Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard - film review

I never met the late Nigel Morland, but I was in touch with him briefly prior to his death in 1986. He edited a magazine called Current Crime, which coincidentally is discussed in the latest issue of CADS. I was keen to lay my hands on copies, but although he supplied some to me, he was clearly struggling to cope with things at that point, when he must have been about 80. But he had a long and rather interesting career in crime fiction.

His real name, it seems, was Carl Van Biene, and after a spell in journalism as a teenager, he worked for a short time as Edgar Wallace's secretary. in his debut novel, The Phantom Gunman, published when he was 30, he introduced Mrs Palymyra Pym. Although he wrote under a host of pen-names, and produced a long list of books over the next four decades, Mrs Pym remained his best-known character. In 1953, he became a founder member of the CWA.

Mrs Pym made it into the movies in 1939, when Morland wrote the screenplay for Mrs Pym of Scotland Yard. This film was thought for a long time to have been lost, but it resurfaced a while ago, and I've now caught up with it on Talking Pictures. And I'm glad I did. It's decent entertainment for its period, and there's a lot of pleasure to be taken in the chauvinistic reaction of the male establishment to the arrival in a murder investigation of a female cop, Mrs Pym. What would Cressida Dick make of it, I wonder?

The story concerns the mysterious deaths of two women, who just happen to have bequeathed substantial sums to a psychical research society. A young newspaper reporter (Nigel Patrick) is sceptical about the psychics, and Mrs Pym (played with gusto by Mary Clare) suspects dark deeds. The mystery is nicely done, and I enjoyed watching it. I'm not suggesting that Morland was a great writer - I suspect he was essentially a journeyman, but there's no shame whatever in that. I get the impression of a hard-working professional who came up with a very good idea, a detective character who really was ahead of her time.  ,

The Terror by Edgar Wallace

I've very much enjoyed reading the Detective Story Club reprints that are being so attractively republished by Harper Collins. They occupy a slightly different part of the market than the British Library Crime Classics series, covering a longer time frame and including thrillers as well as whodunits. The books are keenly priced hardbacks with dust jackets that reproduce the original cover artwork. As you can see from the above image, The Terror is nothing if not dramatic!

The Terror was written by Edgar Wallace and is the second book in this series to which I've provided an introduction; the first was that very intriguing Victorian novel Called Back, by Hugh Conway. This is a very different kind of story, but it's packed with twisty action; reading it,you can see that Wallace had the storytelling skills of a mega-seller.

The Terror headed the list of six books which got the Detective Story Club off to a flying start, and was the only one of the half-dozen that was not a reprint. Wallace got the idea while on holiday in France in 1926, and turned it into a stage play before writing the novel. It was quickly filmed, and then remade with Alastair Sim and Bernard Lee in lead roles.

This edition also includes, as a bonus, Wallace's story White Face, which was also based on a stage play. Again, it was also filmed, though the film is now considered 'lost', and again it supplies lively escapist entertainment. The titles included in this series are highly diverse, ranging from the two books I've introduced to The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Crotts and the highly enjoyable first appearance of Colonel Anthony Gethryn, The Rasp. And quite apart from their lively contents, these books do look lovely on the shelf!

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.

Funeral in Berlin - film review

Funeral in Berlin is the 1966 film version, starring Michael Caine, of a book published by Len Deighton a couple of years earlier, and followed the great success of The IPCRESS File both as a novel and on the big screen. The director was Guy Hamilton, who has already directed Goldfinger, and who would go on to direct three more James Bond films, a couple based on Agatha Christie novels, and one based on an Alistair MacLean. Hamilton had worked in intelligence during the war, and put his know-how to good effect in translating story to screen.

Harry Palmer (Caine) is told by his boss (Guy Doleman) that the chap in charge of the Berlin Wall on behalf of East Germany (played by Oscar Homolka) wants to defect to the West. Is this true, or is some kind of trap lurking? Harry hasn't been in West Berlin long before he is picked up by a pretty girl. Has he swept her off her feet, or is she, too, spy? No prizes for guessing the answer...

The story is well told, but today the real fascination of this film for me lies in its depiction of a vanished world, when Berlin was divided, and people trying to cross from East to West risked their lives. In 1975, I stayed with a family who lived in a flat right next to the Wall, and I have never forgotten hearing shots being fired at would-be escapees. It was such a joy to visit Berlin last year and see the city united, with that wretched wall torn down.

Michael Caine is, as usual, good as Harry Palmer,and the supporting cast includes Hugh Burden, an excellent actor whom I remember fondly as Mr J.G. Reeder in the TV version of Edgar Wallace's stories. Where this film falls short of The IPCRESS File is not so much in the storyline as in the soundtrack. John Barry's brilliant music for the first film added a great deal to the atmosphere. Here the music is intrusive, clunky, and far from suitably mysterious. A reminder, I thought, of the dfference that a soundtrack can make to a film. With that minor exception, I can certainly recommend Funeral in Berlin.

Quiz Question

I’ve acquired a new bibliography of a writer whose life has long been shrouded in quite a bit of mystery, and who used at least three pseudonyms. The material in the book prompts me to set a quiz question.

The real identity of this author was the subject of much speculation when he or she published a pseudonymous novel in 1931. Can you guess the real person - who was variously identified by critics and others as being:

Aldous Huxley
Rose Macauley
E. M. Delafield
Edgar Wallace
Francis Brett Young
H.G. Wells
Richard Hughes
W. Somerset Maugham
Marie Belloc Lowndes
R. Austin Freeman
Eden Philpotts
Francis Brett Young
Roland Pertwee
Bernadette Croce
Warwick Deeping
Robert Hichens
Marjorie Bowen
Osbert Sitwell
Charles Williams
Patrick Hamilton
Anthony Rolls
Stella Benson
E.M. Forster

An extraordinarily diverse list, I think you’ll agree. Some eighteen months passed after publication before the truth about the author’s identity was revealed. Who can guess what it was? (Clue: none of the above!)

The answer will appear here shortly.