A holiday of a lifetime

I'm back home again after taking the longest holiday away I've ever had - more than three weeks. A welcome treat after a lot of hard work writing over the past few months! (Incidentally, this is why I've not been updating comments on the blog until now - I haven't figured out how to do this remotely, as the app doesn't seem to allow it.) The centrepiece was a trip to New Zealand, and because it's such a long way to go, the plan was to have a mini-break in Singapore at the start and end of the holiday. I've never been to either country before, and so a tour company took charge of arranging our itinerary - the idea was to focus on memorable 'experiences' of different kinds and to enjoy a spot of luxury along the way. I was a bit apprehensive - although I've done a lot of travelling, I tend to be quite nervous in advance of big trips. And this one involved seven flights in all, five boat trips, three train rides, and a tram tour. Not to mention an unscheduled visit to a terrific scene of crime writing heritage. Thankfully, it all worked like a dream. There's so much to say: here are just a few of the highlights from the first part of the holiday.

I didn't quite know what to expect from Singapore, but I found I really liked both the place and the people. Our guide on a personal walking tour around the old part of the city and Chinatown emphasised the law-abiding nature of a society which is, I think, quite rigourously policed and which gives the impression of being very safe compared to many big cities around the world. The Marina Bay development, with evening light shows, is very impressive, as are the gardens nearby.

Then it was off to Auckland and one of many rooms with a great view, of the harbour. It was only a couple of minutes to the ferry to Devonport, a swish resort with a great second hand bookshop! And Mount Victoria is easy to ascend. A full day tour of that part of the North Island of New Zealand followed, a first glimpse of some of the stunning landscapes in this beautiful country. Our guide was part-Maori and she gave interesting insights into Maori life, about which I'd previously known very little.

Next came a road trip to Rotorua, with stops at some amazing glow worm caves, which you can tour by boat, a greenstone museum, and a kiwi house (kiwis are nocturnal, and hard to spot) and eco-park.

A spa day - the first I've ever experienced - came next, and then a visit to the amazing geothermal springs, which I found even more spectacular than the geysers of Iceland. This gave me the idea for a short story - it's a great setting. In the evening, a visit to a Maori village and a fascinating insight into Maori culture, with interactive elements as well as a feast and entertainment.

An internal flight took us to Wellington, with a chance to explore the furnicular railway and the botanic garden before a twilight guided tour through the incredible Zealandia eco-park. There were one or two kiwis to be glimpsed, as well as some remarkable flora and fauna. 

And then it was time to leave Wellington and the North Island for the next part of the adventure...

Rainy Day Women - BBC TV play (1984)

There are some gems to be found on YouTube that aren't readily available anywhere else (there's also a lot of pirated stuff, admittedly). Among the obscure items I've come across is a forty-year-old Play for Today written by David Pirie, now not only a well-regarded screenwriter but also an experienced novelist. The play is called Rainy Day Women, and Mark Lawson once described it as 'one of the neglected masterpieces of British TV'. 

This is essentially a wartime story, but it's framed in a manner that seems consciously to imitate The Go-Between, a book and film that I admire. In 1984, a young boy discovers a diary. The story told in the diary is the story of the film, and it's not only dark but thought-provoking. 

Charles Dance, an actor I've always rather liked, plays Captain Truman. He is sent to investigate rumours of espionage in a remote village, presumably in or around Lincolnshire. There he encounters a likeable and sensitive doctor (Lindsay Duncan) and a woman called Alice Durkow (Suzanne Bertish) who is hosting some land girls. Durkow is regarded with great suspicion. Is she a spy? Or even a witch?

The Home Guard are much in evidence, but these men are very far removed from the lovable characters of Dad's Army. They are a very nasty bunch indeed. One of the local men is suffering from impotence and it's as if the war has rendered the whole village dysfunctional, socially and sexually. Truman is a decent man, but he's inhibited by his own conservatism from confronting the menacing locals head-on.

Domestic violence escalates into murder and ultimately something quite shocking happens. We are only told about it, which unfortunately does lessen the impact, but at least Pirie avoids exploitative writing and poses interesting, and far from straightforward, questions about human behaviour and the nature of moral courage. In many respects this is a low-key and moody story, with a few shocking moments, but I can understand why Mark Lawson likes it.   

Forgotten Book - Framed for Hanging

Framed for Hanging, first published in 1956, is another unorthodox mystery from that interesting and original writer Guy Cullingford (in real life Constance Taylor). This is a historical mystery, set in 'Cattminster', which I suspect is based on Chester. There are several references to the famous Maybrick case, in nearby Liverpool, although I spotted one historical anachronism, given that the story appears to be set in the period of Campbell-Bannerman's prime ministership, from 1905-8.

Young and popular Richard Groom has just returned to town, much to the delight of his three aunts. Before he left to go exploring in South America, he'd been dumped by the lovely but wilful Hester, who had opted to marry the unpleasant (but rich) Dr Morby. Hester confides in Richard that she believes Morby wants to kill her. Richard agrees to meet Morby but when Morby is found dead from poison, Richard becomes the prime suspect.

It's obvious that Richard is innocent, and I have to say that the evidence on which the police rely in arresting him seemed less than watertight to me. Is Hester - who is a rather nasty piece of work - the killer? Or might it be one of Richard's two loyal pals and fellow explorers? Or even one of the aunts? 

This is a fairly slow-moving novel, and although Cullingford is good at characterisation and atmosphere, the aunts in particular seemed to me to be rather less fascinating than she evidently believed. In fact, their twittering became rather irksome. The mystery is so-so and the real culprit isn't too difficult to spot. I don't feel this is one of her better books. Of those I've read, I definitely prefer her contemporary novels. 

The Bride Wore Black - 1968 film review

The Bride Wore Black is a movie from 1968 directed by Francois Truffaut, and based on the novel by William Irish (that is how he is credited, but this was a pen-name for Cornell Woolrich). The book is one I rather like and was one of the first books for which I ever wrote an introduction, when it was reprinted by Chivers in the late, lamented Black Dagger series way back in 1992. (Suffice to say that, at that time, I had absolutely no idea of how many book intros I would go on to write - if anyone had told me, I'd probably have fainted at the prospect...)

This is a stylish film, a point underlined by the fact that the costumes are by Pierre Cardin. The soundtrack was written by the great Bernard Herrmann, a very clear signal of Truffaut's' admiration for the work of Alfred Hitchcock. And the eponymous bride (here called Julie Kohler - in the book she is Julie Killeen) is played by the super-stylish Jeanne Moreau.

How much substance this version of the story has is a different matter. This is a combination of serial killer story and revenge thriller, and Truffaut doesn't bother too much with mystification. He is more concerned with charting Julie's single-minded quest for vengeance. But this raises some questions that, to my regret, he doesn't attempt to answer.

Above all, how did Julie get on to the track of her victims? For me, explaining this should be an important part of the story. But Truffaut doesn't bother. His focus is on the visual, which is fair enough for a film-maker, but I do think that, when telling a story like this, it's a good plan to do everything possible to encourage the viewer to suspend disbelief and, ideally, to encourage a degree of identification with the protagonist, even if they are up to no good. I felt that Truffaut - and Moreau - kept me at a distance. A deliberate choice, I'm sure, but although the film is a good one, it does have some shortcomings and isn't quite up to the standard of the source novel.  

Melissa - 1964 TV review

Melissa is perhaps the most famous of all the many TV serials written by Francis Durbridge. I've seen two versions of it, both remakes, one from the 1970s (good) and one written by the talented Alan Bleasdale (poor) and I've also read the book of the show, My Wife Melissa. But until recently, I'd never seen the original series, which dates from 1964.

I've now repaired that omission, and I enjoyed doing so. This is a six-part series, but since each episode is only 25 minutes long, it never outstays its welcome. And it is very rich in plot development (character development? not so much). All Durbridge's strengths, as well as some of his weaknesses, are on display here. Above all, the regular cliff-hangers are very cunningly contrived.

Tony Britton gives a solid, low-key performance as Guy Foster, a struggling writer whose marriage to the glamorous Melissa (Petra Davies) is fraying at the edges. The first of many shocks that he receives comes with the news that Melissa has been murdered, after attending a party with their friends the Hepburns and racing driver Don Page. Chief Inspector Carter investigates, and Brian Wilde is marvellously impish as the softly-spoken cop. 

When a doctor and his secretary insist that Foster has been seeking medical help - something he vehemently denies - the plot really starts to thicken. A mysterious note that suggests Melissa was involved with someone called Peter Antrobus causes Foster to go in search of Antrobus, only to discover that Peter is actually a twelve-year-old boy. It's all very baffling. But Carter gets to the bottom of it, and I can see why this show was such a hit in its day. Yes, there are lots of cliches, but there's also a good deal of entertainment to be had. To write a TV serial that is remade twice and spawns a novel is quite something, and the simple secret of Melissa's success is that Durbridge never lets the pace slacken for a moment. There's a lesson there for modern TV writers. 

 

Forgotten Book - The Pretty Ones

Dorothy Eden was a New Zealander who made her home in England in order to develop her career as a writer. It turned out to be a good move, as she became a bestselling author, primarily in the field of Gothic thrillers with a romantic streak. She strikes me as a sort of literary descendant of Ethel Lina White and Daphne du Maurier. There's no doubt that she ranks as a crime writer - she was an active figure in the CWA and elected to membership of the Detection Club in 1959.

The latter honour came two years after she published The Pretty Ones, which is very much in the Rebecca tradition. Emma, the protagonist, is one of those young women - appealing but not regarded as beautiful - who marries a handsome, rather mysterious man after a whirlwind romance and without getting to know him properly, let alone finding out much about his past. I find this pretty crazy behaviour, but I tried to overcome my prejudice when reading the story!

Emma's new husband is Barnaby, a successful writer of detective novels (though we learn next to nothing about his work, which I found disappointing - a missed opportunity, really). She discovers that he has been married before, to Josephine, but Josephine has not been seen by anyone for months, and Emma finds herself looking after the two 'difficult' young daughters that Josephine has abandoned.

This is a 'whowasdunin' story, with a body discovered on page one - we don't discover the corpse's identity until towards the end of the book. Does the corpse belong to Josephine or someone else? I found this a very readable story, although I have to say that I figured out what was going on, and who was responsible, after only about fifty pages. Not a masterpiece, then, but interesting enough for me to be tempted to read more of Eden's work.

 

The Brighton Strangler - 1945 film review

Brighton has been the setting for a number of excellent crime stories. Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and Patrick Hamilton's The West Pier are notable examples. In recent years, for instance, we've had books set in the resort by Peter James and Peter Guttridge, among others. There's something about the place that seems to spark the imagination of writers. And then there's a rather obscure wartime film called The Brighton Strangler, which I stumbled across on Youtube.

The film is a curiosity. I think it's reasonable to describe it as a film noir, but oddly, it's not a British film noir. It was made in the United States by RKO and directed by Max Nosseck, who had fled to the States from Germany. He had some input into the script, written by Hugh Gray and Arnold Phillips, while the stars of the movie were John Loder and June Duprez. No stellar names there, to be honest.

This is a short film which seems to have made little impact on its original release, but in recent years it has enjoyed something of a revival. One of its merits is that its brevity (67 minutes) mean that the story moves at a fast pace. And there's quite a lot going on. The cleverest part of the whole script comes at the beginning, when a melodramatic murder is committed - and then we realise that it's the climax of a play in the theatre. However, the play is running during the Blitz, and when the theatre is bombed, the lead actor (Loder) suffers a head injury. Affected by amnesia, he becomes a killer, following the pattern of the character in the play...

The scriptwriters were no Graham Greenes and it's not too difficult to find fault with the film. The fact it was shot in America does mean that we don't get any meaningful sense of Brighton at all. I wasn't impressed with Loder's acting, I'm afraid, whereas June Duprez makes the best of an under-written role and Miles Mander is good as the lead detective. But when a film is as short as this, and packed with incident, it probably makes for better entertainment than one of those interminable six or eight or ten part TV serials where the plot material is padded out for purely commercial reasons. And there's room in the world for intriguing curiosities.

Nightsleeper - BBC TV review

Nightsleeper is a BBC TV thriller that has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, it's one of those six-part stories that really should have been two or three parts long. There's a lot of padding and in the end this significantly diminishes the impact of the story. A pity, but it's characteristic of an age when television economics dictate that storylines need to be stretched out long enough to justify the investment in a costly production. 

The story is about the mysterious cyber-hijacking of the Heart of Britain, a high-speed train heading from Glasgow to London. It's hurtling along the railway tracks of the country towards imminent destruction. Where are those leaves on the line and the wrong kind of snow when you need them? The dramatic events on board the train are counter-pointed with innumerable scenes in cybersecurity HQ, where Alexander Roach is leading the attempts to save the passengers, while being generally obstructed by colleagues and superiors, partly because of her determination to involve her chum Pev (David Threlfall, at his maverick best), who is something of a black sheep in the cybercommunity. Suffice to say that the scenes on the train are much more gripping.

The passengers on the train are, naturally, a varied assortment, ranging from a stereotyped right-wing bigot to a small boy who has been separated from his mother, and a host of individuals may not be all they seem. For good measure, the Minister of Transport is on board, and no opportunity is lost in the script to mock her hopelessness.

Joe Cole is the disgraced cop who tries to save the train and strikes up an unlikely rapport with Alexandra Roach in the course of innumerable telephone calls. There are some thrilling moments, but this is really a two-scene storyline that never needed six hours to unfold. A shame, because there are plenty of signs that it could have been so much better.

Forgotten Book - The Ellerby Case

The Ellerby Case was the third novel by John Rhode to feature Dr Priestley. The book was published in 1927 and it showed Rhode's ability as a crime writer, even though he was still finding his way. For instance, this novel is narrated by Priestley's secretary Harold Merefield, a narrative device Rhode had used in the previous book but then abandoned (just as Rhode abandoned Priestley's daughter April, whose romance with Harold was a feature of the great man's first case). At one point, the detective's initials are given as 'J.P.', which is odd, given that we'd been told previously (and would be told again subsequently) that Priestley's first name was Lancelot. But that's the trouble with writing a series. It's so easy to forget what one has said about one's characters. Believe me, I know!

In this novel, Priestley celebrates his 58th birthday and is a little more human and less cantankerous and irritating than in some of his appearances. He is also pretty active, though his interventions come at a cost. When the villain realises Priestley is on his trail, he tries to dispose of him. There's one good scene involving the tidal bore on the River Trent (and the bore, or eagre, does exist), and another incident involves a hedgehog with poisonous green spines (which is rather less authentic, to say the very least). Michael Delving's Bored to Death (1975) incidentally, also involves a dangerous tidal bore, this time on the Severn. I don't think any other writer has used killer hedgehogs in a plot.

The investigation begins when Priestley's old friend Sir Noel Ellerby returns to his Lincolnshire mansion to look into a burglary in which nothing seems to have been stolen. Ellerby dies of heart failure, seemingly a natural death, but Priestley is not satisfied, and of course he is right to be suspicious. Soon he is on the track of an ingenious criminal with a high level of practical expertise, especially in the field of chemistry.

The case involves an excise fraud concerning contraband saccharine, which seems rather unlikely to me, if not as unlikely as murder by hedgehog. The culprit is easily spotted, but this is a lively tale. Priestley had another 69 cases ahead of him after this early investigation, but in few of the books is he as active as he is here.

Nightmare - 1964 film

Nightmare is a low-budget Hammer movie from 1964 that didn't make a huge impact on its original release. In more recent times, however, a number of critics - including the insightful Sergio Angelini - have expressed appreciation for its twisty plot. So I decided to take a look. The screenwriter and producer was Jimmy Sangster, no stranger to melodrama, and the director was the accomplished camera man Freddie Francis. The title is far from original but at least it's better than the unspeakably bad working title: Here's the Knife, Dear: Now Use it.

The film begins with a young woman of seventeen wandering around a gloomy old building at night and finding herself tormented by another, older woman. This turns out to be a nightmare, and Janet, the young woman in question, proves to be deeply troubled by an incident from her past. She's played by Jennie Linden; the role was originally to be taken by Julie Christie, until she got the chance to appear in that terrific film Billy Liar instead, and wisely seized it. Jennie Linden is okay in the role, but she's no Julie Christie. Her performance is rather one-dimensional.

Accompanied by a sympathetic teacher (Brenda Bruce), Janet goes back home, where she's the responsibility of her guardian, Henry Baxter (David Knight), to whom she is devoted. Henry has arranged for her to be looked after by a companion, Grace (Moira Redmond) and the housekeeper and chauffeur (Irene Richmond and George A. Cooper, who for once plays a sympathetic character) are also supportive of her. But poor Janet continues to be tormented.

There are some jarring elements in the storyline (early on, for instance, we're told that everything in Janet's family life was wonderful - until the day her mother stabbed her father to death - which seems a little hard to believe) and David Knight is unimpressive in a key role. However, the events unfold at a brisk pace and this kept me interested. Not a lost classic by any means, but okay viewing.