Steve,

   Your blog entry on John Creasey and the Toff served as a pleasant reminder of the madly-prolific yet now almost-forgotten Creasey. There seemed a time (1960s/1970s) when the shelves on London bookshops were weighed down with Creasey’s Hodder & Stoughton paperbacks.

   I was very interesting to read that William Vivian Butler penned the post-1973 Creasey novels. I reached for Butler’s ‘critical study of some enduring heroes’, The Durable Desperadoes (Macmillan, 1973), a warmly nostalgic overview of British gentleman-adventurer literature from the early part of the last century, and discovered the following special note at the beginning of this work:

Durable Desperados

    “John Creasey’s sad death took place while this book was in production. This gives me an additional opportunity to express my gratitude for all his help, and to emphasise that both the book and its preface were shown to him, and met with his warm approval.

    “Nothing that I have written about the Toff and the Baron is invalidated by their creator’s death — not even the statement that, while so many similar heroes have fallen by the wayside, they still “stroll nonchalantly on”. John Creasey has left so much posthumous material that new novels in both the Toff and the Baron series will continue to appear until at least 1975, and possibly 1977.”

June 1973

   W.V.B.

   It is indeed unfortunate that while the Toff books seemed destined to trail in the shadow of Charteris’s The Saint novels (a little unfairly, I always thought), so have two little-known (of course) cinematic adventures featuring Creasey’s calm and daring character.

   Released to cinemas merely months apart in 1952 (in the UK), Salute the Toff and Hammer the Toff (both directed by Maclean Rogers for producer Ernest G. Roy at Nettlefold Films), starring the seemingly ever-resilient John Bentley as the Hon. Richard Rollison, seem to have disappeared into B-movie limbo. But during their short existence, Valentine Dyall’s Inspector Grice observed as the Toff traced a missing person (in Salute the Toff) and became involved with a stolen metal formula (in Hammer the Toff). Of course, there is the likelihood that the word ‘dreadful’ is primed for reactivation here.

   However, the truly fascinating aspect to these two rarely-seen films is that Creasey himself is credited with adapting the screenplays from his own novels (the 1941 Salute, the 1947 Hammer).

   Much like the still-elusive Paul Temple films of the same period (from works by Francis Durbridge), one hopes that the continual scraping of the bottom of barrels for new DVD movie properties may unearth the Toff duo for viewing evaluation in the near future.

   Thanks again for an interesting and informative Toff/Creasey piece.

Regards,

   Tise



   From Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

BUTLER, WILLIAM VIVIAN (1927-1987); see pseudonym Vivian Butler.

Gideon's Force   * Clampdown (London: Macmillan, 1971, hc) [England]
   * Gideon’s Fear (Hodder, 1990, hc) [Commander George Gideon; England]
   * Gideon’s Force (Hodder, 1978, hc) [Commander George Gideon; England] Stein, 1985.
   * Gideon’s Law (Hodder, 1981, hc) [Commander George Gideon; England] Stein, 1985.
   * Gideon’s Raid (Hodder, 1986, hc) [Commander George Gideon; England] Stein, 1986.
   * Gideon’s Way (Hodder, 1983, hc) [Commander George Gideon; England] Stein, 1986.
   * The Lie Witnesses (London: Macmillan, 1971, hc) [England]
   * Scare Power (London: Macmillan, 1969, hc) [England]
   * The Toff and the Dead Man’s Finger (Hodder, 1978, hc) [Richard Rollison (The Toff); England]

BUTLER, VIVIAN; pseudonym of William Vivian Butler
   * Guy for Trouble (Crowther, 1945, hc)