It has been another depressing month for funerals, this time of my chum Reg Gadney, an academic who straddled the world of art and film, a thriller writer of some renown, an award-winning television scriptwriter and accomplished painter.

His funeral, in Central London, was attended by representatives of all the worlds he had been involved with, including playwright David Hare, actor Bill Nighy and film director Don Boyd and, as a former Coldstream Guards officer, there was even a uniformed bugler to play the Last Post.

I was fortunate to know Reg for the last six years of his life and had the honour of editing new editions of his first two thrillers from 1970 and 1971, with covers designed around Reg’s paintings.

I think Reg was pleased with them as he painted my portrait, deliberately making me rather severe ‘as editors should be’, as a thank you.

Reg died, aged 77, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer on 1^st May, two days before his last novel Albert Einstein Speaking  was published by Canongate. It is not a thriller, but rather an ingenious and at times impishly funny fictionalised biography of the great scientist and I recommend it most highly.

Ambler Still Lying

Legend has it that when Eric Ambler’s cheekily-titled autobiography Here Lies Eric Ambler was published in 1985, many of his fellow thriller writers complained that he had perhaps been too circumspect, not to say vague, and surely must have more stories about thriller writing, fellow writers and working in Hollywood up his sleeve. Ambler is supposed to have replied ‘Don’t worry, you’ll all be in Volume 2!’  but when The Story So Far was published in 1993, it showed Ambler was still being economical with the full story.

Ambler’s second volume of ‘Memories and Other Fictions’ is heavier on the fictions than the memories with nine short stories interspersed with snippets – far too few and skimpy – of Ambler’s life in Hollywood (he was good friends with Alfred Hitchcock), Switzerland and finally returning to his native London. Very few fellow authors get a mention, not even Australian Charles Rodda (Gavin Holt) with whom he co-wrote several thrillers under the pen-name Eliot Reed.

He does acknowledge Julian Symons whom, he thinks, proposed him for the elite Detection Club in 1952 when Dorothy L. Sayers was president, although he maintains he was never ‘initiated’ as he was ‘not given to swearing foolish oaths’ and was about to decamp for America.

On his return to England in the late 1970s, he was, however, pleased to find the Detection Club still functioning. ‘Fortunately for me, Miss Sayers no longer attended meetings.’ (She had died in 1957!) ‘I cannot believe we would have seen eye to eye on almost anything.’ And when the Club asked for a detective story to celebrate Julian Symons’ 80^th birthday, Ambler said he was ‘happy to try’. That short story, The One Who Did For Blagden Cole, which is the conclusion of The Story So Far, appeared in the 1992 anthology The Man Who, edited by H. R. F. Keating and was probably the last piece of fiction Ambler wrote in a career which lasted more than half-a-century and was instrumental in transforming the British thriller.

De-Blake-ing

My mention of Jack Trevor Story and his connection to the ‘Sexton Blake library’ in last month’s column provoked numerous responses, some from those who fondly remembered the work of Story and others who fondly remembered the Sexton Blake stories as they appeared in myriad form over more than half a century.

One correspondent, Tony Bird, wrote in to tell me that Jack Trevor Story had actually written so 20 Sexton Blake ‘novelettes’ and in 1962, one: ‘became an undistinguished film with Donald Sinden and Adam Faith called Mix Me A Person. For whatever reason, Sexton Blake was omitted from the film. I remember, as a youngster, having a letter published in SBL (Sexton Blake Library) complaining about this shocking omission!’

I then discover, courtesy of the blog run by the erudite John Norris in America, that Jack Trevor Story had been doing what in the trade was known as “de-Blake-ing”: taking a Sexton Blake book, rewriting it mainly by removing the character of Sexton Blake, then giving it a new title and often selling it on to a new publisher.

The film Mix Me A Person (directed by Leslie, father of Barry, Norman) was actually based on the novel Mix Me A Person by Jack Trevor Story, published in 1958. That was in fact a rapid re-write of Nine O’clock Shadow, his Sexton Blake ‘novelette’ of 1957, which he suitably de-Blaked, making a female psychiatrist his lead detective character.

So technically, this was not a Sexton Blake film without Sexton Blake, though if it had been, I would have blamed Donald Sinden, who seemed to be something of a jinx in these matters. In 1956 he starred in the big screen adaptation of Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke, a film infamous for having dispensed entirely with Allingham’s famous detective Albert Campion.

The Complete Durbridge

Whenever I am asked – which is occasionally – about Francis Durbridge, who was a household name in Britain and parts of Europe for a fair chunk of the 20^th century, I always reply ‘I know nothing, but I know a man who knows everything.’

Francis Durbridge (1912-1998) was a prolific writer of crime fiction, not just novels but also for the stage, radio and television over a period of around sixty years, his most famous creation probably being the detective Paul Temple. The man who has studied and catalogued his considerable output with scholarly thoroughness, is Melvyn Barnes, O.B.E., a former president of the Library Association and, it has to be said, something of a fan of crime fiction, to put it mildly.

Now, twenty years after Durbridge’s death, Melvyn has written what is surely the definitive guide to his work – and I’m not just saying that because it says that on the cover of Francis Durbridge The Complete Guide now published by Williams and Whiting.

Telling A Book by its Cover

At first glance, you might think this 1950 American paperback of The Nine Waxed Faces was, well, a 1950s American pulp crime novel, perhaps involving G-Men or an over-dressed private eye. The tag line ‘Lovely To See…Deadly To Love’ only adds to that impression.

In fact, The Nine Waxed Faces by Francis Beeding (a prolific two-man writing team) was a 1936 very British spy thriller set in a Europe on the edge of meltdown. Beeding’s thriller were immensely popular in the 1930s, with far bigger sales than those of ‘Golden Age’ detective writers, though the author(s) also wrote cracking crime stories as well.  I am working my way through the thrillers of ‘Francis Beeding’ and others, with a view to discovering just how soon British thriller writers realised that the Nazis and their methods were a genuine threat to peace and civilisation and also ideal villains for their fiction.

I may well submit my findings for a PhD; there again, I may just bore you with an article on the subject in this esteemed organ.

Team Players

Writing partnerships such as ‘Francis Beeding’ (John Palmer and Hilary St. George Saunders) are not uncommon, but married co-authors are. The best- known couple who manage to live together and write together without (seemingly) to murder each other is probably ‘Nicci French’ the writing name of Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, who have a new novel, Day of the Dead out from publisher Michael Joseph in July.

In August another married couple enters the crime fiction lists with a medical mystery set in 19^th century Edinburgh, The Way of All Flesh published by Canongate and written by Ambrose Parry, the pen-name of husband-and-wife team Christopher Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman. That the novel is grounded in fact should come as no surprise, given that Marisa Haetzman is a consultant anaesthetist who also holds a Master’s degree in the history of medicine.

Bagley Remembered

Desmond Bagley (1923-83) was one of the biggest names in British adventure-thriller writing in the 1960s and ’70s and, unusually, a writer much loved by readers, publishers and other writers in equal measure.

He lived for many years on the island of Guernsey where, last month, he was duly honoured, with an official blue plaque unveiled at his home, Câtel House which has been re-named Bagley Hall and an exhibition in the Guilles-Allés library in the island’s capital St Peter Port.

Masterminding the exhibition and giving a lecture to mark its opening was Bagley uber-fan Philip Eastwood, whose website www.thebagleybrief.com is a fund of information about Bagley and his books.

Rula Rules, OK?

I all-too-rarely cover audiobooks as I am not a particular fan of the medium, despite many of my friends being resting members of Equity. However, I have to express a pang of jealousy over the fact that my old chum Stevyn Colgan has secured the services of the mellifluous Rula Lenska to do the honours on his wonderful spoof cosy mystery A Murder To Die For.