Wed 21 Jul 2010
Mike Nevins on BEFORE MIDNIGHT, ELLERY QUEEN, PETER CHEYNEY and the “Bezuzus.”
Posted by Steve under Authors , Collecting , Columns , Covers , Mystery movies[26] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I recently discovered a detective film series I had never heard of before. Before Midnight (RKO, 1933) debuted on TCM in June and starred a young Ralph Bellamy as Inspector Trent of the NYPD.
A procedural this ain’t: Trent comes out on a dark and stormy night to a Toad Hall fifty miles from New York City at the request of a millionaire who expects to be killed before the ancestral clock strikes twelve. Sure enough, the murder takes place, and Trent immediately takes over the investigation, such as it is, smoking up a storm as he interrogates the dead man’s lovely ward, the doctor who loves her, the enigmatic Japanese butler, the sleazy lawyer, etc. etc.
Eventually, donning a white lab coat for forensic cred, he holds up two test tubes with blood samples in them and announces to his bug-eyed stooge that both came from the same person. How he managed to do that, generations before anyone ever heard of DNA, remains a mystery after the murder method (obvious to most viewers) and the murderer (obvious to all) are exposed.
A bit of Web surfing taught me that Before Midnight was the first of four Inspector Trent films, all starring Bellamy and dating from 1933-34. The titles of the other three are One Is Guilty, The Crime of Helen Stanley and Girl in Danger.
Columbia had released an earlier detective series with Adolphe Menjou as Anthony Abbot’s Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt but had dropped it after two films. The Trent series lasted twice as long but who today has ever heard of it? Bellamy of course went on to star in Columbia’s bottom-of-the-barrel series of Ellery Queen films (1940-41).
Second of the four EQ films with Bellamy in the lead was Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (1941). For most of my life I was unsure whether this picture was based on any genuine Queen material.
In Royal Bloodline I speculated that it might have come from one of the early Queen radio plays. Recently I learned that my hunch was right. Its source was the 60-minute drama “The Three Scratches†(CBS, December 13, 1939).
Someday I’d love to compare the Dannay-Lee script with the infantile novelization of the film by some anonymous hack that was published as a tie-in with the movie, but unfortunately that script was not included in The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005).
Does the name Peter Cheyney ring any bells? He was an Englishman (1896-1951), the son of a Cockney fishmonger who specialized in whelks and jellied eels.
He had never visited the U.S. but in 1936 began writing a long series of thrillers narrated in first person by hardboiled G-Man Lemmy Caution, beginning with This Man Is Dangerous (1936).
For the most part these quickies were laughed off as unpublishable over here but became huge successes in England and also in France, where translation concealed Cheyney’s habit of peppering the dialogue of American characters with British slang, not to mention self-created idioms which are like nothing in any language known to humankind.
The one that has stuck in my mind longest is “He blew the bezuzus,†which is not a musical instrument but just Cheyney’s way of saying “He spilled the beans.â€
According to Google the only known use of the word was in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, where a character is said to have a degree from Bezuzus Mail Order University.
Could Cheyney have read that acerbic satire on the American middle class or did he come up with the word independently? Googling “bezuzus†with Cheyney’s name produces no matches, but I suspect that situation will change as soon as this column is posted.
With The Urgent Hangman (1938) Cheyney launched a series of utterly conventional ersatz-Hammett novels about London PI Slim Callaghan, and during World War II he wrote a series of rather bleak espionage novels, all with “Dark†in their titles and lavishly praised by Anthony Boucher and others.
I don’t know if he’s worth rediscovering, but you can catch him as he looked in newsreel footage from 1946, dictating his then-latest thriller to a secretary, by going to www.petercheyney.co.uk and clicking first on “Links†and then on the image at the bottom of the screen.
The mail has just brought me the proof copy of my latest assault on the forests of America. Cornucopia of Crime is a 449-page gargantua bringing together chunks of my writing over the past 40-odd years on mystery fiction and some of my favorites among its perpetrators, from Gardner and Woolrich and Queen to Cleve F. Adams and Milton Propper and William Ard, not to mention screwballs like Michael Avallone and mad geniuses like Harry Stephen Keeler.
One small problem with this copy: on the title page the author’s name is conspicuous by its absence. This glitch will soon be corrected but I’m told that ten or twelve uncorrected copies are on the way to me by mail.
If they arrive before I leave for the Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio late next week, I plan to bring them with me and — assuming there are a few collectors in attendance who are in the market for perhaps the most limited edition of any book on mystery fiction ever published! — sell them off. Consider this an exclusive offer to Mystery*File habitues.
Editorial Comment. 07-22-10. Inspired by David Vineyard’s comments on Peter Cheyney’s contributions to the world of crime fiction, I checked out the website devoted to him that Mike mentioned. It’s definitely worth a look. I especially enjoyed the covers, a portion of one I’ve added below. Who could resist a book with a lady like this on the cover? Not me.
Artwork by John Pisani. For more, go here.
July 21st, 2010 at 6:29 pm
It took Google all of twelve minutes to come up with this blog page’s combo of Cheyney and “bezuzus,” once it was online. Not bad!
July 21st, 2010 at 7:02 pm
The Caution books are a world of their own, but fun in their own wacky way for Cheyney’s cracked version of the American idiom. They are great fun to read — if you know what you are getting, and spawned all those French movies with Eddie Constantine as the G-Man. His name comes from ‘Let-me caution you,’ typical of Cheyney’s use of what he considered American slang.
By far his best received work critically is the Dark series of spy novels (tied together by spymaster Peter Quayle and Belgian assassin Ernie Guelvada) and praised by Anthony Boucher when published here in a wartime anthology. The books were the bridge between the Bulldog Drummond/Edgar Wallace style and the new American voice and a huge influence on Ian Fleming along with Eric Ambler and Somerset Maugham’s ASHENDEN.
West End private eye Slim Callaghan (played in films by Constantine, Michael Rennie, and Derek de Marney among others) is the best of Cheyney’s output in my opinion, a Sam Spade/Michael Shayne style private eye who captures the West End London club scene as vividly as Chandler did Marlowe’s L.A.. Cheyney was famous for his femme fatales and the West End nightclub atmosphere observed from his days as a crime reporter (his heroes consume enough booze to float the Queen Mary). Among other things Slim was the inspiration for Dennis Potter’s THE SINGING DETECTIVE.
“Utterly conventional” is a fair enough description of them, but they are also entertaining and a vivid portrait of one aspect of British society in their time period and place. I find Callaghan’s machinations a good deal of fun as he stays a few steps ahead of the cops, the crooks, and usually his client. A good many Brit crime films of the fifties and sixties are heavily influenced by Cheyney.
Like many popular writers of his time there is a good deal to forgive in Cheyney, though most of it is limited to some slick foreign types with too much grease in their hair. Despite the fact Cheyney was once secretary to Sir Oswald Mosley of the BUF (British Union of Fascists aka Blackshirts)there is nothing in his books as distasteful as in Bulldog Drummond’s early adventures or Sydney Horler (or for that matter in Cleve Adams or Raymond Chandler). There is little or no evidence that his association with the BUF and Mosley was anything more than a starving PR man trying to keep himself fed. During the war he wrote and compiled a huge number of chapbooks for the soldiers that are listed separately in Hubin from his other works, and from his books he is about equally anti-Fascist and anti-Communist.
True, Cheyney was labeled the Prince of Hokum, but he was hugely influential on the genre in England and one of the foundations of the Serie Noir paperback series in France, not to mention the Dark series influence on Ian Fleming and James Bond. John Bentley, David Hume, Gerard Fairlie, John Newton Chance, and Stephen Frances of the Hank Janson books are just a few writers whose work followed the Cheyney mold.
The American writer that Cheyney most reminds me of is Cleve Adams. Like Adams he isn’t overly concerned with original plots and his heroes tend to be cynical, unscrupulous, soused, ladies men, and violent. Caution in some ways could be a cousin of Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner.
Cheyney’s other series heroes include Saint like Alonzo MacTavish, private eye and agency owner Johnny Vallon, Irish secret agent Shaun O’Mara, and diplomatic courier Mike Kells (played by Tyrone Power in Henry Hathaway’s DIPLOMATIC COURIER).
July 21st, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Thanks for long, detailed overview of the Peter Cheyney books, David. The only ones I’ve started but did not finish were in the Dark series, but I was of the wrong age (in my teens and way too young) to appreciate them.
I’ve always meant to give both him and them another try, but so far all I can say in my defense is that I haven’t.
And it looks like I should.
July 21st, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Cheyney is worth reading — at least a few anyway. Try FAREWELL TO THE ADMIRAL and IT COULDN’T MATTER LESS of the Callaghan series, DARK BAHAMA and THE DARK STREET of the spy series, any of the Caution books (POSION IVY is fun), LADY BEWARE and ANOTHER LITTLE DRINK of the Vallon series, and NO ORDINARY CHEYNEY and THE BEST PETER CHEYNEY STORIES are good examples of his short fiction.
If you Google Peter Cheyney you’ll find a good site devoted to him http://www.petercheyney.co.uk/ with many of the great covers done for his books here, in England, and France, and more about the films.
With the exception of the MacTavish, Callaghan, and Caution series the others tend to cross over so that Quayle and Ernie Guelvada appear in most of the DARK novels and Johnny Vallon and Nicholas Gale of the Vallon series show up in the at least one of the Dark novels.
Cheyney was the subject of one of the most famous British cartoons ever published, depicting an elegant lady in her negligee curled up on the chaise with a book while in the background her butler intones on the phone: “I’m sorry, her ladyship can’t come to the phone, she’s on the chaise with Peter Cheyney.”
He never caught on here with relatively few American paperbacks (they tended to come in spurts) but there were plenty of Canadian editions that found their way south. How little he is known here is not reflective of his popularity in the rest of the world. In that he resembles Dennis Wheatley, another writer with huge sales around the world (sixty million books sold — not in print — sold) who never truly found an American audience for most of his output.
There are no surprises in Cheyney’s books other than how entertaining he can be and how vividly he reproduces the West End club milieu he was so familiar with. As a journalist and crime reporter he had huge files of stories and clippings on crime in that West End club society and if his work is superficial it is also an honest reflection of that world.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Just to be obvious, knowing Cheyney’s ‘thud ear’ for American slang, ‘bezusus’ is likely what he heard instead of ‘be’jeazus’ as in ‘You scared the be’jeazus out of me.’ Though it is perfectly possible he read a bestseller like BABBITT and got the word from there.
Not only did he spell it wrong, but used it wrong too. But then he didn’t really care — he was writing for a British audience and he didn’t care what we Yanks thought or didn’t think of his work.
By the time of his death he was one of the most popular writers in the world. I’m sure he would have liked to break into the American market, but he’s like a number of very popular British writers who never were big here including Dennis Wheatley, Dornford Yates, Sydney Horler, David Hume, and to some extent H.C. MacNeile (Sapper). He did quite well without us.
Lemmy Caution was writer Russell James choice for one of the 100 BEST DETECTIVES edtited by Maxim Jakubowkski.
James writes:
‘Every one of Cheyney’s tales contains more twists and stings than a packet of hungry scorpions. Every story has fast dialogue, fast action, and deliciously fast women.’
The Caution books are written in the rare first person present tense which makes them even more unusual. I’m not sure American audiences can appreciate what a breath of fresh air Cheyney and Lemmy were for the British reader in the thirties and forties or just how popular he was. In that he is closer to Spillane’s impact here than to Hammett or Chandler.
Writers like Cheyney, Sax Rohmer, James Hadley Chase, Ian Fleming, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Mickey Spillane are phenomena and as such above criticism. Love them or hate them they storm onto the scene, catch the public imagination, confound the critics, and hold their loyal fans much longer and with more real passion than we sometimes want to admit.
Publishers would love to figure out who the next phenomena will be or how to spot them, but there is no real way to predict them other than their creators tend to be storytellers more than stylists and have an almost magical feel for the public imagination at the time they first hit. HARRY POTTER and the TWILIGHT saga are just recent examples of the type (the former proving good writers can be phenomena too).
In some cases like Anne Rice and Tom Clancy they outlive their greatest success, in others like Stephen King or Clive Cussler they become something more like an institution, but while endless studies are written after the case to explain their popularity no one, writer or publisher really seems to know what causes them to catch fire the way they do.
Cheyney was a phenomena. He didn’t catch fire here, likely because his hard boiled voice wasn’t authentic (Edgar Wallace was nowhere near as big here as in England either), but for millions of readers around the world that didn’t matter. Taking shots at him is about as effective as shooting spit balls at a 747 — it may be personally satisfying, but it isn’t going to avail you much.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:55 pm
A lot of the “tough” or more thriller-styled English detective novelists, who were very popular in UK, enjoyed indifferent success in the US, for whatever reasons. All the John Rhodes between 1927 and 1961, I believe were published in the United States, for example, even though authors like Sydney Horler sold many more books in Britain. But Horler seems to have been dropped by American publishers for the most part in the 1930s.
Cheyney definitely was very popular. He was even read by intellectuals, much like Ian Fleming was a bit later.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:15 pm
At the height of his popularity Cheyney’s British sales were 5 million a year, even during the war with paper shortages he was selling 2 million a year.
DARK DUET was the first book published in France even as the Germans were leaving having been smuggled in from occupied Holland.
Curt
I think the British hard boiled voice seemed phony to Americans in general, but Raymond Chandler was quite complimentary of DARK DUET in a letter to James Sandoe.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:53 pm
David, good catch on the bejeazus thing.
Here’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (1998) on Fleming:
“In many ways unreadable, the Bond stories achieved enormous success….As a character Bond was only marginally less ridiculous than Bulldog Drummond….”
I love that first sentence juxtaposing “in many ways unreadable” with “achieved enormous success.” Enormous success as what, if they were unreadable? Doorstops?
A great many people read these books, including “educated” people. Fleming even had a vogue with the intellectuals in his day. It was much more the thing to be glimpsed reading a Fleming on the commute than a Christie.
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:53 am
I suppose unreadable would apply to Edgar Wallace too in some judgments. Fleming could be careless, but at his best he had that whiskey soaked Fleet Street voice and a fair hand at some memorable phrases:
‘March came in like a rattlesnake …’
“It reads better than it lives.”
“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time is enemy action.”
“Screw it in, don’t push it in …” (M telling Bond how to use a jeweler’s eye)
“He disagreed with something that ate him” (after Felix Leiter has been fed to a shark)
“Never go abear of England.”
‘The World is not enough’ (Bond’s family motto)
‘It was one of those days when it seemed to James Bond that all life, as someone put it, was nothing but a heap of six to four against.’
‘James Bond, with two double bourbons in him, sat in the final departure lounge of the Miami Airport and thought about life and death.’
Among other intellectuals who praised Bond were Kingsley Amis, C. Day Lewis (Nicholas Blake and England’s poet laureate), Paul Gallico, Cyril Connally, John Betjeman, Noel Coward, Umberto Eco (who like Amis wrote a book on Bond), Raymond Chandler, Christopher Hitchens, and Eric Ambler (who was quite complimentary in TO CATCH A SPY and also said “The Bond books definitely deserve to be read as literature.”). I don’t know if you can call Ayn Rand an intellectual but she was a Bond fan too (and a Spillane fan).
Although he is still dismissed here largely the Andrew Lycett biography of Fleming led to a reevaluation of his work in England where he is now viewed in a much more favorable light by critics.
The glee with which some critics greeted the recent troubles of MGM and the remote chance that might end the Bond film saga was a good example though of how much impact Fleming still has. TIME magazine has been predicting the end of the film series since the release in 1964 of GOLDFINGER. Inspiring that kind of hate is almost as great a tribute as inspiring fans.
One mark of the writers like Fleming and Cheyney is how virulently some of their critics hated them and attributed their works with social significance far beyond their popularity and influence. Malcolm Muggeridge for instance wrote of Bond after Fleming’s death that he was ” …utterly despicable,obsequious with his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women …”
Hard to believe he’s discussing a fictional character.
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:20 am
Let’s not forget President John Kennedy who gave Fleming sales in America a big shot in the arm when he mentioned liking the James Bond novels. Just about the only mystery/thrillers that he read, I still remember when this happened and it caused me to read a few Bond novels.
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:22 am
A warning should be appended to Mike Nevins’s book: WARNING – this man can make the most unreadable junk sound appealing!
Seriously, that is definitely a compliment, as most of Mike’s pieces are better than the books and authors he writes about.
😉
July 22nd, 2010 at 9:32 am
Too bad JFK didn’t read and remark upon Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series. We might have had a series of films featuring an AMERICAN spy that AMERICANS could be proud of, instead of those low-budget asinine atrocities featuring Dean Martin, who really should have stuck to singing.
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:16 pm
This may be off-topic a bit, but the comments about how British writers handle American slang reminded me of something I saw many years ago.
A few days before his near-fatal heart attack, Peter Sellers appeared on Steve Allen’s syndicated talk show. During the course of stories and gags, at one point Sellers alowed that he didn’t do an American accent as well as he thought he could. I don’t recall his exact words, but it was something like when British actors tried to sound American, they ended up sounding like sports announcers. What I do remember was Sellers’s enunciation of “You’re darned tooting, Buddy!”
Since seeing that, any time I’ve come across non-American attempts to replicate American slang, I’ve always thought of that Sellers voice.
(Not that American writers handle British expressions any better, but … oh hell, you know what I mean.)
Mike Nevins: can’t wait to get the big book. Ordering info ASAP, if you please.
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Replying to Jeff and your comment #11:
I assume you’re talking about Harry Stephen Keeler, boosted highly by Mike whenever you talk to him, and not Ellery Queen or Cornell Woolrich…?
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Mike Doran:
When Mike Nevins’ book is available (from Ramble House books), I’m sure you’ll hear about it here on this blog as soon as you will anywhere else. Guaranteed.
— Steve
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Accents are funny things. Michael Caine said his Cockney friends used to break up in theaters whenever he or Cary Grant showed up on screen as an English aristocrat.
Over the years we have gotten so used to the ‘Middle Atlantic’ accents of James Mason, Cary Grant, and Ray Milland that we accept them as Americans without really thinking about it.
I always found Laurence Olivier’s accents simply awful. His American accent is one of the worst. On the other hand Hugh Laurie on HOUSE is uncanny — especially when you hear him off screen. So, for that matter, is the star of THE MENTALIST.
And another vote for Mike Nevins who does indeed make the worst writers more interesting than they could ever possibly be on their own.
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Walker
JFK’s famous list certainly did wonders for Fleming though American sales for DOCTOR NO and GOLDFINGER had ‘saved’ Bond even before the JFK list came along (Fleming had considered ending the series with FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE).
Mike Tooney
I know I’m kicking a hornet’s nest here, but JFK reading Donald Hamilton still wouldn’t have done for Helm what it did for Bond. I like the Helm books and love some of Hamilton’s non series books, but they aren’t in a class with Fleming (Hamilton’s a better suspense novelist I’ll grant without a fight) and I doubt would have caught on or generated a series of films like the Bond films.
One of the silliest things I hear from American haters of Fleming is the complaint there is no American Bond. The reason for that is simply few American writers could write decent spy or thriller fiction — mostly they churned out semi hard boiled private eye stuff disguised as secret agent fare. I have no problem with readers preferring Helm or Joe Gall or even Nick Carter, but recognize Fleming’s goals and achievements were different. Bond is unique in voice and style — which isn’t true of Hamilton or Atlee.
Hate Bond if you will, certainly critique Fleming’s many flaws as a writer, but don’t kid yourself that Matt Helm would have inspired a series of films that lasted into the 21rst Century. He couldn’t even stay in print after Donald Hamilton’s death. Bond may be a fussy bachelor, but that beats Helm’s cranky old woman anyday (I swear if Hamiton did one more rant on women in pants or American cars I would have thrown my whole Helm collection in the trash).
Life and literature aren’t fair. What made Bond and Fleming a phenomena like what made Spillane and Mike Hammer and what made Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason phenomena before him are unique to those writers and creations. If Hamilton and Helm had had that in them it would have happened JFK or not. We can complain that Ross Macdonald and Lew Archer are more deserving than Spillane and Hammer, but that won’t change the sales figures.
JFK’s list did nothing for John Buchan — and he had two (non-fiction) books on it.
It wasn’t until Ross Thomas that a writer came along who did this sort of book anywhere near as well as the Brits. In some cases writers like Robert Littell, Charles McCarry, and William F. Buckley even topped them eventually, but the fantasy that Helm and Hamilton would ever have been Bond is just that — a fantasy.
And stop and think a moment. Can you honestly remember the details of one Helm novel plot, villain, heroine, or setting without going back and checking? I can’t, and I’ve read most of them multiple times, but I can recall whole passages from the Bond books.
For all his flaws Fleming created a world in the way Doyle did for Holmes and Spillane did for Hammer. John D. MacDonald did that for Travis McGee which is why a McGee film is in the works as we write. But Hamilton, good as he was, doesn’t quite reach that level with Helm, and without that few fictional characters survive whatever their creators other skills.
July 23rd, 2010 at 10:34 am
David – No argument here about Fleming’s abilities; he was quite capable of vivid writing, no doubt about it. And no argument about Hamilton’s writerly shortcomings; at times his rants do grate.
Nevertheless, a heftier budget, imaginative scriptwriting, and better casting could have transformed Matt Helm into an “American James Bond,” which I regard as a lost opportunity on Hollywood’s part. (The two Derek Flint films with James Coburn were fatally flawed ab initio through injecting too much parody into the concept.)
Still, Fleming was also quite capable of lapses. I remember reading one of his stories in a magazine and coming to a scene in which an American cab driver, gruff and jaded, says something that no self-respecting New York hack would ever utter: “He must be daft!” Just goes to show how true the remark by somebody (George Bernard Shaw? Oscar Wilde?) is that America and Britain are two nations divided by a common language.
July 23rd, 2010 at 10:43 am
I did something wrong last night and I lost Mike’s complete column. The entire post was blank for several hours until I was finally able to reconstruct it, thanks to a Google cache.
So all was well, I thought, until Mike Tooney emailed me this morning and said that the New Comment box was gone. I posted his comment for him, see above, and looked to see what else I had done.
And I found it. A check-off box allowing for comments on this post had mysteriously become unchecked. Maybe everything’s OK now. Fingers crossed.
July 23rd, 2010 at 12:55 pm
The all-time best Yank accent to come from a British actor was Barry Morse as Lewtenant Gerard on THE FUGITIVE (he never slipped and said Leftenant).
I remember how Morse would appear on ’60s talk shows and send the hosts off the rails with his real voice (not to mention his geniality). Occasionally he would even sing (Music Hall ditties and Noel Coward mainly).
They just don’t make actors like that anymore.
July 23rd, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Mike Doran
Agree about Morse. At times I forgot he was a Brit.
Mike Tooney
We’ll have to agree to disagree here because I don’t see anything in the Helm books to tag a successful film series on. I’ll grant you might have done a few good movies, maybe like the Bourne series with big budgets and the right actor, but nothing approaching the long lasting impact of Bond.
The reason is simply that Fleming creates a world in which Bond operates and peoples it with characters and settings that occur again and again and give a continuity and backstory to Bond we don’t have past DEATH OF A CITIZEN in the Helm books.
Even the comic book and pulp aspects of some of Flemings plots and villains is better suited to film. Individual Helm books are better suspense novels, but they don’t really lend themselves to the big screen — more a couple of tight well done films with the same hero.
I can only think of four continuing characters in the Helm series and only two of them are important — Helm and Mac, and compared to M I know nothing of Mac even though he appears in many more books. Helm’s wife appears as an afterthought once in a while and Mac’s daughter, but for the most part the Helm books appear in a vacuum with no real continuity from one to the next. That is not a formula for a successful film series — not one that lasts decades. Bond is a saga, Helm is a series of books tied by a continuing character.
I do agree we could have got a few good Helm films, though there isn’t much in the books to lend themselves to the screen really. The books depend on our being in Helm’s head but we don’t really imagine ourselves as Helm whereas with Bond — as Kingley Amis points out — everyman is his own 007. In a way the very fact Helm is more rounded is a drawback. We read and watch Helm, we experience Bond.
We live vicariously through Bond. With Helm we watch from the outside even though we are allowed in his head. Bond is a fantasy figure in a way Helm isn’t. Hamilton’s ‘nice guy who kills people’ isn’t as attractive a film prospect as Fleming’s ‘cardboard booby.’ We can create our own Bond withing the confines of Fleming’s outline. We don’t have that option with Helm.
Fleming always had the screen in mind for Bond and it shows in the cinematic style of the books. Hamilton doesn’t seem to have been much of a film fan outside of his westerns.
Granted, talented people can make a film out of anything, and there is something to work with in Hamilton and Helm, but I just don’t see a really good film series coming out of them. In an ironic way I think they could have come closer to film success with Sam Durrell because plot and setting and his world play a more important part in Aarons books than Hamilton’s. The fact that Durrell is not as well drawn as Helm would be an advantage on film — there is more to work with.
Truthfully I just don’t see the pleasures of Hamilton and Helm being transferred to the big screen. In the books we respond to Helm’s internal world, but the external doesn’t mean much. In Bond all the trappings, brand names, and such are his internal and external world. He is a vodka martini ‘shaken not stirred,’ his Aston-Martin, his cold cruel smile, and ‘authentic comma’ of black hair. I’m not sure I’d recognize Helm on screen if he didn’t stop to complain about women in pants — and I can’t see film audiences much caring for that.
A couple of good films — maybe. A series lasting forty years — I don’t see it. An American Bond? No. But then there isn’t a British Perry Mason or a French Mike Hammer either. Some things are unique to their time and place and you can’t copy or duplicate them. It isn’t always fair to often really good writers — Thatcher Colt was a better character than Philo Vance by a better writer, but it is Vance we remember. In one sense Fleming’s flaws as well as his strength’s led to Bond’s success and Hamilton’s strengths meant Helm couldn’t duplicate them.
July 24th, 2010 at 5:05 am
Interesting to compare Cheyney to his contemporary, Leslie Charteris. The first SAINT stories were very English, but gradually became more mid-Atlantic as the author settled into life in the USA. However, Charteris’ style never really became totally American, and Simon Templar seems to float like a soap bubble above every culture that he visits. In contrast, Cheyney seems desperate for everyone to believe that the Lemmy Caution books are being written by a real American. By attempting such a whole-hearted pastiche, he probably made the audience more likely to notice any tin-eared dialogue.
July 24th, 2010 at 10:10 am
David – You win! (Although I wasn’t really arguing for Matt Helm INSTEAD OF James Bond; after all, Sam Spade and Dr. Gideon Fell were contemporaries and never crossed each other up, much less crossed each other’s path.)
Still, re: your well-reasoned argument about internal and external worlds, it could have been fun to have a spy film in which Helm (or some Helm-surrogate) did a Chandlerish voiceover narration, thus adding spice to the stew, in contrast with the objective POV in which most, and possibly ALL, spy movies are related.
(Note: All caps are used for emphasis, not shouting.)
July 24th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Mike
No shouting suspected. And I agree I would love to have seen a good Helm film or two, though the problem with American spy films was that hard boiled voice to some extent and trying to believe the low brow lunk heads Hollywood gave us as American agents would last five minutes with their more sophisticated cousins. Granted they made some entertaining films, but the Yank moron, all fists and guns, who bulls in and stomps all over the place so upsetting the enemy that they make a fatal mistake isn’t very convincing in tales of international intrigue. But for a good early one with a non lunk head hero see either John Huston’s ACROSS THE PACIFIC or Robert Stevenson’s TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH with Dick Powell.
Richard Sale’s FIRE OVER AFRICA (Maureen O’Hara and Macdonald Carey) is a typical American spy film of the pre Bond era — not bad, but not particularly good either.
The reason I made the argument is this comes up fairly often among a small but vocal group of fans and writers who resent Bond’s success because he is a Brit and therefore in their view effete and suspect. This reverse snobbery almost always centers on how superior Hamilton and Helm are, and as I’ve pointed out always ignores why Bond succeeded and Helm did not and likely would not have. This isn’t to take away from Hamilton or Helm, but is equivalent to arguing that if not for Sherlock Holmes Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt would have been the world’s greatest detective.
The very thing that made Fleming a success also meant he generated some enemies who loathe he and Bond far beyond anything they deserve. The one thing they cannot face is that if there hadn’t been Bond there would have been no spy film craze or series. It just wouldn’t have happened, just as the detective novel would have never caught fire without Sherlock Holmes. These things aren’t inevitable, but depend on the right writer and creation at the right time.
Len Deighton and Adam Hall, among others, did well with the hard boiled voice in spy fiction, but I’m not sure it would really have worked in a film — not that I wouldn’t like to see the attempt. Quite a few low budget thrillers from the late forties and fifties pretty much do just that and none of them are very good spy films though some entertain. Other than one or two Buchanish books by American writers (David Garth, John August) and some good Ambler imitations (Frank Gruber, William McGivern) there isn’t much to brag about in American spy fiction until Ross Thomas debut. Now we do it as well as anyone, but it wasn’t always true. Even Helen MacInnes British books are superior to her American ones.
And it is ironic as the American voice is what made Ambler, Greene, and even Peter Cheyney and Fleming distinct from the Buchan, Oppenheim, and LeQueux schools.
The closest we get to seeing what a decent Helm film would have been is THE MAN INSIDE with Jack Palance as M.E. Chaber’s (Ken Crossen) Milo March or THE MACINTOSH MAN with Paul Newman (based on a book by South African Desmond Bagley though). Neither is perfect, but in their own ways offer some idea what a serious Helm film might have looked like.
Though it is interesting to watch some of FIVE STEPS TO DANGER. based on Hamilton’s novel, and imagine Sterling Hayden is playing Helm, or for that matter Joel McCrea in SHOOT FIRST (based on Geoffrey Household’s book A ROUGH SHOOT). My mind’s eye version of Helm would have been well played by Hayden, McCrea, Randolph Scott, or Glenn Ford — at least I could buy them as an agent code named ERIC.
I would like to have seen someone try to film Ross Thomas MacCorkle and Padillo books, but again I’m not sure it would have worked in the long run. But to give Bond a Yankee spin, he would never have caught on here if Blake Edwards PETER GUNN hadn’t first bridged the gap between him and Mike Hammer. The combination of factors like that coming together for something like the Bond series to succeed is almost impossible to predict or manufacture. Even George Lucas and Steven Spielberg only got four films out of Indiana Jones — and the last one stunk — though several times I thought Harrison Ford was playing Matt Helm instead of Indy.
To paraphrase Fleming the odds of something like the Bond phenomena happening is six to four against.
I once tried to compile an annotated list of spy films made from the end of WWII to the first Bond film, and while it rapidly got out of hand completely one thing became clear, with a handful of exceptions the only good American films on the list tended to be either second hand CASABLANCA or semi documentary films like THE HOUSE ON 92nd STREET, with the only true exception NOTORIOUS — which really isn’t fair since it is made by a Brit — none of the American films on the list were particularly good spy films though some were entertaining. They just substituted Commies or Nazi war criminals for gangsters and did the same basic crime film we had all seen a million times. Most of them weren’t as good as the average Eddie Constantine Lemmy Caution flic, and were just gangster movies with exotic locations even when they were good films.
July 25th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Re-reading Dennis Wheatley’s autobiographical account of his experiences in the Joint Planning Staff, I was fascinated to learn how difficult they found it to convince the American Military to go along with their attempts to fool the enemy. It was if the Americans found the whole idea of espionage rather vulgar and unpleasant.
Even at the height of its Imperial Power, Britain needed espionage to help keep control of its possessions (just look at Kipling’s KIM). In contrast, the USA always seemed to feel that you should win battles by force of numbers and superior tactics. Spying was an underhand activity that foreigners indulged in. Could this be why it so long for spy films and fiction to catch on?
July 26th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Bradstreet
It’s even worse than that. When William Donovan, the founder of the OSS and the CIA, wanted a charter for the agency he had to ask Ian Fleming to write the outline for it. He couldn’t find an American who knew enough about the game to do the job.
Fortunately during the war FDR had an appreciation for the ‘game’ and sometimes overruled his own commanders.
But keep in mind England at least partially earned that nickname Perfidious Albion because it had been playing the spy game seriously since at least the reign of Henry VIII and certainly under his daughter Elizabeth. That’s at least partially how an island becomes an empire.
With the exception of the Revolution and Civil War America disdained espionage at least until Teddy Roosevelt came into office, and even then it wasn’t until WW II that we began to seriously indulge.