Forgotten Book - The Little Walls

The Little Walls was published in 1955, and the following year, it won the CWA's Crossed Red Herring Award for the best crime novel of the year. That was the very first time the prize had been awarded. It's now the CWA Gold Dagger. Some of the finest crime novels of the past sixty years have won the Gold Dagger, but a surprising number have fallen far out of sight since then.

The Little Walls is among them, and yet its author is renowned. He was Winston Graham, famous above all for Poldark, which I've never read or watched, but which is undoubtedly very popular. What is more, Graham's crime fiction was also successful - Hitchcock filmed Marnie, for instance, and The Walking Stick also became a movie.

This novel reminded me strongly of the type of thriller Eric Ambler was writing at much the same time. Graham's writing, like Ambler's, is several cuts above the average. He is strong on character and setting and competent with plot, though this isn't a whodunit. Rather, it involves the attempt by Philip Turner to find out the truth about the death of his brother, who apparently committed suicide by jumping into a canal in Amsterdam.

The heart of the book lies in a series of moral dilemmas. Graham contrasts two different types of personality, in effect representing good and evil, and does so in a way that is constantly interesting, even if the pace is occasional less fast than one expects of a thriller. Much of the action takes place in Capri, and he evokes that lovely island's languid nature very well. I can see why this book won the award, and I'm glad I finally caught up with it at last.

Woman of Straw - film review

To my astonishment, I find that almost six years have passed since I reviewed Catherine Arley's suspense novel  Woman of Straw on this blog in its early days. Arley is an interesting French writer, and having enjoyed the book, I've been trying for ages to track down the film version, to no avail. Recently I chanced upon a Spanish DVD version, available on Amazon, with the facility to switch off the Spanish language and hear the original actors' voices. So I grabbed it.

I'm glad I did, because it's a very watchable film, set partly in a very grand English mansion, and partly on a private yacht cruise of the Med. The fact that the stars are Sean Connery and Gina Lollobrigida makes it even more watchable. The film was first screened in 1964, when Connery was already anxious to avoid becoming typecast as James Bond, and he has a quite hypnotic screen presence here.

Ralph Richardson plays Connery's odious uncle. He is racist, sexist and incredibly rich. You are already guessing that he is a prospective victim, aren't you? Well, you are right. He hires a new nurse, the lovely Gina, and soon the nasty old man falls for her. But what about his nephew? His motives seem equivocal, and before long he is encouraging Gina to marry the old man. What's he playing at, and who can be trusted?

At one point, there appears to be a glaring legal error in the script, but this is subsequently explained as representing one of the numerous plot twists. The direction, by Basil Dearden, is extremely competent, even if the characters' motivations aren't explored in any depth. Some commentators suggest that Hitchcock would have shown more flair, given the melodramatic potential of the story. However, the evidence of Marnie, first screened in the same year, and also starring Connery, suggests otherwise. Personally, I enjoyed the film, and felt my long search for it was worth while. The book is superior, but both are entertaining, and a little bit different.

Forgotten Book - Take My Life

Winston Graham is well remembered as the author of the Poldark series of historical romances set in Cornwall, but his excellent crime fiction is (with a few exceptions such as Marnie) often overlooked. My Forgotten Book for today is a mystery he published in 1947, which is now available as a Bello ebook. I think Take My Life began life as a screenplay, and this is evident in the visual quality of the story. Certainly, it was filmed, although I've never seen the movie version.

At the time he published this book, Graham had been writing novels for more than a decade, yet overall I think it's fair to say that it still formed part of his literary apprenticeship (and many of my fellow authors may well agree that one's apprenticeship sometimes feels as though it will never end!) I read this book on holiday in the Arctic, immediately before a second Graham novel written twenty years later, and there's no doubt that the later book is superior. I'll say more about that one on this blog before long. But Take My Life is a swift, easy read. He was a very accessible writer.

This is a "race against time" story, one of those where an innocent man faces execution for murder, and the one person who believes in him faces a desperate struggle to try to establish that he did not commit the crime. Everything in Philippa Talbot's life seems rosy. She is a young, pretty and talented singer, who has just returned to London with her new husband Nicholas. But her pleasure in success on the stage is marred when she sees him with a member of the orchestra who - it turns out - is a former lover. They have a row, he leaves the house, and at a time when he has no alibi, the lover is murdered.

So, whodunit? The answer is soon revealed, because Graham is more interested in the clock race than mystery. I have to say that I did not believe the evidence was strong enough to convict a man of murder, and the police's failure to follow up other leads, though perhaps necessary for the plot, was highly unconvincing. These are real flaws, yet it is a tribute to Graham's sheer readability that I raced through the story, keen to find out precisely what had happened, despite my reservations. Not a masterpiece, by a long chalk, but brisk and worthwhile entertainment.

Winston Graham

In the 1970s, the hugely popular television series ‘Poldark’ made Winston Graham’s name very well known. I never got into ‘Poldark’, a historical saga set in Cornwall (even though I thought Angharad Rees, one of the stars, was truly lovely) and I was never tempted to read the books. Not until some years later did I discover that, before he turned to swashbucklers, Graham was a highly accomplished writer of crime fiction.

Successful, too. He wrote the book on which Hitchcock based that interesting movie ‘Marnie’, starring Sean Connery, and also the story that sourced ‘The Walking Stick’, a quirky thriller boasting another starry cast that included the late David Hemmings, Samantha Eggar and Francesca Annis. I rather like both films.

And there is more. Winston Graham was the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1955, for The Little Walls. (In fact, in those days, the award rejoiced in the name of the Crossed Red Herrings Award. It changes name from time to time, having recently been the Duncan Lawrie Dagger an expediency to reflect the short-lived sponsorship of a bank, but the Dagger name changes are irritating; to my mind the Gold Dagger is the right title for the award for best crime novel of the year.)

So I decided it was high time to read a bit of Winston Graham. And thanks to eBay, I now have a decent and modestly priced haul of his paperbacks.