Forgotten Book - Game for Three Losers

Edgar Lustgarten was once a familiar face on British TV screens. A barrister from Manchester, he became a successful broadcaster, specialising in programmes about crime. The Scotland Yard TV series that he fronted (and which was very good) has recently been resurrected on the Talking Pictures channel, and this has reignited my interest in a writer who wrote occasional novels as well as numerous true crime books. His first novel, A Case to Answer, was especially well-regarded, not least by Julian Symons.

Game for Three Losers was first published in 1952; later, it was adapted for TV as part of the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series which has again resurfaced thanks to Talking Pictures. The novel is written in Lustgarten's rather distinctive style, with rather more "tell" than "show"; today, this isn't a fashionable method, but he handles it pretty well.

Robert Hilary is a rising star in the political world, a Conservative MP in his late forties. When his trusty secretary leaves work to have a baby, her replacement is a stunningly beautiful young woman and Hilary finds her irresistible. He soon finds himself in a compromising position, and open to blackmail by the woman's rascally lover, who poses as her outraged brother.

I rather expected Hilary to decide that the only solution to his dilemma was murder, but Lustgarten's main focus is on charting the consequences of crime. This is a book roughly in the Francis Iles tradition that focuses on the way the legal system operates - not very justly, in some cases. The story is downbeat in mood, but Lustgarten's crisp writing kept me interested from start to finish.

Forgotten Book - Turn the Light Out As You Go

Edgar Lustgarten was a Manchester-born barrister with a love of writing who became a famous criminologist and broadcaster. He is best remembered for introducing the Scotland Yard TV series first screened in the Fifties, which has made a welcome reappearance lately on the Talking Pictures TV channel. He wrote extensively on true crime, but he also dabbled occasionally in fiction.

By far his best known novel is A Case to Answer, aka One More Unfortunate, which was widelyu translated and filmed with Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer, but despite the success of that book, he only wrote a handful of novels over the next thirty years. The very last one, Turn The Light Out As You Go, was published in 1978, the year of his death, and it made little or no impact, partly no doubt because by that time Lustgarten was a name from the past.

It's an unusual novel, though, and one that I found very readable, if flawed. It's a short book which may (I don't know) have been based in some respects on a real life case. Certainly, the treatment of the sexual assault and murder of a young girl is presented in a style almost verging on the documentary.

The focus is on the couple who live next door to the dead girl's family. Joe and Elsie are a middle-aged couple whose marriage has become stale. Elsie wonders - without any very substantial grounds - whether Joe might have killed the little girl - and the suspicion proves corrosive. Joe's life embarks on a downward spiral, even though he becomes friendly with one of the policemen working on the case, who doesn't regard him as a likely suspect. Other people come into the frame before a shock ending that wasn't (to my mind) foreshadowed quite as much as it might have been. It's a curious book in several ways, and the portrayal of working class life seemed a bit dated to me, even by the standards of the late Seventies. Lustgarten was not, I think, first and foremost a creative writer. All the same, I found the story interesting as well as unorthodox.

The Writing Life - and Taking a Break From It

When I was working full-time as a partner in a law firm, holidays were limited, and even when I was away, it was very difficult to escape the burdens of business. Life is different now I'm a part-time writer, and I'm very glad about that, but the question of when and how to take a break from writing is (in a different way) at least as important. Many years ago I read an essay by Len Deighton, which I've never forgotten, in which he said he wrote every day - even on  Christmas Day. (The essay was to be found in an entertaining and informative book put together by Harry Keating called Who-dun-it?) I certainly don't manage to emulate Len, but I do feel that taking a break from writing can really help - somehow - to get one's story ideas into shape.

Considerations like these were in my mind last week, when I celebrated my birthday. You could say that I've reached the age when one should not dwell too much on birthdays, but I believe the opposite: it's time to make the most of them! So in recent years, even when I was office-based, I have taken the day off and gone an interesting trip. The result has been plenty of memorable birthday adventures.

So it was this year, when - having warmed up for the celebrations with a trip to London to see a fabulous concert at the Royal Festival Hall with the ageless Burt Bacharach and Joss Stone - I headed off to North Wales. One of Cheshire's many advantages is that it's an excellent base for exploring lots of fantastic destinations within an hour or so's drive, and one of them is Llangollen, a gorgeous town.

Llangollen boasts a very large second hand bookshop there, and I started my trip by making a few acquisitions, books by Helen McCloy, Edgar Lustgarten, and Julian Symons. Then, as the sun made an appearance, it was on to the steam railway for a trip along the Dee Valley. This journey reminded me of my last steam railway trip, in the Ardeche region of France (below) during a stop off on a short cruise on the river Rhone that I undertook recently.

Next stop was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Pontcysllte Aqueduct, which is the highest navigable aqueduct in the world, It's a pleasantly dizzying experience to walk along the narrow path beside the canal, far above the valley.

Again it put me in mind of the trip to France, and a visit to another amazing aqueduct, Pont du Gard, (below) which was built by the Romans rather than by Thomas Telford. Two wonderful places, both strongly recommended.

My birthday afternoon finished up with tea at Chirk Castle, followed by dinner overlooking another canal, this time in Lymm, and then a chance to get stuck in to Symons' The Colour of Murder, a highly enjoyable book that I hope to discuss on this blog on Friday. And whilst I didn't get any writing done, the pleasure of doing something different certainly seems to me to be helpful in terms of writing. A chance to relax gives your subconscious a chance to untangle one or two of those knotty plot problems that you've been struggling with. And so it proved last week.  .