Forgotten Book - Hand of Fate

Are there any other Michael Underwood fans out there? Underwood was a prolific writer of mysteries which usually had a legal element. His long career began in 1954 and came to an end with his death in 1992. He produced a number of series, the most extensive featuring the solicitor Rosa Epton, together with stand-alones, and he was Secretary of the Detection Club and served as Chair of the CWA. I think it's fair to say that he was predominantly a writer for the library market, but although he seldom scaled the literary heights as a novelist, he was an accomplished entertainer.

My forgotten book for today is one of his stand-alones, Hand of Fate, which appeared in 1981. It's a good story, which showcases Underwood's strengths, as well as his limitations. We begin with a scenario suggestive of the Crippen case. Frank Wimble is a rich, self-made man whose wife refuses him a divorce at a time when he wants to marry his mistress. Elspeth Wimble duly disappears in mysterious circumstances. Local gossip comes to the attention of the police and their investigations take a fresh turn when a severed hand is found in local woodland, bearing Elspeth's ring. Frank is duly charged with murder.

The murder trial takes up the bulk of the novel. Underwood, whose real name was John Michael Evelyn, was a barrister who worked in public prosecutions, and his command of detail is extremely convincing, even if sometimes the information is presented in a slightly dry way. We veer into Verdict of Twelve territory, with Underwood presenting us with insight into the jurors' lives, rather as Raymond Postgate did. This is fascinating, although many of the threads here are left undeveloped. We also learn about the female judge, and I presumed that what was going on in her personal life (her daughter-in-law is having an affair) would somehow link in with the plot. It's not really a spoiler to say that it doesn't. Here, I think, Underwood missed a trick. Postgate was more ambitious with his novel, and that's why it is better remembered.

Nevertheless, I kept turning the pages, wanting to find out what the truth was (I did guess most of it, but the twists are clever.) Underwood had a very smooth, readable style. What he lacked in terms of literary ambition, he made up for by telling a good story. In real life, he was gay, and my guess is that the discretion that evidently characterised his life influenced his approach to writing. He didn't want to give too much away about himself, although there's an interesting development in the closing paragraphs of the novel. This is a light, pacy read, and even if the characterisation isn't too sophisticated, it's well worth reading.

Forgotten Book - The Announcer

I've talked previously about Donald Henderson, a writer who has long intrigued me. Because he died young, his work fell out of print quite quickly, and he's hardly ever been discussed in reference books (though I do talk about him in The Story of Classic Crime). Recently, I read his 1946 book, The Announcer, and found it extremely enjoyable.

The book's alternative title in the US, and perhaps a better one, was A Voice Like Velvet, which is a phrase taken from the story, concerning the protagonist, Ernest Bisham. He happens to be a BBC radio announcer by day. But he is also, by night....wait for it...a cat-burglar!

As a premise this carries, perhaps a whiff of the absurd, but in a pleasing way. Henderson worked for the BBC, and he has a great deal of fun with his account of BBC life. I'm sure it appealed to his ironic sense of humour to imagine a very correct announcer as a master-criminal. His wit reminds me of Francis Iles, and he shares Iles' interest in true crime: Crippen, Jack the Ripper, and Neil Cream are among the killers name-checked in the story.

Like Iles, Henderson had considerable gifts as a novelist. This is a well-written story, with plenty of nice lines, but he also manages to create suspense in a very pleasing way. I found myself rooting for Ernest even when he behaved foolishly, and especially when he found himself in tricky situations, facing almost certain discovery. This really is a hidden gem.

Blue Serge

"Blue Serge" is a new short story of mine, which has just appeared in an anthology compiled by the tireless Maxim Jakubowski. The title of the collection, published by Robinson, is The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories, and the numerous other contributors include Barbara Nadel, Peter Guttridge, and Michael Gregoriou.

My story has a connection with a real life case other than the Ripper murders - the almost equally famous case of Hawley Harvey Crippen, and features one of the leading characters from the Crippen case. I've long been intrigued by both cases, and I really enjoyed writing this particular story.

I tried to stick to the facts of the Ripper case so far as they are known, but in an afterword to the story, I explain that the part of it which pins villainy on a particular person is very much the product of my imagination. That individual is long gone, and I don't think anyone would have a moment's doubt that this is a work of fiction, solely intended to entertain. I'm conscious, however, that stories often represent long-dead people as misbehaving in all sorts of ways which have in fact been invented. To my mind, it's important to spell out the fact that they have been invented. Otherwise - especially in film screenplays which claim to be faithful to the facts, but which actually take liberties with them -  reputations can be posthumously damaged without cause.

My thanks go to Maxim Jakubowski, who has edited a great many anthologies and included stories written by me in quite a number of them. Unless you've edited an anthology yourself, you tend to under-estimate how much hard work is involved. I take my hat off to the likes of Maxim and Mike Ashley, and in the US Otto Penzler, who have produced so many anthologies of such high calibre. Long may they continue to do so.

Forgotten Book - Henbane

Henbane, by Catherine Meadows, published in the US as Doctor Moon, is a long-forgotten book dating from 1934, which I have wanted to track down for ages. There were two reasons for my curiosity. First, it's a fictionalisation of the Crippen case, which has fascinated me for decades. Having been responsible for my own take on Crippen in Dancing for the Hangman, I'm always keen to see what other writers make of the story. Second, Dorothy L. Sayers lavished praise on the book in one of her reviews for the Sunday Times, and she was no mean judge.

I wasn't disappointed. This is a very readable and capably written novel, and it's all the more surprising that Meadows, so far as I know, published only one other novel. That was Friday Market,another book inspired by a real life crime, namely the Armstrong case. I do wonder if Meadows was a pen-name for someone else,but I've  not found any evidence of this. If anyone knows the answer,or has more information about the mysterious Ms Meadows, I'd be glad to learn it.

Meadows sticks fairly closely to the established facts of the Crippen case,but makes some amendments - more, I think, than Sayers realised. Caspar Moon, who stands in for Crippen, is very sympathetically presented, and so too is his secretary and lover, based on Ethel Le Neve. It follows that his wife Cora (called Flora in the novel) is presented vividly but negatively, as a man-chasing and utterly selfish domestic tyrant. Sayers said: "the book is not merely a costume-piece, still less a study in morbid psychology; it is a fine novel of human passion and suffering."

I haven't kept a statistical record, but it's my very strong impression that the Crippen case is referenced more frequently in Golden Age fiction than any other real life case - including such notable cases as Maybrick and Wallace. The story was sensational in its day, and remains absolutely full of interest - so much so that I enjoyed writing Dancing for the Hangman as much as any other novel I've ever written. As with Maybrick and Wallace, there 's room to debate what actually happened. I don't go along with the theory advanced a few years ago,based on claims relating to DNA, that Crippen's wife survived, and I think it very likely (as, I believe, did Agatha Christie) that Ethel was not quite the dewy-eyed innocent portrayed by Meadows. But Meadows' story, though told at a pace that is very leisurely by today's standards, remains enjoyable, and it's baffling that a writer of such accomplishment should have vanished seemingly without trace. .  

Stranger Than Fiction by Neil Clark

The full title of Neil Clark's new book is Stranger than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, The Man Who Created King Kong. That rather suggests an anxiety that people may not know who Edgar Wallace was. And it's true that, inevitably, given that more than eighty years have passed since his death, his name is much less well known than it used to be. But it remains the case, I think, that it is still fairly well known.

I first came across Edgar Wallace as a teenager, in the days when some of his books were being reprinted as Pan paperbacks. I wasn't so keen on the thrillers,but I remember that I quite enjoyed The Clue of the Silver Key, which was closer to the sort of detective story that I loved. I also caught several episodes of that long-running TV series, Edgar Wallace Mysteries. Later, I read The Four Just Men, which strikes me as very interesting as a slice of social and political history. It's also revealing, in that Wallace discusses a society fearful of immigration, and his instincts are clearly liberal.

Neil Clark discusses Wallace's interest in politics, as well as his journalism, his gambling and various other escapades. He was in many ways a rascal - I've always felt that his role in the Crippen case, when he was desperate to tease a confession out of Crippen, was discreditable. He wasn't a reliable or particularly trustworthy man. But he had a number of very important gifts. Above all, he was a great story-teller.

I'm involved in a Wallace-related project myself at the moment, and I found this book useful, as was the much earlier biography by Margaret Lane. The publisher of Clark's book is The History Press, who, perhaps I should mention, also recently published my CWA anthology, Truly Criminal. As usual, they have produced an attractive book that is well worth reading. I regret the lack of an index, which seems to me to be a mistake, but overall this is a book which I am sure will help to remind people of what an interesting writer and character Edgar Wallace really was. And yes, his life story was indeed stranger than fiction.

Forgotten Book: S.S.Murder

S.S.Murder is the second novel by Q.Patrick which I’ve featured as a Forgotten Book. It first appeared in 1933, and a game of bridge is a significant part of the plot – just as it was a year or two later in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table. I’m not a bridge player (in my youth, I once went to evening classes to learn how to play, but retired, utterly defeated, after a few weeks). Fortunately, my lack of knowledge didn’t interfere with my enjoyment.

This is a more orthodox detective novel than that superb Q. Patrick book The Grindle Nightmare, and lighter in tone. The story is told through entries in a private journal made by a young woman journalist for the entertainment of her future husband. She is on board a luxury liner, taking a long trip to South America to help in recuperating from illness. But murder intervenes. A wealthy man is poisoned, and before long another person is thrown overboard.

The lively writing is part of the appeal of the book, but inevitably its quality is dependent on the plot. Who is the mysterious “Mr Robinson” who disappears after the first crime? I cherished the hope that, since that was the name used by Crippen when he fled across the Atlantic, there might be some link with the Crippen case. Sadly, it was not to be.

The puzzle is, however, suitably elaborate, and Patrick takes great care to play fair, and offer a range of clues. I guessed part of the solution, but not all of it. Nicely done, I thought. I also rather liked the way he referred to himself in passing – even including a plug for one of his other books! Cleverer than the much-debated modern use, by some, of "sock puppets", that's for sure. This novel is well worth a read, if you like classic whodunits. 

The Father of Forensics

The Father of Forensics, by Colin Evans, is sub-titled ‘How Sir Bernard Spilsbury Invented Modern CSI’ and at once it is evident that, although Spilsbury has his detractors, Evans is certainly not among them. This is a positive, but I think reasonably balanced, account of the work of the legendary pathologist, and there is certainly room for more than one way of judging the achievements of this flawed, but remarkable, human being.

I became interested in Spilsbury’s work mainly as a result of his involvement in the Crippen case. The trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen, just one hundred years ago, was the first capital case in which Spilsbury testified, and due to the massive publicity that attended the proceedings, the case made his name. His evidence contributed significantly to a guilty verdict, and it is open to question as to whether, in 2010, the forensic clues would have been interpreted in the same way. For instance, Andrew Rose, in his interesting book Lethal Witness, has a notably different take from Evans’.

Nevertheless, Evans makes good use of the fascinating material at his disposal, offering an account that it is in the traditions of British true crime writing, focusing on the many intriguing cases – some of them surprisingly little-known, like that of Gordon Cummins, a war-time serial killer – that filled Spilsbury’s career.

Evans chronicles Spilsbury’s glory years, as well as his tragic decline, afflicted by ill-health, financial and matrimonial problems, and bereavement. Ultimately, the great man met a horrid end, committing suicide in his own laboratory. Evans’ conclusion is that: ‘’Although he was the finest forensic pathologist of his time and a superb diagnostician, it would be churlish to pretend, as some hagiographers have done, that Spilsbury was immune to error...but claims that he was a mere prosecution puppet, the killing arm of British justice, don’t stand up to close inspection.’ I’m not sure ‘churlish’ is the right word, but I tend to agree with Evans’ sentiment. This is an entertaining read, published by Icon, and likely to be of great interest to those with an enthusiasm for forensics.

Talking about Crippen

Public speaking is something I’ve done often over the years, yet I’m far from being a ‘natural’. I spend my youth dreading and therefore avoiding it, and when I became a solicitor, I coped with advocacy (in less formal employment tribunals rather than conventional courts) by treating each case as a battle to be won. I started lecturing on legal topics in my 20s, but found this hard going, and I still try to dodge it when I can.

When my first novel was published, I found my first ever radio interview to be quite an ordeal. But over the years, I gained a lot of practice in talking about my writing, and I became more confident. I also found it easier to talk about crime fiction than, say, legal issues, because crime fiction is what I love. Attending crime conventions and participating in panels also helped to build my confidence.

Since publishing Dancing for the Hangman, I’ve given my talk about Dr Crippen several times. Each time it’s a little different, because I talk without notes and consequently change it a bit every time, varying the parts of the story on which I focus. Last night was different again, because I gave the talk as part of the Lymm Festival, and members of the audience included quite a number of people who know me as a neighbour rather than a writer. And, of course, you don’t want to make a fool of yourself in front of people you might bump into any day.

Fortunately, there was a good audience, with lots of questions, and the atmosphere was very positive, with plenty of books sold at the end of the evening. I really enjoyed sharing my enthusiasm for a story which really is stranger than fiction. The Crippen mystery is endlessly fascinating, and the Lymm Festival-goers seemed to think so too.

Plot, Pace and Information

Every now and then in this blog, I touch on an issue concerning the writing of crime fiction, and I’ve been interested to see how many comments some of these posts have prompted. One example was when I asked about the gruesomeness of some modern crime fiction. And another came last Monday, with my post ‘Too Much Information?’

These are topics that intrigue me, though I don’t think there are simple answers to the questions I have posed, and I’m glad that you seem to have found them interesting too. Many readers, it seems, are fascinated by the craft of writing, and give it a lot of thought.

A number of comments on ‘Too Much Information?’ made the point that the key issue is that of balance, and I agree. If background information slows down the development of the story, that’s a drawback. But background information conveyed subtly can add a layer of interest to the book, and can also, sometimes, reflect some of the key themes.

If I were to choose an example from my own work, it might be The Serpent Pool. There’s quite a bit of stuff in there about Thomas De Quincey, which (I like to think) is interesting in its own right. But it’s also intended to cast some light on the plot, both in relation to the role that Daniel Kind plays in unravelling the central mystery, and in conveying ideas about motivation to murder.

Books that have a historical setting tend, by definition, to include a good deal of information about past times. Ellis Peters’ books about Brother Cadfael provide a classic example. And when I wrote Dancing for the Hangman, I tried to integrate historical background with the depiction of Crippen as a credible, if by no means wholly likeable, character. The pace of modern life is one of the reasons why a novel set today can seldom afford to become bogged down with an excess of background detail. But provided that detail is relevant and interesting, it can certainly add to reader enjoyment.

Avoiding Libel

The threat of a libel action haunts some writers - it featured as a plot device in Andrew Garve's The Megstone Plot, a lively thriller of the Fifties, and there may be other examples. A claim of libel can be very damaging, not only because of the risk of having to pay out compensation, but also because a book that contains libellous material may have to be withdrawn, at great cost. Yet, because of the – sometimes unsatisfactory - way in which the libel laws work, there are various traps for the unwary.

Even very sensible people can become ensnared by libel law. Michael Gilbert, an eminent solicitor, ruefully told of how a short story he wrote landed him, and the magazine which published it, in trouble. I read about this mishap and once asked him about it, but it was plain that the memory was still painful. One of the main pitfalls is that it is possible to libel a person unintentionally (for instance, where there is a coincidental overlap between what you write and something or someone in real life) whereas most legal wrongs can only be committed if you are proved to have the intention to commit them.

The newspapers often campaign for a relaxation of the laws of libel. This is said to be in the public interest, although of course there is a degree of self-interest there, too. A complex society such as ours does need laws to protect the reputations of people, which can so easily be destroyed, causing much distress and without any justification. Yet a balance needs to be struck, because there is a genuine public interest in free speech. All of us (except for libel lawyers) would benefit from a simplification of the libel laws, and a method of dealing with alleged defamation that was easy and cheap to operate. Easier to wish for than to achieve, I appreciate.

I know some writers who say they aren’t bothered about libel, and merrily depict real people in their fictions. Not a course I would recommend. In my own case, I do make a serious effort to ensure that, even though I’m using the real settings of Liverpool and the Lake District, my characters, and the incidents in the story, are invented. I certainly would hate to hurt anyone’s feelings, even by mistake. It was very different with Dancing for the Hangman, the only book in which I’ve used real people for a story. But there, not only Crippen, but all the other actors in the drama were long dead.

Dancing in the USA

This year has been rather strange in some ways, not least because I haven’t published a brand new novel. My last book came out just before the end of 2008, and The Serpent Pool will appear next February. But I have had some overseas publications to celebrate, and I’m pleased that Dancing for the Hangman will appear under the Five Star imprint on 9 December.

I know that I’m very fortunate, in the current climate, to have books published by two American publishers. While Poisoned Pen Press have done a fantastic job in bringing out, and publicisng, the Lake District Mysteries, and Waterloo Sunset, Five Star published the first two Harry Devlins as well as the new book about the misadventures of Dr Crippen.

The reviews of Dancing in the UK were great, and the first American review has just appeared, in advance of publication. Booklist calls it ‘a clever reappraisal of the case’ and concludes: ‘Alternately funny and unsettling, the book examines the historical record, filling in some of the gaps and offering up new answers for some of the case’s key questions. An excellent example of the nonfiction novel.’

You can never be sure how reviewers will react to a book, however much you care about it and believe in it. Dancing is very different from my other novels, but it is a book which I am particularly proud to have written, and so it’s all the more pleasing that the critical response has been so positive.

The Victoria Vanishes

I’ve never met Christopher Fowler in person, although we share an agent, and whilst I’ve read and enjoyed his short fiction in the past, I’ve been slow in catching up with his successful series about Bryant and May, from the Peculiar Crimes Unit. I’ve just finished the sixth book in that series, The Victoria Vanishes, and I must say I found it immensely enjoyable – one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a long time.

This is a book packed with good things. For instance, there is a very nice ‘impossible’ puzzle, which features almost incidentally in the story-line. How is it that Arthur Bryant, after a few drinks, should have seen a woman coming out of a pub that no longer exists?

The main plot concerns a series of killings of middle-aged women in London’s public houses. The mystery is splendidly contrived, and although the solution is a little far-fetched, that matters not. The twists and turns make the hunt for the culprit a very satisfactory one.

But above all, what I liked about the book was the quality of the writing, and in particular its humour, which was very much on my wavelength. The style blends nostalgia with a sharply contemporary eye on the nature of modern society. And there are lots of wonderful lines. As well as a cat called Crippen. What more could anyone want?

One thing is for sure. I shall be reading more Bryant and May books.

Belle

The Crippen story has inspired many writers over the years, long before I wrote Dancing for the Hangman. One of the most remarkable fruits of that inspiration was a musical called Belle, alternatively titled The Ballad of Dr Crippen.

The music was written by Monty Norman, with a book by Wolf Mankowitz. It opened at the Strand Theatre on 4 May 1961, and managed a mere 44 performances before critical opprobrium killed it off. There was an outcry about bad taste, with the acerbic Bernard Levin in the vanguard. However, a CD of the show has been issued, and the notes claim that it ‘has to be one of the truly great British musicals, admirably incisive in its invention, wit and sympathy for its subject’.

The music hall style is not really to my taste, but the score does have verve, and it might be argued that the show was simply ahead of its time. The cast featured George Benson as Crippen (I remember him from countless TV comedy shows in the 60s), Rose Hill as his wife, and Virginia Vernon as Ethel Le Neve. There is a track listing on the Crippen page on my website.

I have managed to obtain a programme of the show, inscribed by Vernon. She was a pretty young actress who had already appeared in The Millionairess with Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, but her musical career ended with Belle. She married a comedian, Ben Warriss, and retired from the stage.

As for Norman, at least his music attracted the attention of the producer of a new spy film. And so it was that Norman was asked to write The James Bond Theme….

Crippen to be cleared? and other news

I’ve been intrigued by recent news reports suggestion that Dr Crippen’s name may finally be ‘cleared’ almost a century after his execution for the murder of his wife. Here’s a link to one of the articles:

Crippen Cleared?

The quality of Crippen’s legal representation during the course of his trial is one of the key elements of Dancing for the Hangman. I’m intrigued to see that Mr Di Stefano, now engaged in this matter, numbers Saddam Hussein among his former clients.

How far this particular campaign to exonerate Crippen will get, who knows? I suspect that issues about the validity of the ‘DNA evidence’ said to prove his innocence may be more complex than the news reports suggest.

Changing the subject, I was really pleased to hear from my German publisher this week that Kein Einsames Grab (aka The Arsenic Labyrinth) is being reprinted already. A German mate emailed me the other day to say that all three of the Lake District Mysteries are prominently featured in bookshops he’s visited lately, and for any mid-list writer, this has to be morale-boosting news.

Dancing again

Dancing for the Hangman is due to be published in the United States towards the end of this year. I’ve just received this preview of the front cover, which seems good to me The publishers are Five Star, who have also published two of my Harry Devlin novels in the States (the Lake District Mysteries are published by Poisoned Pen Press.)

Dancing took quite a while to bring out, but I’m really pleased with the reaction to it in the UK. I’ve just received the latest issue of CADS – a magazine I’ll talk more about before long, because this issue is crammed with fascinating things, as usual – and although the main focus is on books of the past, there’s a nice review of Dancing for the Hangman. All the more pleasing because the reviewer, magazine Geoff Bradley, is someone whose opinion I value, because he never heaps praise on books he has doubts about.

Here’s part of what Geoff said:

‘I’m not really one for true crime and I know very little of the Crippen case, but I did find this novel fascinating. The author manages to get inside Crippen in such a way as to make his personality, inadequacies and motivations clear…I must confess I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book, but enjoy it I did. – very much so. Using the real story with the fictionalised insights into Crippen’s own mind make for a winning combination and a book which I highly commend.’

New Life in New Brighton

In the 1980s, I lived for eight years on the Wirral peninsula, not far from the seaside resort of New Brighton, which faces Liverpool across the River Mersey. Now it has to be said that New Brighton’s heyday as a tourist haven was about a hundred years ago, and in the 80s, it had a rather decayed feel. I tried to capture that in the opening chapter of my second Harry Devlin book, Suspicious Minds, but when the novel was at proof stage, I took the precaution of making a return visit to find that the place was being spruced up, and so I hastily modified what I had said about it.

Fast forward seventeen years, and I have just given a talk on Dr Crippen at the brand new Floral Pavilion. The idea was to have a couple of crime fiction events (by Margaret Murphy and me) to coincide with a week-long performance in the theatre of Agatha Christie’s play Spider’s Web, which has played to large and appreciative audiences.(The list of forthcoming attractions also impressed me – ambitious and interesting.)

I must say I was enormously impressed by the Floral Pavilion and by the ongoing regeneration of New Brighton. Of course, I was seeing them on a beautiful day, but even so it was great to see people on the beach at Fort Perch Rock a hundred yards or so from the Pavilion. I’m not saying New Brighton will ever replace Majorca as a sun-seeker’s paradise, but the past-it atmosphere that struck me twenty-odd years ago is now itself clearly out of date.

Incidentally, Crippen had a connection with New Brighton. Apparently he gave a lecture there in 1907 about one of his supposed medical cures. Maybe they ought to put up a plaque to record the historic association. But on second thoughts…..

Red Leaves and Crippen

I’ve been having a very busy time since returning from Lincoln, and this week has included not only a good deal of work, but also two enjoyable events.

The first was an evening at the shiny new branch of Waterstones in Altrincham. Cath Staincliffe and I talked to a pleasingly large audience about our approach to writing, and specifically about Thomas H. Cook’s excellent novel of psychological suspense, Red Leaves. Cath and I are huge fans of the book, though interestingly, some of the readers’ group members in the audience disliked it, mainly because it was too bleak, although one plot hole was cited by Ayisha of Waterstones.

It was good to meet, for the first time, Paul Beech, who sometimes comments on this blog, Jennifer Palmer, who is organising a Mystery Women event which I shall participate in at Manchester’s Portico Library in July, and Caroline Shiach, the competition winner whose story appeared in the anthology Criminal Tendencies, which I mentioned recently.

The second event was another talk about the life and mishaps of Dr Crippen, this time hosted by Alison Russell and taking place at Runcorn Library. A smaller audience, but many questions and much discussion, so a very satisfactory session. The consensus of those attending was that Ethel Le Neve played a more prominent part in the death of Mrs Crippen than has been acknowledged.…

Dr No

Forty seven years after it was first screened, I’ve finally watched the first James Bond film, Dr No. And I have to say that I found it thoroughly enjoyable – in fact I was surprised at how modern it seemed.

One of the secrets of the film’s enormous success is that the screenplay is very taut. I was amazed to read on Wikipedia that Wolf Mankowitz, who was involved with the original version of the script, was so unhappy with it that he had his name removed from the credits. If true, it was weird judgment on Wolf’s part. One of the writers who was credited, incidentally, was the late Berkley Mather, a thriller writer who is now little remembered, but who was chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association in 1966.-67.

Sean Connery immediately establishes himself here as the definitive Bond (though I admire Daniel Craig’s updated interpretation) and Ursula Andress is the definitive Bond girl -she also played Vesper Lynd in the spoof Bond movie Casino Royale, in 1967, inspiring Burt Bacharach’s classic melody ‘The Look of Love’. The eponymous villain is played by Joseph Wiseman, an actor I’ve never come across elsewhere. He portrays the bad guy bent on world domination as a kind of precursor of Gordon Brown, but with added charisma and bionic hands.

What of the music? The soundtrack was written by Monty Norman, who has won libel claims against those who allege that the great John Barry composed the ‘James Bond Theme’ rather than simply arranging it. I was fascinated to learn that Monty was chosen for the job because of a musical he had written called ‘Belle’ (with a book by Wolf Mankowitz – it’s a small world.) Belle was the stage version of the story of another villainous Doctor – Hawley Harvey Crippen. And the story of that musical deserves a blog post to itself, on another day.

The Young Poisoner's Handbook

The case of Graham Young is one of the most interesting murder-by-poisoning stories of the 20th century, and I’ve just watched the film based on Anthony Holden’s account of the case, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook.

Young discovered the efficiency of thallium as a means of committing murder whilst a teenager. He poisoned several people, including – fatally - his step-mother. Sent to Broadmoor, he was treated with some care and sympathy and ultimately released into the community – he was regarded as fully recovered. Thereafter, he found a job in a photographic supply business, but started to poison his colleagues. For weeks it was thought that the company had been afflicted by some mysterious ‘bug’, which resulted in two men suffering quite agonising deaths. It was only when Young started asking too many questions which revealed his obsessive fascination with poison that his background was checked and he was arrested. Surprisingly, he pleaded not guilty, but he went back to Broadmoor, where he died – allegedly of a heart attack, although there is some debate as to whether he was killed by fellow prisoners, or committed suicide; the film opts for the suicide version of events.

The film is a quirky comedy, and and attempts to mitigate accusations of tastelessness by distancing itself from the real-life story in a variety of ways. This makes for a better film, but a less insightful account of a very strange young man’s make-up. Hugh O’Conor plays Young, and the cast also includes such notable names as Roger Lloyd Pack and Anthony Sher (both do a good job, especially Sher as the gulled psychiatrist.)

Graham Young was one of the most remarkable poisoners in the history of crime. It is said that his hero was Dr Crippen. However, it’s worth remembering that if Crippen did murder his wife (which is open to question), he did it quickly, and the crime was a one-off. There is something remarkably cruel, to my mind, about the way Young allowed his victims to endure such horrific suffering. And it’s a level of cruelty that the film, although entertaining, does not begin to explain.

The Maybrick A to Z

A number of classic true crimes have fascinated me for years. The Crippen case is the obvious example, and yesterday evening I was delighted to read some very positive commentary about Dancing for the Hangman on John Baker's very well-regarded blog. Awaiting me in the post was also a generous article in the Mensa Magazine, which I hope to be able to link to on the website before long.

Among my other favourite real life puzzles is the Maybrick case (especially interesting to me because of its Liverpool setting) and so when I chanced across Christopher Jones’ The Maybrick A to Z a week ago, I couldn’t resist buying a copy. And I've now dipped into it extensively, with pleasurable results. The book is published by Countyvise Press, a small but prolific outfit based on Wirral. The Press produced an anthology of northern crime writing that I put together in the 1990s, and later published my collection of short stories, Where Do You Find Your Ideas? and other stories. But I’d never heard of the Maybrick book until the other day.

Christopher Jones is a deputy head teacher based in Liverpool, the city that was home to James Maybrick and his young American wife Florence. He gives an account of how the couple met and married in 1881, and of the events leading up to James’ mysterious death in 1889. There is an account of the trial – at which Florence was found guilty of poisoning her husband, although she earned a reprieve from the gallows. After serving fifteen years in jail, she was released, and she lived to a ripe old age. But then, in the 1980s, came the sensational discovery of a diary, allegedly written by James, the author of which claimed to be Jack the Ripper.

The combination of these two classic, yet very different, murder cases makes for utterly fascinating reading, and Christopher Jones has done a good deal of research in putting his book together. The format of any A to Z book necessitates some repetition, but on the whole the concept is well-suited to such a complex story. An interesting and worthwhile addition to any true crime library.

Incidentally, this is my 500th post (in 502 days) since I started 'Do you write under your own name?' I'm glad I've kept it ticking over for so long, and I'm very grateful to everyone who has encouraged me to keep going.