Gerald and Chris Verner - a fascinating collaboration

Gerald Verner was a prolific writer of crime and thriller stories, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under pseudonyms. I've recently become interested in his work, and luckily enough I was put in touch with his son Chris and his agent Philip. Chris told me about a project that he undertook, concerning The Snark Was a Boojum! I was duly intrigued, and I asked if he'd consider talking about it in a guest post. He was kind enough to agree, and this is his story:

"My father began a trilogy featuring his flamboyant artist-detective Simon Gale with “Noose For A Lady” published by Wright & Brown in 1952, the novel of his BBC eight part Radio Serial Play of the same name. The book was made into a 73 min film in 1953 by Insignia Films Directed by Wolf Rilla which has recently been ‘discovered’ and released on DVD. A second book to feature Simon Gale “Sorcerer’s House” was published by Hutchinson in 1956. A third book “The Snark Was A Boojum!” was announced in the press the following year, begun but due to various personal problems never completed.

The murderer based his crimes on selected verses from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark”. The book was divided into three parts commencing with The Vanishing. Part two was The Hunting, concluding with part three The Snark! There were two versions of Part One of the book, a third person account and a revised version in the first person, describing events seen through the eyes of Jeff Trueman, a guest at Hunter’s Meadow. I read the revised version and immediately understood why my father had made the changes - the story works much more intimately. In 2015, persuaded by Gavin O’Keefe at Ramble House, I resolved to finish it. I began a process of completely revising the story from the beginning, major additions and rewrites for part two, and adding the final part, the solution: The Snark!

As I typed up Part One, I jotted down Gale’s character traits by looking up passages in Noose for a Lady and Sorcerer’s House. This also helped me to avoid inconsistency in the writing style, enabling me to adapt or borrow elements of the two books when my father’s pages ran out… Of course, eventually they did run out. It was like travelling along on a train and suddenly noticing there were no more rails ahead. I was suddenly on my own! In moving forward, I also had to go backwards and rewrote most of Part Two, cutting quite a lot out and putting different scenes in to make my plot work. The story wouldn’t let me go, and I couldn’t let it go, because I realised I would never be able to pick it up again once it had gone out of my head. Bit by bit I laid down new track, and inched along it, giving chapters to my wife Jenny to read, in order to get the point of view of someone not down in the cake mix. If it didn’t feel right I worked it again until it did. It was an intense process and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Suddenly, the book was finished, and in the surprisingly short time of 35 days.

I sent the completed manuscript to my agent Philip Harbottle with some trepidation on 16th April. The following day Harbottle sent an email to Gavin O’Keefe: “I have some exciting news for you!”  Then all hell broke loose! Four days later Ramble House issued a contract, a proof of the book, and a draft of the cover design by Gavin L. O’Keefe! By the 24th April the paperback was on sale at Amazon. That must be some kind of a record."

E.R. Punshon

Technology has its downsides, but one of its great benefits has been that technological advances in publishing have made it possible for a host of once obscure, and often unobtainable old books to become available again, at modest prices. Yes, the quality of those books is variable, but far better to read the occasional dud than not be able to check out the work of interesting writers. Recent months have seen a host of books, and indeed publishers, make their presence felt, and some of the authors concerned are certainly new names to me - an example is J.C. Lenehan, a minor Golden Age novelist whose work I have yet to sample.

E.R. Punshon is another to have benefited. I've talked about Punshon's books several times on this blog, as well as in The Golden Age of Murder, and I've mentioned his interest in social issues of his time, as well as the sometimes startling variability in quality of his work. He had a long writing career, though his hey-day was certainly in the Thirties, when Dorothy L. Sayers reviewed him very generously, and he was elected to membership of the Detection Club. I've even been lucky enough to find his Death of a Beauty Queen (one of his better books), with a splendid Detection Club-related inscription written in his rather spidery hand.

Fender Tucker's small press, Ramble House, has been publishing Punshon titles for a few years now, and Dictator's Way and Diabolic Candelabra are worth checking out. Their latest titles are both extremely interesting. Bobby Owen, Black Magic, Bloodshed and Burglary is a collection of short stories, which I look forward to reading. Punshon's recurrent weakness was verbosity (cunningly reflected in the book's title!), and the demands of the short story form no doubt provided a good discipline for him.

Documentary Evidence is an exceptionally rare "dossier" novel originally published under the name Robertson Halkett. And Six Were Present is the last of the Bobby Owen police stories, posthumously published in the Fifiies. All these books benefit from introductions by Gavin L. O'Keefe. I haven't mentioned Gavin before on this blog, but he is a talented chap - not only a researcher and writer but also an artist whose artwork adorns the covers of countless Ramble House books. There is a fun aspect to Ramble House's list (who else would publish the complete works of Harry Stephen Keeler?) that is extremely engaging.

I'm also a fan of Dean Street Press, masterminded by Rupert Heath, a well-known literary agent (several agents are moving into publishing, an interesting development that I'll talk about here one of these days.) DSP publish a wide range of books, including cricket books and detective stories by Tim Heald, a fine writer who unfortunately is not in the best of health just now. DSP have also done Golden Age enthusiasts proud, with an extensive series of reprints introduced by Curtis Evans, including plenty of Punshon titles, such as the excellent Information Received and Mystery of Mr Jessop.

I'll be discussing some of these Punshon books in more detail in due course, but in the meantime, I like to imagine how thrilled Punshon would have been in his later years, when he was still writing, but for a pretty small readership, to know that his books would enjoy a fresh life in the twenty-first century. For all technology's downsides, it gives us a great deal to delight in..