Taken from an obituary which appeared in the online edition of The Guardian:

George Tabori

    “The dramatist and writer George Tabori, who has died aged 93, was one of the last of the generation of writers forced into exile by the Third Reich. Hungarian by birth, writing in English and directing and occasionally acting in German, he combined experience of British and American life with the cosmopolitan cultural traditions of central Europe. Starting as a maverick director in 1970, he was the most widely performed modern writer in the German theatre by 1992.

    “From 1943 until 1947 he worked for the BBC in London, where he took British citizenship [and] had begun to write novels: Beneath the Stone (1945), a thriller written in Jerusalem, Companions of the Left Hand (1946), composed on the boat back from Egypt, and Original Sin, a psychological crime novel set in Cairo. These came to the attention of MGM, which in 1947 signed him as a scriptwriter. He moved in émigré and film circles. With Thomas Mann he tried to set up a film of The Magic Mountain to star Montgomery Clift and Greta Garbo, but in the end he had few Hollywood credits, although he wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s I Confess in 1953 and shared a Bafta with Robin Estridge for the screenplay of Anthony Asquith’s The Young Lovers in 1954.”

I Confess

   His entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, even slightly expanded, is relatively modest:

TABORI, GEORGE (1914-2007 )
      * Beneath the Stone. Houghton Mifflin, hc,1945. British title: Beneath the Stone the Scorpion. Boardman, pb, 1945.
      * -Original Sin. Houghton Mifflin, hc, 1947. Boardman, hc, 1947. Setting: Cairo.
      * The Good One. Permabook M4180, pb, 1960. Setting: West Africa.


Beneath the Stone

   Of Beneath the Stone, one online bookseller described it thusly: “The story of two men, a German and an Englishman – captor and captive – who meet for one night in a Balkan valley to dine…”

   A Time Magazine review of Original Sin says: “George Tabori […] seems to have written this psycho-thriller with his left foot. A khamseen howls for days in Cairo, wearing tempers thin as the hot, gritty sand seeps through the doors and windows of the pension […] On the fifth morning of the storm, Adela Manasse, wife of the pension’s proprietor, is found dead in her tub, naked and smiling a ‘kindly’ smile. How did she die and why did she smile? Original Sin explores this problem amid swirls of windblown sand and snarls of plot typical of Cosmopolitan magazine fiction – which is, in fact, what this novel is.”

The Good One


   From the front cover of The Good One: “The story of an honest police chief helplessly caught up in the seething violence and bloody fighting of a revolt in a West African colony.”


    — Thanks once again to John Herrington for passing the news along to Al Hubin.