Inside the Room - 1935 film review

Inside the Room is a short black and white movie released in 1935 which features both an "impossible crime" puzzle and a very, very early example of the serial killer story in which the culprit sends enigmatic, menacing messages to his intended victims . One of the most interesting aspects of the film is how it originated. The story began life as a short story written by Marten Cumberland towards the start of his career. "The Diary of Death" was an entertaining tale which merited inclusion in Ronald Knox's famous anthology of 1928, Best Detective Stories. Much more recently, I included it in Miraculous Mysteries.

Cumberland turned his plot into a play, which he called Inside the Room, which was produced in 1934. This was in its turn adapted for film, but by the prolific screenwriter Harry Fowler Mear, rather than by Cumberland. In the short story, the detective, Loreto Santos, is a cosmopolitan character, born in Argentina of Spanish parents, and raised in England. In the film, he becomes Pierre Santos, and is played by Austin Trevor, who had already made a name for himself by portraying Hercule Poirot on the screen.

The story begins with the death in poverty of Lilian Hope, once a celebrity stage performer. She'd fallen on hard times, and been deserted by her friends. Embittered, she'd written a vitriolic diary condemning those she blamed for not rescuing her from tragedy. After her death, fragments of the diary are found with the bodies of two murder victims. Who is killing the people that Lilian scapegoated?

Most of the film takes place in a classic country house setting. A former admirer of Lilian's is among the house guests, and after receiving a warning that he is next on the killer' list, his body is duly found in his room, along with an extract from the diary. Santos, needless to say, applies his brilliant mind to the problem and comes up with the solution. It's not a great film, but quite watchable. Overall, though, I prefer Cumberland's original short story.

The Lookalike - movie review

The Lookalike is a very recent film - so recent, in fact, that I've not read any reviews of it. I wondered if this was a bad sign, and the fact that the cast was completely unknown to me (this is probably just my ignorance, as the actors do a very good job) didn't help. My anxieties were compounded when I gleaned that it's a story with a plot which revolves around drug dealing. I read a report of an inquest into the death of someone who died from a drug overdose recently, and found the sheer waste of lie and potential to be very sad, and deeply depressing. Drug dealers in films may be marginally less repellent than their real life equivalents, but I usually find stories, whether in the form of a novel or a screenplay, about their world utterly unappealing. So why did I decide to give the film a try?

I suppose it's because I'm fascinated by stories about identity, and the idea of lookalikes is one that has interested me for a long time. Similarly, I'm very interested in twins, especially identical twins, and the very close bond that exists between them. Some of the most interesting books and films I know concern mysteries of identity of one kind or another. I recently watched again an early episode of Taggart that made clever use of the notion of identical twins  - though during the Golden Age, Ronald Knox made clear his disapproval of plots that relied on the cheap trickery of introducing a character's twin at the last minute.

Rather to my surprise, I found The Lookalike to be, on the whole, a gripping and entertaining story. It's also convoluted, in a way that I found unexpectedly satisfying. I don't want to say too much about it for fear of giving the main twists away, but briefly two brothers who need to make money in a hurry get involved, separately, with two attractive women, whilst at the same time becoming embroiled in a scam with two very unpleasant gangsters.

One of the gangsters has accidentally killed an attractive young woman who was to be used in a sordid money-making scheme. They need to find her lookalike in order to make sure that the money comes in, and one of the brothers is given the job of finding the unlucky woman. I felt that one character behaved in a self-sacrificing way that was, to me, unbelievable, and this did weaken the film's impact. Nevertheless, it kept me watching from start to finish, and wondering how things would turn out. .Not a masterpiece, but not bad, either.

Inspector De Luca - BBC Four TV review - and historical crime

Inspector De Luca is a brand new BBC Four series that began on Saturday evening with An Unauthorised Investigation. It's an Italian production, and there are four two-hour shows, based on the character created by Carlo Lucarelli and played (very well, I thought) by the likeable Alessandro Preziosi. Lucarelli is, I'm aware, a very successful novelist, but I've never read him. I was drawn to watch really by the fact that the series is set in pre-war Italy, when Mussolini reigned supreme.

This period coincides, of course, with the Golden Age of detective fiction, and although this story didn't have a Golden Age feel to it, I've become interested in learning about the politics of the 30s, and the impact that people like Mussolini had, both in their own countries, and further afield. Several Golden Age writers - E.R. Punshon, R.C.Woodthorpe and Ronald Knox among them - wrote scathingly about Il Duce, but despite (or because of) his warped ideology he exerted an influence on people like Mosley and his followers in Britain. What must it have been like to live in Italy under his rule?

Inspector De Luca left us in no doubt that this was a deeply unhealthy society, where fear made people terrified of expressing anything less than unswerving devotion to a man who, in many ways, was as ridiculous as he was dangerous. De Luca himself is not a fan of Il Duce, but he is no saint either. He is a pragmatic police officer, and he manages (more or less) to keep his scorn to himself. I found the tension created by the claustrophobic political climate to be more interesting than the plot, which concerned the discovery on a beach at Riminii of a prostitute's corpse. De Luca's investigation soon brings him into very close contact with a glamorous countess whose seducative attention he finds hard to resist. But is she herself a victim, or a culprit?

Italy is one of my favourite countries, and it's so photogenic that makes an ideal background for a series of this sort. I liked De Luca as a character, but this was a case - in my opinion - where the history was more compelling than than the mystery. At two hours, the story felt rather drawn-out. Will I watch again? Maybe, but there are a lot of crime dramas on the screen at present - a good thing, my only regret is that none of them are based on my books! - and hard choices have to be made. I've just caught up with the very different, and quite excellent, Line of Duty, and Inspector De Luca didn't have the same wow factor. But it's a well-made and well-acted show, and if you like history, or Italy, it's worth taking a look to see what you reckon to it.

The Thirteenth Tale - BBC TV review

The Thirteenth Tale, a BBC adaptation of a best-seller by Diane Setterfield (which I haven't read) proved to be one of the stand-out dramas of the festive season. Screenplay by Christopher Hampton, lead roles played by Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Coleman - what could possibly go wrong with this gothic tale? Not much. I really enjoyed it.

The opening was spookily (sorry, couldn't resist it0 reminiscent of the preamble to The Tractate Middoth on Christmas Day. A woman arrives at an impressive but rather forbidding country house by an enigmatic housekeeper, and is ushered into the presence of an elderly person who is close to death but has something important to say. But from that point, the two stories diverged. Redgrave plays a famous writer who wants Coleman to write her biography. Her story proves to be compelling, but deeply disturbing.

That story is (or seems to be - I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) about twins who grow up in a strange and almost surreal environment. Ronald Knox famously urged mystery writers to exercise restraint in the use of twins as a plot device, but The Thirteenth Tale is not really a detective story, although there is a puzzle to be solved. And more importantly, there is to my mind something deeply fascinating about twins. Perhaps it's because I'm an only child that I find the nature of the twin relationship especially mysterious, yet very intriguing. The experience of being a twin is so very different from my own experience. I've never written a story about twins, but one of these days, I'd like to have a go.

If I did, I'd be very happy if it was anything like as good as The Thirteenth Tale. The weird old houses, the slightly sinister family retainers, the entrancing gardens complete with topiary, and the frequent hints that something sexually illicit was going on, all these elements were mixed skilfully by Hampton to provide first rate entertainment. A gripping story, well told.

No Forgotten Book tomorrow, by the way. But there will be a post about a good and little known Golden Age novel in a week's time.

Forgotten Book - Still Dead

Still Dead, by Ronald Knox, was published in 1934 and features Knox's regular sleuth, the insurance investigator Miles Bredon. The setting is Scotland, and the mystery is one of those vanishing-body puzzles. Colin Reiver's corpse was spotted, apparently, on a Monday, but then disappeared before turning up on the Wednesday. He seemed to have died of exposure - but had he been murdered, and if so, when and by whom?

The set-up is very good, and the unravelling of it so complicated that many readers will be glad of the footnotes Knox helpfully supplies to point out where relevant clues appeared earlier in the text. I did, however, feel that here -as in an earlier Knox book, The Footsteps at the Lock - my interest faltered because of the lack of sufficient incident after the initial flurry of activity. My old friend Robert Barnard often used to say that second murders in books are "vulgar", but a further killing here would, quite frankly,have livened up the second half of the story.

Colin is not someone for whom we feel much sympathy. He has killed a child in a road accident, although the criminal justice system didn't pin the blame on him. To get away from it all, he is sent by his family on a cruise to Madeira and the Med, but his death occurs as soon as he returns to the family estate in Scotland.

Although I was not greatly enamoured of the plot, I enjoyed some of Knox's little touches, touches which suggested to me that, had he taken the detective genre as seriously as, say, Dorothy L. Sayers, he could have made a more notable contribution to it as a novelist. In fact, he is now better remembered for a few good short stories, and his 'Decalogue', a tongue-in-cheek set of rules for writing detective fiction. But there are moments of genuine passion here, notably in his scathing words about a doctor who is a eugenicist - and eugenics were popular with many people until the horrors of their practical application in Nazi Germany became apparent. I could have done with more of this real feeling in the book, and a bit less of the almost interminable debate about what had actually happened to Colin's body. Not a masterpiece, then, but one with a number of points of genuine distinction which make Still Dead still worth reading.

Forgotten Book - The Footsteps at the Lock

Ronald Knox, author of today’s Forgotten Book, The Footsteps at the Lock, was to my mind a rather frustrating detective novelist. He had great gifts – an understanding of human nature, a sharp wit, and an intricate mind – that suited him ideally to Golden Age fiction. Yet overall, I fear, the verdict must be that he under-achieved.

This novel is an example of what I mean. It begins splendidly, and wittily, setting the scene for a story about complications over an inheritance. Two cousins who loathe each other decide, for dubious reasons, to go on a boat trip together – and one of them goes missing. Has he been killed by his cousin? The plot soon thickens agreeably.

Miles Bredon, an insurance investigator, is called in by his firm, and he is accompanied by his likeable wife Angela. Unfortunately, the story-line becomes bogged down in complications about what precisely did happen on the ill-fated boat trip, and the arrival on the scene of an improbable American called Erasmus Quirk doesn’t improve things, although it does turn out to be highly relevant to the plot.

The real trouble is that one of the cousins turns out to be very different in practice from the way in which he is at first presented, and this uncertain handling of character seems to me to be at the heart of Knox’s struggle with the genre. Intellectually, he was a master of it, but he could not inject into his books the same level of empathy with his people that, say, Henry Wade, Sayers or Christie achieved. For a priest, this seems rather surprising, and one does wonder whether his approach was over-intellectual. So The Footsteps at the Lock ranks as a fair example of the classic detective novel, but not the masterpiece I began to hope for when relishing the early pages.

Forgotten Book - The Warrielaw Jewel

I’d never heard of either Winifred Peck or her 1933 novel The Warrielaw Jewel prior to reading a favourable review by Curt Evans on the excellent Mystery File site. Curt has a deeply impressive knowledge of Golden Age fiction and his opinions are always soundly reasoned, so I was keen to seek out the book. Thanks to an excellent book dealer, Jamie Sturgeon, I’ve laid my hands on a copy and read it quickly.

Winifred Peck – who was to become Lady Winifred Peck – was a mainstream novelist who occasionally dabbled in crime fiction. She came from a remarkable family. Her niece is the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and her brothers also achieved eminence. Ronald Knox was one of them, and he was a major Golden Age writer and founder member of the Detection Club.

The main events of The Warrielaw Jewel are set in 1909, and upper class society in Edwardian Edinburgh is well described through the eyes of Betty, an Englishwoman who has recently married a Scottish lawyer. Through him, she gets to know members of the somewhat dysfunctional Warrielaw family, whose prize possession is a ‘fairy jewel’. One or two aspects of the story reminded me of J.J. Connington’s The Dangerfield Talisman, but in this book, unlike Connington’s, murder is done.

The plot and prose are well-constructed. However, I felt that they were both rather ponderous, and I found myself longing for a bit of excitement. Even potentially dramatic scenes had a rather soporific feel to them. This book is interesting as an example of a novel written in the midst of the Golden Age that sought to be something more than a puzzle, and really is a study in character and setting. But despite Peck’s literary talents, I say: give me Agatha Christie every time!

Writers and their Readers

Dorte asked in a recent comment about the ‘contract’ between writer and reader, and this intriguing question prompted me to reflect again on what it is that readers expect writers to deliver. In this post, I’ll focus on my own experience, and field, but there are a good many wider issues that are also well worth discussing, and perhaps a future post will do so.

Most people would agree that ‘rules’ for writers are not a good thing. Way back in the 20s, Ronald Knox devised his Decalogue for detective story writers, a list of rules which should be observed and which has been seen in some ways as a cornerstone of writing in the Golden Age. But even he broke one or two of his own rules in his fiction, and so did many others, very successfully.

There is one important issue in a crime series that occupies my thoughts a lot. If you have loyal readers, who have read your earlier books, you don’t want to bore them with explanation about the characters’ back stories. But new readers need to understand about the people in the story, and not be confused. I believe I owe it to both sets of readers not to irritate them with too much or too little back story, and to deliver information in a pleasing way, without boring anyone. I have come across some series where there is too much or too little repetition of key facts, and the skill required to walk the tightrope is, I think, often under-estimated. I am determined to try to make sure that you can start my series anywhere - with the latest book, or one in the middle, and still enjoy that one, and then - if you do like it - all the others.

I’m also guided by another principle, which not everyone will agree with. I strive in my writing to create a strong impression of realism, but I’m not obsessed with it. I don’t mind changing the topography of Liverpool or the Lakes a little, if it suits the story, and does not jar (at least, does not jar with me!) One reason why this is a good idea, in my opinion, is to avoid distressing people in the real world, or even libelling people or organisations unintentionally. For instance, inevitably I feature the Cumbria Constabulary in my work, but I’ve created a fictional equivalent to the real police force (the real one is, I gather from the statistics, very good, even if it lacks a Hannah Scarlett, let alone a Les Bryant or a Greg Wharf.)

However ‘realistic’ we try to be as writers – and I’m strongly in favour of writers making the attempt to be ‘realistic’ – we have to recognise the real world is different from our make-believe universe. Take the Cumbria shootings, or the Jo Yeates murder, for instance. Those tragic events have a resonance and an impact that is almost impossible to re-create in fiction, even though the best fiction can have enormous impact. Here’s another ‘rule’ that I set myself, then. When challenging readers to think about matters of life and death in fiction, to do so with respect for those living in the real world.

Forgotten Book - Behind the Screen

My latest entry to Patti Abbott’s series of forgotten books is a companion piece to last week’s entry, The Scoop. The very first collaborative work by members of the Detection Club was the 1930 serial Behind the Screen, written for broadcast and published initially in ‘The Listener; but not brought out in book form until more than half a century had passed.

It’s historically very interesting indeed. Having said that, regarded simply as a detective story, it's a slight piece, not in the same class as The Scoop in my opinion. The body of a very unpleasant lodger called Duddon is found behind a japanned screen in the house of the Ellis family. The story is opened by Hugh Walpole, best known for his Herries Chronicles, but also the author of several rather dark thrillers. Above the Dark Circus was much admired by Julian Symons, but my favourite is The Killer and the Slain, a stunning novel that has unaccountably been overlooked in writing about psychological suspense.

Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers continue the narrative in their contrasting styles, and the later chapters are written by Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley and Ronald Knox.

Milward Kennedy set a competition for readers of ‘The Listener’, and his assessment of the entries is included in the Gollancz volume that brought this story and The Scoop together in book-form for the first time. Sadly, the original illustrations were not included, though I’ve seen some of them, and thought them rather pleasing.

The Wine of Certitude

The Wine of Certitude would rank high in my list of unenticing book titles, yet – contrary to a fault - I’ve invested in a copy. Why? Because it is a brand new ‘literary biography’, written by David Rooney, of a rather interesting character, Father Ronald Knox.

Knox was a member of a family of high achievers (his brother Edmund, who edited 'Punch', also wrote a very funny skit on detective stories which is not mentioned here.) Ronald converted to Catholicism and became a major figure in the English Catholic literary revival of the first half of last century. He was a prolific writer, but the main attraction of the book to me is the insight it offers into Knox’s role in the Golden Age of English detective fiction.

It seems that the Knox family members were very keen on puzzles and word games (one brother was a master cryptographer ‘in the service of the British government’), and Ronald often compiled acrostics, publishing a book of them in 1924. The detective puzzle offered him a more elaborate kind of intellectual game to play – and the chance of supplementing a meagre priestly salary. In 1926, he produced his debut mystery, The Viaduct Murder, ‘complete with a map of the fictional environs around the murder scene, and a cast of characters who could hardly raise enough three-dimensionality among them to obscure the physical evidence placed before the reader.’

Knox introduced his regular sleuth, the insurance investigator Miles Bredon, in The Three Taps, a more sophisticated whodunit. Rooney regards The Body in the Silo as his best mystery. Knox abandoned writing crime stories after 1937, and it’s interesting to note that some of the most interesting Golden Age writers (Knox, Sayers, Berkeley/Iles and Rupert Penny) had given up the genre by the time the Second World War ended.

Rooney concludes that ‘for stylistic beauty and for ability to evoke the English and Scottish countrysides and manors of the interwar years, Knox had few equals, and his detective fiction would remain enjoyable for that reason alone…The golden age of the English detective story is the richer for his contribution.’

I’ve read Knox’s celebrated short story ‘Solved by Inspection’, but none of the novels – an omission I mean to repair. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's read the novels, and who has any recommendations. There’s also quite a bit more to be said about Knox’s contribution to the Golden Age – this will be the subject of a future post.