La Boutique - Francis Durbridge

 

Francis Durbridge (1912-98) dominated British detective fiction from the 1930s to the advent of the likes of P D James and Ruth Rendell in the 'Seventies and 'Eighties.  He wrote books but his true dominance was the radio serial and, later, TV.  Paul Temple was his calling card for more than sixty years, originally on radio, then on stage, and finally on TV, where each series was so prestigious it used to be announced as 'Francis Durbridge presents."  His scripts were translated and adapted for broadcast all over Europe.  In 1967 he was commissioned by the European Broadcasting Union to produce a series capable of being broadcast by all member nations.  La Boutique, in five episodes, is the result.

Durbridge here dispenses with Paul Temple.  Our hero instead is Superintendent Robert Bristol of Scotland Yard, summoned back from holiday at his sister's hotel in Venice after his composer brother Lewis is murdered in London.  At the heart of the case is the titular fashion outlet owned by Lewis's ex-wife and run by her oddly possessive female friend.

It must be forty years since I had heard or watched anything by Durbridge.  But these are radio scripts and thus explicitly my bag.  They are very impressive.  Durbridge doesn't waste time on fancy dialogue but he is an absolute master of radiophonic techniques, switching fluently from present time to flashback, from Venice to San Francisco.  And the all-action denouement was genuinely thrilling.

Williams & Whiting Books have scored a major coup getting hold of the Durbridge rights, and Melvyn Barnes provides a useful introduction.  The scripts themselves are unfussily presented and there is a nice collection of contemporary press cuttings at the end.  I will be buying more - the problem is, deciding which next.

The Fall of Kelvin Walker - Alasdair Gray

Gray died last week, aged 85. It occurred to me I have never read his fiction, so I got hold of this 1985 novella. It's about a prim Scottish nobody who runs away to London, beginning an unlikely rise to great fame and an inevitable fall. It's a modern parable about the thirst for fame, the transitory nature of fame, and the monsters that crave it.

 Kelvin Walker does not start off a monster. He's the oppressed youngest son of a Scottish Wee Free grocer. He has no experience, no qualifications, yet believes himself  capable of achieving great things. So he turns up in Swinging London in his plus fours and Hitler haircut and blags his way into the BBC. He is so counter-cultural that he attracts a cult following on TV, and live on TV he is brought down.

Gray's views on the BBC are made plain. His writing is punchy and funny. I shall investigate further.

Death of Anton - Alan Melville

Alan Melville (1910-83) was one of those bright young men who became a jack-of-all-trades with the BBC (producer, writer, performer) before World War II. I remember him on television in the Sixties. He is almost entirely forgotten now and I for one did not know he had written crime novels in his twenties. So many thanks to the British Library for adding Death of Anton to their Crime Classics reprints series.


The detective, Chief Inspector Mr Minto (there is no first name) is such a brilliant creation that you can't help wishing he had spawned a series. His much younger sister is about to marry a vacuum salesman and Minto is in town for the wedding, which will be conducted by his brother Robert, a Catholic priest. Carey's Circus is also in town, and the Mintos are at Dodo the clown's party when Anton the tiger-tamer is found dead in the tiger cage. The initial view is that the tigers mauled him, but Minto of the Yard is not fooled. He spots three bullet wounds.


Melville was a famous wit and this is therefore a light-hearted romp. Minto is very funny - but nobody's fool - and the circus setting guarantees a cast of eccentrics for Melville to play with. The mystery is well-plotted and I certainly did not guess who had done it or why. Entirely satisfactory on every front. As I say, the shame is there was no follow-up. After the war Melville channelled his comic talents into musical theatre and that is somewhere I wouldn't venture at any price.

Four Absentees - Rayner Heppenstall

Another oddity this, not dissimilar to the memoirs of Julian MacLaren-Ross which I read and reviewed here earlier this month.  Indeed, it was the mention of Heppenstall in the MacLaren-Ross book that made me wonder if Heppenstall had written anything in a similar vein.  The answer is yes, quite a bit, of which this is just one.

Heppenstall was a bit of a poet, an experimental novelist, a writer of at least one book on ballet.  A peripheral figure on the London literary scene of the 1930s but not an absolute soak like MacLaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas.  This is a memoir of four absent friends, and what an ill-assorted bunch they are.  From left to right in the spiffy cover art by Natacha Ledwidge: John Middleton-Murry, much married critic, socialist utopian, best known for having married Katherine Mansfield; then Dylan Thomas himself; then George Orwell; and finally the incestuous sculptor, graphic designer and self-made monk Eric Gill - all of whom were dead by the time Heppenstall wrote this in 1960.

Heppenstall would seem to be the sole link between them - but how well did he really know the much older men, Murry and Gill?  Not very well would seem to be the answer.  Dylan he knew reasonably well, and a highlight of the book for me is Heppenstall's two-page dissertation on the subject of Dylan's death - suicide or accident?  Orwell he knows best of all, having shared accommodation with him until Orwell drove him out one night with his shooting stick.  It's annoying that Heppenstall insists on calling him Eric Blair and always putting inverted commas round 'George Orwell'.  Yes, it's accurate because Blair didn't become Orwell until after he and Heppenstall went their separate ways, but we know him as Orwell and we are only interested because of his Orwell fame.

After the war Heppenstall joined the BBC (radio, naturally) and became a producer.  As such he was able to offer his friends work.  Gill had long since died, but the always impecunious Murry did one of Heppenstall's "Imaginary Conversations" between Keats and Coleridge.  Orwell was offered one between Pilate and Lenin, which would have been interesting, but didn't do it.  He did, however, provide a dramatization of Animal Farm for his former flatmate.

It's odd the sort of thing people used to be able to publish.  We certainly wouldn't get away with something this flimsy nowadays.  Heppenstall is a pedantic writer (the commas are wildly out of control) and there is far too much of Heppenstall in a book that professes to be about the other four.  Still, it throws an interesting light on the literary scene before and immediately after World War II.  There are lots of authoritative studies of Thomas and Orwell that seem to me not to know it.  As it happens, I have Dylan's letters on my desk and there is a mention there of the shooting stick incident which the editor has been unable to place.

Dylan Thomas in America - John Malcolm Brinnin

The classic account of the poet's last days, written by the American poet who organised his US reading tours and produced the first live performances of Under Milk Wood a year before British audiences heard it.  It adds adds several layers to the standard impression of the roistering Welsh bard.  For a start it is in no sense hagiographic; even though it was published in the US in 1955, barely a year after Thomas succumbed to alcohol poisoning in New York in November 1953, Brinnin offers a study of a man at war with himself, conflicted between art and self-indulgence, who often behaved appallingly but who was also appallingly treated by those closest to him.  What brings the book startling to life is the realisation that Brinnin has fallen in love with Thomas, hence the enmity of Dylan's legendary wife Caitlin, who is not gently depicted but who nevertheless endorses the book with a foreword.  The final, unflinching account of Dylan's last days, comatose in St Vincent's hopsital whilst Caitlin trashes the waiting room and brawls with nuns in the throes of a drunken mental collapse which soon sees her banned from the hospital and voluntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, is truly eye-watering.

The book's greatest strength is that Brinnin confines himself solely to what he witnessed or uncovered.  There is no mention of anything before February 1950 when, as the newly-appointed Director of the New York Poetry Centre, Brinnin invited his idol to visit the Big Apple.  What particularly interested me was the alternative account of the creation of Under Milk Wood.  Brinnin encounters the work already part-written but still has to pressure Thomas into making it ready to be read publicly and subsequently acted.  At the same time, of course, though Brinnin knows nothing of it, the BBC was having exactly the same problem.  In a sense Brinnin and America win because they get to see Thomas read his own work and perform it with actors.  Brinnin also tells us that Thomas was still making changes and writing new material until his health finally collapsed.  Thus what Brinnin saw in New York in October 1953 was almost certainly different to what the BBC broadcast in January 1954, neither version was a finished work and neither was entirely what the poet had envisaged.

This classic Aldine paperback from 1956 is a companion piece to the February 1954 Aldine edition of Under Milk Wood on which I have based all my scholarly writing about the work.

I do this because we can pretty sure this is text that Douglas Cleverdon put together for the BBC production.  (My research has demonstrated that other published texts, even those published after the broadcast, differ significantly from the performed texts.) Others - including Cleverdon - have since re-edited and generally tinkered, usually making it less impactful in my view.  Surely the only text better than this - or, more precisely, closer to Dylan's last view of what it should be - would be the text performed in New York at the end of October 1953.  I wonder if that exists anywhere?

Odd, isn't it, that the publishers only seemed to have the one photo of Dylan?