Fri 24 Apr 2009
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH MYSTERY FICTION, PART V – Reviews by Allen J. Hubin.
Posted by Steve under Columns , Reviews[3] Comments
Reviews by Allen J. Hubin.
Amusing and satirical and worth tracking down is Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain (Skeffington, 1934). Inspector Wilson of the Yard is in the audience when an actor plays dead with unseemly realism in the first act of the London premiere of “Blue Music,” a musical extravaganza staged by the redoubtable Douglas B. Douglas.
The corpse is the star, the also redoubtable (if innocent of talent) Brandon Baker, whose fans number in the passionate hundreds of thousands.
Wilson takes change in his own inimitable way, abetted and confounded by his journalist son, Derek. Wilson has an idea that the apparent killer (who committed suicide thereafter) is innocent, and accumulates evidence to prove his theory.
Fortunately it all fits together SO neatly, even if rather messily for another member of the cast…
Inspector Geoffrey Boscobell features in thirteen of Cecil M. Wills’ detective stories, and Fatal Accident (Hodder & Stoughton,1936; Ramble House, 2007) is about midway through the series.
Here wealthy Stephen Merrivale successfully casts himself for death: he discards a tempestuous mistress, stands exposed in perfidy to his wife, drives from his home the photographer who has befriended his wife, and regularly antagonizes his nephew, whom he keeps on a very short leash.
So Merrivale’s corpse comes as no surprise, except that he seems to have died in a car accident in which a random passing motorist may have been culpably negligent.
These events in due course come to the attention of the Yard. Boscobell travels to the rural scene and finds a wealth of suspects, but the death stubbornly remains an accident, despite his instincts and efforts…
Another generally competent product of the Golden Age, though the means of death is rather pulled from a convenient hat.
The Griffith Case by John Bentley (Eldon, 1935) chronicles the second of nine investigations by Sir Richard Herriwell, noted antiquarian and amateur sleuth, whose “usual procedure is to accept a certain conclusion and then work back to prove it.” (The book is subtitled: “A Problem in Inductive Reasoning.”)
He assists Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Barton, a bluff policeman not given to subtleties. Here Marcus Griffith, a wealthy and odious moneylender, is stabbed to death in his country residence.
As with most unloved murder victims, various suspects appear; indeed, a confession is forthcoming in due course. But Herriwell is not satisfied… Nor, hugely, was I; this seems but an unremarkable product of detection’s golden age.
NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column.
[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] Fender Tucker, head man at Ramble House, is doing his best to get some of these gems of the “Golden Age” back in print, and in fact some of the books he publishes are true First US Editions.
Such is the case for Fatal Accident, by Cecil M. Wills. That’s the cover you see up above. My suggestion? Follow the link and encourage him to keep publishing books like this one!
April 24th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
John Bentley did a bit better when he retired Sir Richard Herriwell and took up writing thrillers more or less in the Peter Cheyney vein. The hero was mostly private eye Dick Marlow in books like Mr. Marlow Takes to Rye, and Mr. Marlow Stops for Brandy. One non series book Rendezvous With Death was filmed as The Night Visitor (1943). Bentley’s other series character was Glen Gibson, more along the lines of Marlow than Herriwell.
Still nothing special, but they offer minor entertainment along modest lines, unlike the one or two Herriwell books I’ve read, which were uniformly uninteresting. His 1946 novel Dark Disguise was a decent little spy novel on Cheyney lines. His last book seems to have been 1949 or so.
April 24th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
I own the three Mr. Marlow books that were published in the US, largely because I was intrigued by the titles. The one you didn’t mention was Mr. Marlow Chooses Wine. Ironically enough, the UK editions of these books all had different titles, none of them nearly as interesting, such as Prelude to Trouble for the Wine book.
One of the Marlow books not published in the US was Rendezvous with Death, which I mention because a movie was made of it: The Night Invader (1943) with David Farrar as Marlow. I wonder if copies exist; a preliminary search hasn’t uncovered any so far.
— Steve
April 25th, 2009 at 2:14 am
I didn’t realise Rendezvous was a Dick Marlow, or that David Farrar was in it. He also played Sexton Blake in two good but cheap little outings Meet Sexton Blake, and The Echo Murders (Ferdy Mayne — The Fearless Vampire Killers — is in both), and appears in an earlier Blake movie, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror with George Curzon as Blake and Tod Slaughter the wonderfully overacting Hooded Terror (all three were at one time available on the gray market). Farrar plays on of Blake’s agents.
I’ll add Night Visitor to my always growing list. Farrar had a good if minor career as a leading man with dark and slightly sinister good looks, appearing as Xerxes the Persian King in 300 Spartans, and starring in The Golden Horde based on a Harold Lamb story about Crusaders meeting up with Ghengis Khan. His big role was the male lead in Michael Powell and Emric Pressberger’s film of Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus with Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons. He also starred in the suspense films The Small Back Room based on Nigel Balchin’s novel about a crippled scientist who has to defuse a blockbuster bomb and Night Without Stars based on Winston Graham’s novel about a lawyer with nyctalopia (night blindness) who gets involved in intrigue.
I always thought he looked a good deal like Ian Fleming’s description of James Bond, and oddly enough when The Times did an identikit police photo of Bond based on Fleming’s descriptions it looked a good deal like a cross between Farrar and Edmund Purdom.