Forgotten Book - Green Grow the Tresses-O

Last year, I included in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books the notable first novel by Stanley Hyland, Who Goes Hang? Today I’m highlighting another of his books, Green Grow the Tresses-O, which was first published in 1965, at which time Hyland lived and worked on the periphery of politics, producing political broadcasts for television, as well as being involved with a wide range of other TV shows.

Because Hyland was a busy man, he did not have much time for novel writing and he only wrote three novels in all; I found Top Bloody Secret, which involved the secret services, only so-so. But Green Grow the Tresses-O is a short and snappy story, which benefits from a dramatic opening, with the discovery of that a blonde Italian girl has met a messy end in the machinery in a Yorkshire mill. It’s very different from Who Goes Hang? Yet I think it’s at least as good, even if not as well remembered nowadays.

From there, a mystery involving an element of international intrigue develops. A high-security American base is near to the mill – is there a link with the killing of Gina Mazzoni? And is the unsolved murder of another girl two years ago connected?

This is an enjoyable story with some nice humour and a good final twist. Although he moved to London to pursue his career, Hyland was a Yorkshireman, and he portrays the people of his home county entertainingly and well. It is a pity that he did not have more time to devote to the genre – he definitely had a talent for it.

Forgotten Book - Who Goes Hang?

My latest entry in Patti Abbott’s series of Forgotten Books for Friday is Who Goes Hang?, the debut novel of Stanley Hyland. Published in 1958, it was later described by Erik Routley, in his idiosyncratic survey of the ‘puritan pleasures’ of detective fiction as perhaps the last in the line of the ‘real sexless cerebral’ detective stories.

This was a novel which gained much from its author’s knowledge of the setting. Hyland was a Yorkshireman who went to work in the Houses of Parliament as a research librarian, and his book opens with the discovery by Fred Armytage, a workman carrying out repairs to the Clock Tower, of a mummified corpse in the wall cavity beneath Big Ben's bell chamber. The body is that of a man about 40, dressed in the clothes of the mid-nineteenth century. The crushing of the skull indicates that murder has been done.

Amongst those attending the inquest - conducted by the Coroner of the Royal Household and quite splendidly described - is a young M.P. called Hubert Bligh. He becomes intrigued by the case and gathers together a non-partisan committee of M.P.s to investigate further, with each member following a different line of research.

This is only the start of a neatly constructed story. The way in which Hyland feeds into his narrative substantial chunks of history without distracting interest from the central puzzle is especially interesting - the more so when one reads his note at the end of the book, which reveals just how much fact there is within the fiction. It even appears that repairs were indeed effected to the Clock Tower in l956, although not with the dramatic results that occurred in the novel.

Stanley Hyland only wrote two more crime novels, neither comparable to this one. He became heavily involved in politics and television. He was close to Harold Wilson and produced several of his election broadcasts. He was also involved in early TV shows focusing on do-it-yourself. A man of many talents, he died in 1997, at the age of 82.