their ship, something that first becomes apparent to Birdie when he notes the ship doesn’t like what they are doing.
And little wonder, because the man that Fordyce has them smuggling is a wanted child murderer.
They barely get away and their passenger ends up overboard, but their luck has run out. Bill is ready to chuck it all and turn himself in when Fordyce and George, hoping to get away, murder Sam Brewster who is onto them and kidnap he and Birdie to get them safely to Portugal.
But no one has counted on the weather or the whims of their once gallant ship.
That faint, and it is very faint, hint that the ship is somehow aware of what it is being used for and ashamed is the main oddity in the story which otherwise would be a tough but standard British noir crime outing of the period with a better than average cast.
Based on a story later expanded by Nicholas Monsarrat (The Cruel Sea, The Nylon Pirates, White Rajah) who was a bestselling novelist who wrote primarily of the sea and whose feel for that life was notable, the supernatural aspect is never overplayed. It works at the fringes and builds only at the big climax.
The Ship That Died of Shame isn’t seen all that often, but it is worth catching. Currently it, and quite a few excellent films from the Thirties through the Sixties are available on Classic Reels a low price streaming service that adds one or two new films a day.
The clip below is taken from the British film Brassed Off(1996), starring Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor.
From Wikipedia: “The film is about the troubles faced by a colliery brass band, following the closure of their pit. The soundtrack for the film was provided by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, and the plot is based on Grimethorpe’s own struggles against pit closures.”
Through the magic of movie making, the flugelhorn solo was by Paul Hughes, not by Tara Fitzgerald’s character, Gloria Mullins.
JAMES LEE BURKE – Burning Angel. Dave Robicheaux #8. Hyperion, hardcover, 1995. Hachette Books, paperback, 1996.
Well, Burke’s one of the big-timers in terms of sales. He’s also ne of the best pure prose stylists around regardless of genre, and he’s created some great characters in Dave Robicheaux his family, and Cletus So what’s not to like? Well, occasionally in the past he’s had a few plot problems …
There was a small-time grifter named Sonny Boy in New Orleans who ran afoul of the big-timers and went away. Then years later he came back, and passed a black notebook to Dave. After that, people started dying in bloody ways. Mysterious folks wanted to kill Sonny Boy, and they wanted his little black book, and Dave didn’t understand any of it, That didn’t keep more people from dying, though.
The thing about Burke is that he can write. That’s not a given with bestselling authors, but if you’ve never read him before you know a very few pages into your first one that you’ve picked a winner for people and prose. He is just a very, very good stylist.
He’s also someone who seems to care less and less about plot and a coherent story, and who is more and more inclined toward angst, deep thoughts, and the quasi-supernatural, and who is beginning almost to parody himself. This is all about sin, redemption and all sorts of other stuff; truth to tell, I’m not sure what all Burke was trying to tell me. I am sure it didn’t make much sense, and that I finished it with a feeling of dissatisfaction. But he sure can write.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #21, August-September 1995
W. A. DARLINGTON – Mr. Cronk’s Cases. Herbert Jenkins, UK, hardcover, 1933. No US edition.
As someone who fancies himself a detective but bumbles through his cases, Mr. J .W. Cronk is the British equivalent of [Ellis Parker] Butler’s Philo Gubb, [George Barr] McCutcheon’s Anderson Crow, and [Percival] Wilde’s P. Moran. Although Cronk’s cases are not so mystifying as those of Gubb and Moran, his adventures are far more sensitively and sympathetically told.
Crank’s youthful ambition had been to become a private detective, but he gradually settled down to a life as a lawyer’s clerk. In his 50s, however, two events combine to make him decide at long last to become a professional sleuth: an inheritance frees him from depending on a regular salary, and he overhears a typist describe him as “a little old dried-up stick.”
His new career does not begin auspiciously: children follow him about as he investigates, and he mistakes an accident for murder. But in his second adventure, though, the criminal leads him around by the nose, he stumbles across stolen diamonds, and the Countess of Piecehurst praises him to her aristocratic friends.
Soon he begins to get commissions. Unfortunately he continues to solve most of his cases purely by chance, but Scotland Yard thinks that his air of naive vagueness is a mask to fool criminals. Cronk is, in fact, not naive, and his knowledge that his success is not due to his abilities nags at him.
In the final story, however, Cronk actually discovers, by investigation and reasoning, how a necklace disappeared from his old office. His former employer remarks: “Queer fellow you are, Cronk. Here you are, a detective who’s made himself a name… but to listen to you, one might think it was your very first case!” “Yes,” Cronk replies in the final line of the book, “you might, mightn’t you?”
In short, unlike Gubb, Crow and Moran, Cronk is not merely a comic figure. We sympathize with his bumbling and we are pleased when he emerges as a real detective. (W. A. Darlington, the author of Mr. Cronk’s Cases, was a humorist who wrote a series of lively books about Private Alf Higgins, who in Alf’s Button discovers that the brass buttons on his uniform were made from Aladdin’s Lamp, and in Alf’s Carpet makes slippers from a Magic Carpet. Mr. Cronk’s Cases is more restrained than the Alf books.)
– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 6, Number 3 (Fall 1985). Permission granted by Doug Greene.
Bibliographic Note: The book, Darlington’s only entry in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, consists of nine untitled stories. There is only one copy currently offered for sale online, and luckily that seller provided an image of the cover, sans jacket.
STEPHEN MACK JONES – August Snow. August Snow #1. Soho Crime, trade paperback original; 1st printing, 2007.
August Snow is not a private eye, not in the licensed legal sense, but in fiction “almost†is the same thing as “is.†What he really is is a former policeman for the city of Detroit who, because he bucked the system, told the truth, and ended up winning a twelve million dollar lawsuit against the city. The son of a black police officer and a Mexican-American mother, he calls the rundown neighborhood called Mexicantown home, and when the book begins, he has just returned there after a lengthy sojourn abroad.
His main concern is making friends with his neighbors and helping them rebuild their street, their homes and their lives. But when Eleanore Padgett, one of the richest women in the city asks him for help, their paths having crossed before, he says no, and before he can change his mind, she is found dead, apparently a suicide. Although everyone else is ready to move on, Snow is not so sure.
And if you the reader don’t know who’s right, you haven’t read enough mystery stories.
As the author, Stephen Mack Jones takes his time in putting the pieces of this tale in place, brick by brick, using dialogue, keen characterization, and a superb sense of place to move the story along. But to tell you the truth, Snow doesn’t do a lot of detective work. He’s the kind of guy who just plunges into the case (he’s his only client) and sees what kind of turmoil he can stir up. (It also doesn’t hurt to have twelve million dollars at your disposal.)
And does he ever. It’s only afterward, after you’ve finished the book, that throughout the book he hasn’t been acting, only reacting. If the villain(s) of the piece had only ignored him, or even easier, shot and killed him, leaving his body in some dark alley, all their problems would have gone away.
Is Snow a loner? By no means. By book’s end he’s gathered together a coterie of assistants, friends and helpers that, figuratively speaking, constitute a small army. The high point of the story occurs considerably before the end, when he and two of his band, along with the two women whose home is being invaded, kill a gang of seven paramilitary invaders intent in wiping them all out. Lots of firepower here.
It’s all downhill from there, though, with just a little too much information withheld from the reader to make what follows go down as smoothly as it ought to.
The book has gotten a lot of nominations and awards (see below), but I demur. This one’s good, it’s fun, it’s entertaining, but it’s also fantasy land. I will read the next in the series, gladly, but don’t expect the next Hammett, not yet, in spite of the award.
Winner of the 2018 Nero Award
Winner of the Hammett Prize for Crime Fiction
Finalist for the 2018 Shamus Award
Strand Magazine Critics Awards Best First Novel Nominee
The August Snow series —
August Snow (2017)
Lives Laid Away (2019)
Dead of Winter (2021)
ROGER BLAKE (John Felix Trimble) – Commie Sex Trap. Art Enterprises/Boudoir, paperback original, 1963.
Let me confess up front, I cannot resist a book with a title like Commie Sex Trap. And having said that, I might add that back in my college days I was assigned books that seemed to me no better-written than this, and certainly much duller.
Not that Commie Sex Trap is much good, but there are indications here and there that Blake/Trimble could write with some style, if the spirit moved him. Lines like: “Long arms moved up to his neck and pulled him down to the twisting mounds of flesh that played an undulating game of mobility with her restive body.†Show flickers of talent, and the story is set up reasonably well.
Ah yes, the Set-Up. Sgt Joe Guthrie works in the decoding section of US Army headquarters in West Berlin, and he’s involved with Erika Lang, a blonde fraulein with parents in the Eastern sector. The relationship is against Army regs, but these kids are in love and whaddaya gonna do?
Well it seems somebody knows just what to do. Guthrie shows up one night at Erika’s room, and walks into a situation straight out of Woolrich: Erika is missing, her clothes and personal effects are gone, and the bed they shared is occupied by a voluptuous American redhead who says she’s been there for weeks — a story backed up by the landlord, even under duress from Joe. Then, before you can say achtung, the landlord’s killed and Joe is in the clutches of Russian spies who offer to return Erika and keep Joe from being fingered for murder — in exchange for decoding room secrets.
From here on out, it reads like a Men’s Sweat magazine, as Joe bounces from improbably-cantilevered seductresses to neolithic Russian agents snarling threats in fluent gutteralese and playing patty-cake with our hero’s face.
As for Sex… well there isn’t any till page 90 of a 160-page book. Up to then, it’s just a plethora of scantily-clad ladies flinging themselves, knees akimbo, at the manly GI, only to have things interrupted by spies jumping out of closets and the like. We get a guest appearance of a Rosa Klebb clone out of From Russia with Love, a bit of torture, some slug-festing, and all the sort of thing teenage minds of all ages once considered “adult.â€
As such, Commie Sex Trap is just about perfect, but readers with a mental age over 15 should approach with caution.
C. B. H. KITCHIN – Death of His Uncle. Malcolm Warren #3. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1939. Perennial Library, paperback, 1st US printing, 1984.
Malcolm Warren is a London stockbroker. He has had nominal success as an amateur sleuth in two cases involving relatives. Warren is contacted by an acquaintance, Dick Findlay, he knew at Oxford, who he does not consider a close friend. Dick casually asks Warren to help him discover the whereabouts of his uncle, who has not returned from a mysterious holiday.
Warren intends only to help Dick learn whether his uncle is still on holiday or met with an unfortunate accident (turning the case over to the police if the latter happened). Try as he might, Warren is unable to dismiss the observations and indicators that seem to point toward foul play. Even after evidence points to a bathing accident, Warren is unable to stop making deductions and pursuing interviews with possible suspects.
The illogicality of a missing mackintosh, a pair of patent leather dress shoes and no dress suit, and a missing pad of paper provide Warren with the salient clues for a murder solution, Tremendous for those who like mysteries with an old-fashioned flavor!
– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 6, Number 3 (Fall 1985).
Editorial Comment: Be sure to also read Gloria’s preceding review, Death of My Aunt, also by C. H. B. Kitchin, and the first of the Malcolm Warren stories.
C. H. B. KITCHIN – Death of My Aunt. Malcolm Warren #1. Leonard & Virginia Woolf, UK, hardcover, 1929. Harcourt, US, hardcover, 1935. Perennial Library, US, paperback, 1984.
Twenty-six year old Malcolm Warren is a London stockbroker. He is suddenly summoned to his Aunt Catherine’s home for a weekend — ostensibly to advise her about some investment. In the midst of his discussion with his aunt, she starts to choke, just after taking a dose of “Le Secret de Venus,” a very unique tonic.
Thus begins an investigation into the murder of rich Aunt Catherine. Several relatives stand to inherit sizeable fortunes, and Catherine’s arrogant assumption of “infinite wisdom” had offended many of them. However, motive seems only as important as opportunity. And opportunity and motive seem to point directly at her second husband, Hannibal.
The investigation uncovers the fact that the marriage was anything but ideal and Catherine was in the process of further revising her will and reducing Hannibal’s portion. With the finger of justice pointed at Hannibal, only Warren seems to accord him the possibility of innocence.
A fast-moving narrative combines with strong characterization to equal a classic mystery from the Golden Age.
– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 6, Number 3 (Fall 1985).
Editorial Notes: I probably do not remember this totally correctly, but I believe that when she wrote this review, Gloria Maxwell was a librarian somewhere in the Midwest. About eight years ago I was able to get in touch with her, at which time she agreed to allow me to reprint her reviews for The Poison Pen here on this blog. I have lost touch with her since, but at the moment I am assuming that that permission still holds. She wrote quite a few reviews for Jeff Meyerson’s zine.
As for Malcolm Warren, this was the first of four appearances in book form. Gloria also reviewed the third in the series, Death of His Uncle, in the same issue of TPP, and you’ll see it here soon.
