Alderney Adventure

Alderney is the third largest Channel Island, and is the nearest to both Britain and France. Yet for years it has been curiously tricky and expensive to reach, and as a result it has for a long time been the one Channel Island I've not visited. I wanted to put that right during my stay in Guernsey, and luckily I managed to book with Bumblee, a boat service that is only in its third year of operation but provides a very good link between Guernsey and Alderney.

Bergerac is still a fondly remembered TV show set in Jersey, and Guernsey has featured in crime fiction more than once - I mentioned Eileen Dewhurst's book yesterday, and back in the Golden Age, John Ferguson had some success with Death Comes to Perigord, But I'm not aware of any crime story set on Alderney - I'd love to learn about any that do exist - and I'm tempted to fill the gap myself.

The skipper of the Bumblebee gave me a number of valuable insights, and I must say the local people are extremely friendly - not criminal types at all - but this tranquil island would still make a great background for a mystery. I liked very much the small museum, run by the Alderney Society, the rocks covered in gannets, and the quiet beauty of the landscape. The island was abandoned by the locals during the war, and they were only able to return to their homes after the German occupation ended. This gave rise to some poignant stories, well told in the museum.

Jersey and Guernsey are affluent places which find it necessary to make it hard for people to relocate there,but oddly, Alderney is suffering some degree of depopulation, and despite the excellence of Bumblebee, it really does need more and cheaper transport links if it is to prosper in future. But I was really fascinated by the place, and a story idea came to me even as I was walking around it. When will I find time to write it? I'm not sure, but soonish, I hope...

 

Robert Banks Stewart

With surprisingly little fanfare, Robert Banks Stewart recently published a thriller, The Hurricane's Tail. Why do I say 'surprisingly'? Well, the fact is that Mr Stewart might be described as one of the more successful crime writers of the past half-century. Yet I guess that although plenty of readers will recognise his name, they will not be quite sure why it seems so familiar.

The explanation is that the name of Robert Banks Stewart has appeared on our television screens countless times, as he has been a producer and screenplay writer of great distinction. I first became aware of him years ago, and he was involved with many of the great television series. In his early days he wrote scripts for the Edgar Wallace thriller series, as well as Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan. These were among the first crime shows I watched on the box when I was very young.

After that, the hits kept on coming. He wrote for Doctor Who and also for The Avengers - an episode featuring a parodic version of Mensa, of which his wife was a member. He created Shoestring (one of my all-time favourite TV detective shows), starring Trevor Eve, and when that came to an end, followed it up with the even more successful, if less quirky, Bergerac, starring John Nettles. What a CV!

I've been lucky enough to come into contact recently with this wonderful writer, and I asked him about the difference between writing for TV and writing a novel. He told me, "The thing you learn as a screenwriter...ist that economy is important. The picture tells the underlying story...to a certain extent." He found that with his novel, the dialogue came easily, but that he had to work much harder to make everything else convincing: "Funny, isn't it, on screen you don't leave a lot to the imagination. In  a book, huge chunks are down to the imagination of the reader." 

The pleasure of becoming acquainted with this legendary writer has prompted me to take another look at his work, and I'll be returning to Robert Banks Stewart's brilliant career in a future post. In the meantime, The Hurricane' s Tail is definitely worth a look.

The League of Gentlemen

For the first time in many years, I’ve watched The League of Gentlemen, the classic 1960 film from which the comedy show took its name. It’s a black and white movie, broadly in the tradition of the Ealing Comedies, and a thoroughly good period piece, as well as excellent light entertainment that has retained its charm and grip.

The film was based on a book published a couple of years earlier by John Boland. The story involves a redundant and embittered senior army officer, at odds with post-war British society, who hatches a plan to rob a bank. He decides to rope in a number of former military men who have fallen on hard times in the years since the war, and who have indulged in a variety of crimes or shady dealings, but who bring a range of skills to his heist team.

The ensemble cast is led by Jack Hawkins, at his imperious best, and is full of names who dominated British cinema and television for many years. They include Bryan Forbes, who directed (his wife Nanette Newman also has a small role), Richard – later Lord – Attenborough, Terence Alexander (best remembered as Charlie Hungerford in the long-running Jersey cop series Bergerac) and a host of other fine performers. Even Oliver Reed has a walk-on part.

It’s a movie quite different in style from The Italian Job, made only nine years later, but very much a product of the Swinging Sixties, while The League of Gentlemen harks bark to an earlier time. As for John Boland, he was a prolific thriller writer, but I am not familiar with his other work – though the success of his most famous book did prompt him to bring back the Gentlemen for subsequent adventures.

The Dangerous Game

One of the very best British detective shows on tv (at least, in my opinion) was Shoestring, which ran for about a year, and 21 episodes, starting in 1979. The show introduced me to Trevor Eve, one of the most watchable actors, making a name for himself as Eddie Shoestring, who takes up a career as a gumshoe working for a Bristol-based commercial radio station after suffering a nervous breakdown.

I’ve just watched The Dangerous Game, which proved to be the very last Shoestring case. It’s set at Christmas, and it’s worn surprisingly well, with the characteristic blend of a neat story idea and Eve’s idiosyncratic and memorably intense work as the oddball hero. In this one, he discovers that a number of dangerous electrical games have been sold as Christmas presents. In the run-up to Christmas Day, he has to track all the games down in a race against the clock before a child is seriously injured or killed.

As with many episodes, the cast was impressive – it included those splendid performers Celia Imrie and Burt Kwouk. Doran Goodwin made her usual all too brief appearance as Eddie’s not-quite love interest; she is an appealing actor and it’s a pity she’s been, at least as far as I know, long absent from major roles on the screen.

I’m not sure if viewers outside the UK ever saw Shoestring, but it acquired a devoted following here. Eve gave up the part because he didn’t want to be typecast, and the writers used a similar premise in a more glamorous setting to create Jersey’s finest cop, Bergerac. John Nettles did a great job as Jim Bergerac, but I still prefer Shoestring.