Sun 8 Jul 2012
JOHN CREASEY – The Toff on the Farm. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1958. Walker, US, hardcover, 1964; Popular Library, paperback, 1972. Also published as Terror for the Toff, Pyramid, paperback, 1965.
The Toff, aka Richard Rollison, is a character I’ve never really become attracted to, but I read one of his adventures every once in a while. He’s a combination/imitation in many way of the Saint and an American-style pulp hero. The British do this kind of derring-do adventure hero best, though, and if you don’t have one of Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar novels handy, the Toff will do as second best.
In this particular case Rollison is asked by a friend to intercede on the behalf of two friends of his, a man and his sister who are trying to sell their farm, but are unable to, due to an old tenant farmer who refuses to give up rights to his home.
Before the Toff can reach the scene, the girl is suddenly deluged with offers, up to three times what the farm is worth, and before the story is over, two men are dead, and Rollison is forced to wonder how badly he could have misjudged a man whom Scotland Yard considers to be a notorious American gangster.
As with any good pulp fiction, this reads very quickly, pulling you into a tales with so many crooked angles you are puzzled how any sense can ever be made of it. And as usual, the ending is not up to the end of the story. Discovering how simple the plot actually was is part of it, but learning that it was mostly jiggery-pokery on the part of the author is another.
And the more I think about it, trying to see if there is any way I could tell you more about what I mean than that, the more I am convinced that “jiggery-pokery” is exactly the right word, and we can leave it at that.
February 1991 (slightly revised).
[UPDATE] 07-08-12. My opinion of the Toff books has varied considerably over the years, being not much interested in them when I first encountered them, but gradually warming to them to the point of actually enjoying them. I still think the Saint books are better, but so do a lot of people.
Earlier reviews on this blog:
The Toff Among the Millions.
Double for the Toff.
A Rocket for the Toff.
July 9th, 2012 at 11:19 am
When I began hunting for collectible crime books in London in 1989 I picked up a “Toff”-first edition. It had no dustwrapper and was in very good condition and was cheap. Perhaps 1 or 2 pounds. I have never read the book. After reading the review I think I will not do so in the future. I wonder why there is a “John Creasey Award” of the British Crime Writers Association. Creasey must have written some outstanding novels, not only a bulk of them.
July 9th, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Anyone who’d like to know more about John Creasey might start with his Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Creasey, which begins:
“The author of more than 600 novels, John Creasey published them using 28 different pseudonyms, including:
Gordon Ashe
Norman Deane
Robert Caine Frazer
Kyle Hunt
Abel Mann
Peter Manton
J.J. Marric
James Marsden
Richard Martin
Anthony Morton
Jeremy York.”
…omitting some of his less well-known pen names.
I’m sure a large part of his reputation is based on sheer numbers, but (quoting again): “In 1962, Creasey won an Edgar Award for Best Novel, from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), for Gideon’s Fire, written under the pseudonym J. J. Marric. In 1969 he received the MWA’s greatest honor, the Grand Master Award.”
And as for the British CWA, there’s this: “In 1953, John Creasey founded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) in the UK. The CWA New Blood Dagger was awarded in memory of CWA founder John Creasey, this dagger for first books by previously unpublished writers is sponsored by BBC Audiobooks and includes a prize of £1000. This award was known previously as the John Creasey Memorial Dagger.”
As happens with most mystery writers, Creasey’s fame has diminished since since his death. The vast majority of current mystery fans, I’m sure, have never heard of him.
July 9th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
I used to read a lot of John Creasey and I must have at least one book (and sometimes more) for each of his pen names. I always found them to be a lot of fun, but I haven’t read him in years. If I remember correctly, Creasey visited Al Hubin more than once and Al’s six children enjoyed the visits. Creasey became part of the family.
July 9th, 2012 at 1:43 pm
I should have mentioned that most of Creasey’s series characters are based on other popular series characters of the day. The Toff is The Saint, Peter Dawlish is Bulldog Drummond, etc. When TAD ran Bob Briney’s bibliography of Creasey it was arranged according to pseudonym and that is the way my 200+ Creasey volumes are arranged on the shelves in my basement. Creasey’s best works are the Gideon of Scotland Yard books written as by J. J. Marric.
July 9th, 2012 at 4:50 pm
To be fair, the early version of THE SAINT is quite strongly based on Bulldog Drummond (he has a group of friends who will do anything for him, he confuses the enemy with a stream of colourful gibberish, he works outside of the law). He drew away from the original pretty quickly, but then so did Creasey. The Toff became his own character very early on. As William Vivian Butler pointed out in THE DURABLE DESPERADOES, he is more vulnerable than Simon Templar, and unlike The Saint has a network of family and friends who help define him. He’s not a cheap rip-off of The Saint. Are they as good as the work of Charteris? Over the course of many many volumes the quality can’t remain constant, but the best of The Toff deserves to stand with the best of The Saint.
My favourite Creasey characters? It’s probably a toss up between The Baron and Inspector West.
July 9th, 2012 at 6:46 pm
Bradstreet
Yes, you’re right. The Toff may have been modeled after The Saint when Creasey first came up with the character, but not the Saint’s early stories. And there soon were many many differences. As characters, I view them about the same, but I think that I’ve always enjoyed the Saint’s adventures more.
The the primary villain in the early Saint books, Rayt Marius, has a lot in common with Drummond’s Carl Petersen, so you’re right about that, too. Much later on I think of The Saint as more of a gentleman adventurer, which I don’t think The Toff ever became. I think of the Toff as a Londoner through and through, particularly his roots with the common folk of the East End.
For whatever reasons, though, the Saint adventures caught on early here in the US. It took a long time before the Toff ever appeared here, and he never did make much of a splash.
I’ve never read more than one of the Baron stories, and that was a long time ago. Is he also an adventurer in The Saint sense of the term?
July 10th, 2012 at 11:40 am
As I remember it, the Baron was an antiques dealer who at one time was a cat burglar who never was caught though Scotland Yard was pretty sure of his identity, they could never prove it. There was a short-lived television series with Steve Forrest I believe playing the role.
July 10th, 2012 at 11:44 am
Thanks, Ray. That sounds right to me. This may sound hard to believe, but I’m sure I have the DVD set of that TV series, and I’d totally forgotten about it.
July 10th, 2012 at 1:18 pm
The Baron starts off as a gentleman burglar, but eventually became an antiques dealer who constantly got into the sort of trouble where he had to use the rather questionable skills that he had learnt during his life of crime.
He’s more of a gentleman adventurer than The Toff, but from the first book he has a girlfriend whom he eventually marries (Creasey’s heroes always seem more domesticated than those of a lot of his contemporaries).
Give the Steve Forrest series a look in. It doesn’t bear much relation to the books, but it’s good fun. Monty Berman, who had co-produced the B&W series of the Roger Moore Saint series, left the show when it went to colour and started to produce his own stuff. The show does feel a lot like ‘THE SAINT:MARK TWO’ in that the character gets up to all the same sort of stuff that Templar does.It’s amusing when the writers forget that he’s supposed to be an antique dealer, and play him simply as a secret agent. There are some corking episodes, particularly one called COUNTDOWN, where Edward Woodward is superb as a sort of evil counterpart to The Baron.
I’m a big fan of the works of Leslie Charteris. He is an underrated writer. One of the fascinating things about Charteris is the way that he appreciated the importance of ‘multimedia’ a long time before anyone else. He was always pushing for radio series, film series, comic strips, TV series in order to keep people aware of Simon Templar. One of the reasons that the character remained popular for so long was that you could know all about The Saint without ever having read a word of the original stories.
July 11th, 2012 at 12:08 pm
I quite enjoyed reading some of Creasey’s Toff books as a boy. Returning to them years later however, along with one or two of his Inspector West’s I found both series rather flat and insipid. The Commander Gideon books he wrote as J.J. Marric are apparently much better, though I’ve yet to get around to reading one.
Leslie Charteris though, has always been one of my favourite authors. I agree he’s been underrated; he had such a unique style and sense of humour. I prefer his earlier work, before writing became something of a chore for him, in particular the short stories anthologised as THE BRIGHTER BUCCANEER and THE SAINT INTERVENES, while CLOSES THE CASE is an excellent yarn that I must have read half a dozen times over the years.
I also love his witty and acerbic opinions on the treatment his stories received at the hands of various movie and TV writers and producers, for whom he had a thinly veiled contempt. As if to prove his point, Terry Nation adapted his short story LIDA for the SAINT series, then used the same plot and even some identical dialogue for an episode of THE BARON, PORTRAIT OF LOUISA, a couple of years later. The story goes that both shows were then aired in the US at around the same time, which, understandably, didn’t go down very well.
July 11th, 2012 at 12:47 pm
As long as the topic in these comments are shifted to include more and more discussion of Leslie Charteris, perhaps it’s time to remind newcomers as well as oldsters that both he and the Saint have been covered several times before on this blog.
I’ll direct you first to https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=10116#comments, which includes some links at the end of Ron Goulart’s article to some earlier reviews of three of the Saint books.
July 11th, 2012 at 1:09 pm
For whatever reason, my favorite Creasey character is Mark Fraser.
The Toff is all right, but all of his books are pretty disposable.