by Colin Watson
In 1928, Dorothy Sayers described Wimsey’s transport as ‘a big open car with an unnaturally long bonnet’ which ‘had slipped up to them, silent as an owl’. Wimsey wore motoring goggles and when he pushed them up there was disclosed ‘a long narrow nose and a pair of rather cynical-looking grey eyes’. The cynical expression was only to be expected from one who had just overtaken two motor cyclists, themselves travelling at seventy miles an hour, in days when there still existed an official universal speed limit of thirty.
Predictably, the motor cyclists, a truculent lower middle-class pair, had their names taken by the police with a view to prosecution whereas Lord Peter was subjected to no inconvenience (‘you being who you are’, as the local superintendent told him) other than stares of admiration at ‘the long sweep of the exhaust and the rakish lines’ of his car.
Four years later, Lord Peter was still attracting notice to his means of locomotion. The scene had changed from Eaton Socon, on the Great North Road, to London’s Jermyn Street. This time it was not just the envious comments of bystanders that were heard but
the reverent murmurings of a congregation of persons gathered in the street to admire its streamlining and dispute about the number of its cylinders.
Evidently there had taken place in the interval some transfiguration so awe-inspiring that religious metaphor was now in order. Had Lord Peter bought the eight-litre sporting saloon, that final, two-and-three-quarter-ton gesture of the Bentley company which in less than a minute could accelerate in top gear from ten to a hundred miles an hour smoothly and in silence? Miss Sayers did not say.
No such reticence was to cut short the motor-car lectures of Ian Fleming, perhaps the last thriller writer to put his hero behind the wheel of a Bentley. He was very specific indeed. Mark IV engine … nine-point-five compression … Mulliners’ coachwork … painted in rough, not gloss, battleship grey, with black Morocco upholstery … Further, it had two-inch exhaust pipes because Bond ‘hadn’t liked the old soft flutter of the marque’ and the long grey nose was topped by a big octagonal silver bolt instead of the winged B.
The car sounded impressive enough and we have the author’s word that ‘Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life.’ But whatever it was that Bond was supposed to be driving after it had been cannibalized forbearingly by Rolls-Royce at his request from parts made by them in the first place, it certainly was not a Bentley.
A quarter of a century before Fleming learned to exploit the ‘status’ obsession of his times by being airily knowledgeable about marques and rear axle ratios, Leslie Charteris sent Templar out on the road in a vehicle of his own invention. He called it the Furillac, implying perhaps that it was a combination of enormous power and the sort of luxury which the American makers of the Cadillac were supplying to the few who could still afford to buy their gadget-laden V-16 monsters in the year after the Wall Street crash. It seems to have had special advantages for one of the Saint’s athletic potentiality:
The Saint vaulted into the Furillac, and came down with one foot on the self-starter and the other on the clutch pedal. As Patricia gained her place beside him, he unleashed the full ninety-eight horse-power that the speedster could put forth when pressed.
In The Last Hero (1930) the Furillac, alas, crashed, but Templar was not at a loss. He took over from a friend an even more extraordinary motor car, somewhat inaptly named Hirondel. There was nothing very swallow-like about that one.
It was not an inconspicuous car at the best of times, even when sedately driven, that long, lean, silver-grey King of the Road.
This is how The Saint took the tramway-infested road to the north east out of London one night in 1930:
The Hirondel, as though recognizing the hand of a master at its wheel, became almost a living thing. King of the Road, its makers called it, but that night the Hirondel was more than a king: it was the incarnation and apotheosis of all cars … a snarling silver fiend that roared through London on the wings of an unearthly wind.
Even on the quite narrow and, as Wallace’s Captain Gordon had found to his cost, winding roads of provincial England before the big highway developments of the 1930s, Simon Templar managed a very creditable ninety miles an hour – and after nightfall, at that. The one precaution he did take was to maintain
a challenging blast of klaxon and snarling stammer of unsilenced exhaust …
This circumstance was typical of the illegalities that the period’s heroes of crime fiction seem to have vied with one another to commit, and it has interest in relation to what Edmund Clerihew Bentley, author of Trent’s Last Case, decided as early as 1910 to be an essential ingredient of the detective story. Absolutely necessary, he declared, was ‘some fussing about in a motor car or cars, with at least one incident in which the law of the land and the safety of human life are treated as entirely negligible’. By 1940, when he published his autobiography, Those Days, Bentley’s opinion had hardened even further. He said it was now a ‘strict convention’ that the detective-hero had to be a driver so idiotically reckless that those in the car with him would totter out of it, pale and trembling, vowing never to entrust their lives to him again, when their destination was reached.
Bentley appealed for an explanation.
‘The recklessness is thought to be dashing and attractive, I suppose; risking one’s life always has been so; but what I should like to have worked out for me is why risking other people’s should be regarded as an activity with something appealing and heroic about it.’
It is ironic that so few people here or in America – where it was first published – realized that Trent’s Last Case was intended to be a send-up of the conventional detective story, that to this day the book is solemnly indicated as the classic example of something Bentley found utterly absurd.
CHAPTER 17
‘With thy quire of Saints for evermore …’
As part of the preparation of her thesis. Fiction and the Reading Public, Mrs Q. D. Leavis sent out a questionnaire to the most popular writers of the day, including a number of authors of crime fiction. Their answers established, among other things, that substantial and consistent success was always secured by those novelists who reflected and encouraged the habits of thought of the least inquisitive, the least experimental members of the community.
‘The general public,’ declared one witness confidently, ‘does not wish to think. This fact accounts for the success of my stories, for I have endeavoured to make all my descriptions so clear that each situation could be visualized … with the minimum of mental effort.’
Another ascribed large sales of his books to the fact that he wrote them primarily to please himself, a ‘normal man’, whose tastes he could assume to be shared by millions of other ‘normal’ men.
Normality was also stressed by P. C. Wren, soldier turned novelist, whose wildly romanticized accounts of life in the French Foreign Legion fascinated thousands who would not have known a sheik from a shillelagh. ‘The bulk of my readers,’ claimed the creator of Beau Geste, ‘are the cleanly-minded, virile, outdoor sort of people of both sexes, and the books are widely read in the Army, the Navy, the Universities, the Public Schools, and the Clubs … Although I now make a good many thousands per annum, I still am not a “professional novelist”, nor a long-haired literary cove. I prefer the short-haired executive type.’
Whatever undercurrents of sexual motivation may be discerned in this credo, it remains impressive evidence of the quite genuine sense of rectitude that imbued authors of sensation fiction between the wars. A later generation would call them prigs. So they were, but the fact that their priggishness paid off so handsomely acquits them, curiously enough, of the twin charge of hypocrisy. The public, however addled its notions of Algeria, or Chinatown, or Scotland Yard, is wonderfully sensitive to the calculating author, the author who deliberately writes down.
Success strides with sincerity: which explains why some of the most widely read and enduring newspaper and magazine columnists
have been humourless, unsubtle and conceited persons with absolute faith in their own platitudes. What P. C. Wren wrote in answer to Mrs Leavis may safely be assumed to express an honest conviction: phrases such as ‘cleanly-minded’, ‘thousands per annum’, ‘literary cove’, ‘executive type’ – these could have emanated only from a guileless prig or an accomplished satirist, and Wren certainly was not the second.
It was the belief of Mrs Leavis that the pattern of popular fiction in the 1930s had been set by the magazine, the standard formula of which was the avoidance of everything that could possibly cause worry or offence or unease. The magazine had achieved ‘readability’ not merely by setting itself to amuse and soothe; it was explicitly defiant of other standards and ambitions. ‘And by accustoming the reading public to certain limited appeals and a certain restricted outlook, it has spoilt the public for fiction in book form of a more serious nature.’ It is true that most magazines became increasingly trivial in content and presentation with every year of the twentieth century. So did newspapers, with which they generally shared common ownership. Both, as Francis Williams has pointed out, were transformed between 1920 and 1940 from instruments ‘of information and political persuasion into a branch of the entertainment industry concerned primarily with making the largest possible appeal to readers who wanted to be excited and amused’.
But so long as they were run for profit, in what other direction could they have developed? Today, television has taken the place of magazines as the most often quoted cause of debasement of public literary taste. (Not the least upset by this usurpation are the magazine publishers.) But assertions as to ‘taste’ are easier to make than to prove. If the process of debilitation had really continued steadily during the past fifty years, it would be reasonable to expect present-day popular fiction to be more superficial, silly and more slipshod, more crude and more vicious than that of the 1920s and 1930s. Many people find it all of those things. But they are applying personal standards and referring to what they consider eternal moral verities. To regard the matter from the Wildean view – that there are no good or bad books, only well and ill written ones – might produce a different verdict.
‘I have proved from experience,’ Horler wrote in 1933, ‘that the reputation of a sensational novelist is more securely placed with the reading public than almost any other form of writer.’ With this statement, at any rate, there is no reason for Compton Mackenzie or anyone else to quarrel. Almost every thriller writer of Horler’s time testified to the loyalty – the sometimes quite disconcerting loyalty – of his readers. This kind of fan mail has diminished considerably in recent years with the opening of great new channels to draw off the emotions of simple, of frustrated or of easily moved, generous-hearted people; but written fiction still has the special capacity it has always had for sending characters into what might be called the multitudinous affection of society. Television does not have this power. Hard as it tries with repetitive techniques to establish its own folk heroes, all it has succeeded in doing so far is to graft a particular actor’s face and mannerisms to some already universally familiar creation of a writer of books. The cinema suffers a like impotence, and this perhaps is poetic justice to an industry which at its commercial zenith regarded writers as menials to be hired by the squad and drilled into acceptance of the meretricious formulae of semi-literates.
The reason for the failure of television and the great majority of films to put permanent lodgers into the minds of their audience lies, paradoxically, in their wealth of means. They can convey so much, so quickly and with such mechanical expertise, that human characters slip straight through with the rest of the highly convincing artifacts and do not have to gain entry the hard way through the imagination. So these same characters can and do slip out again just as readily, despite the most clamorous promotion campaigns; indeed the cult of the film star and the TV personality has itself militated against the establishment of any original hero, heroine, or even anti-hero capable of outlasting a television series of a dozen episodes or a half-year’s film run.
In the years when Hollywood was riding high – and exceedingly rough-shod – one of its most demoralizing practices was to ‘remake’ at regular intervals one or other of a selection of stories it liked to classify as deathless. The term had a variety of meanings, of which being out of copyright frequently was one, but its general application was to anything which on being filmed for the first time had made a lot more money than had been expected. Apart from the Bible, to the monopolizing of whose spectacular possibilities Cecil B. de Mille brought a talent trained on pre-Hays Office pornography, the most favoured material for working over was historical romance, preferably with religious streaks. To Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Leo Tolstoy, the industry was deeply – and repeatedly – indebted. There grew from this exploitation of classics a golden goose philosophy. By the 1930s it had become axiomatic in Hollywood that success could be replicated indefinitely from prototype. Among the more dire consequences were the Andy Hardy family, the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Monster of the Month Club, and the progeny of a sheepdog called Lassie. But there was one area in which simple duplication worked very rarely. It was that of crime fiction.
Several attempts were made to transfer the Holmes opus to the screen, but not one managed to reproduce whatever it was that had captured the imagination of the reading public. Perhaps the authentic Baker Street flavour was masked by the unconscionable quantities of swirling vapour wherewith film-makers invariably signified Victorian London (piping it, some said, from that permanent Louisiana swamp set reserved for haunted house B features).
Fu-Manchu was somehow not so much sinister as comical on celluloid, while Edgar Wallace’s splendid indifference to probability leaked through into some of the adaptations of his stories and turned them into farce. America’s own Earl Derr Biggers was better served. The adventures of his smug, pseudo-Confucian Hawaian detective Charlie Chan formed one of the most durable and popular Hollywood series. It used up three Chan actors, of whom the second, Warner Oland, probably came nearer than did any star of the 1930s to imparting memorable personality to a crime investigator. William Powell’s endearing air of hungover courtesy helped to make the Thin Man films mildly enjoyable, but they were scarcely identifiable as the work of Dashiell Hammett. The doctoring of original stories to spare the supposed susceptibilities of storekeepers’ wives in Illinois was not calculated to leave much that a Hammett or a Chandler would have cared to acknowledge, once the cheque had been cleared. Chandler’s script of The Blue Dahlia and the adaptation of Hammett’s early novel The Glass Key were exceptional in their retention of a recognizable degree of their authors’ style and concern, while for the film version of The Big Sleep the choice of Humphrey Bogart materialized exactly the sardonic, much-damaged but incorruptible Philip Marlowe. Much more closely in line with Hollywood tradition and practice was a dry-cleaned travesty of Farewell My Lovely, in which Dick Powell jumped around as Marlowe in the semblance of a pert, over-eager shoe salesman, while written-in lines such as ‘She was evil – evil …’ were declaimed to indicate to the ladies of Illinois what all the shooting had been about.
Film producers in England showed more enthusiasm for the native detective story as potential screen material than might be supposed. The plots, after all, were dauntingly complicated. Whatever satisfaction they offered could only be attained – like that of guests at a somewhat elaborate dinner – by orderly course-by-course consumption. Cinema audiences did not care to be ruled by the clock, whatever the custom might be in theatres, so it was desirable that films should be as nearly as possible continuously self-explanatory for the sake of those who liked to ‘stay round to where we came in’. The detective story, whose very essence was the withholding of explanation until the last minute, might reasonably have been considered a non-starter. Yet a surprising number of whodunnit films was attempted. Some of the least pretentious – Green for Danger, for instance, adapted from Christianna Brand’s novel, and len
t distinction by Alistair Sim as a wonderfully fallible Scotland Yard inspector, came quite near to being successful, but the majority were just standard products of the British film industry’s almost psychotic fear of overstraining public intelligence. A notable collector’s item among film adaptations of crime fiction is the version of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon in which Lord Peter Wimsey is played by the American actor Robert Montgomery. Montgomery presumably was chosen in the hope that his fame at that time as a star would make the film attractive to more people. He was a personable, conscientious actor who dressed well, looked clean, and might conceivably have fooled a Bowery doorman into mistaking him for a British aristocrat. Otherwise, he made as convincing a Peter Wimsey as Pancho Villa might have done. The film was a lesson on the essentially static, immutable nature of the detective novel. A trace of New York accent, a certain buoyancy of manner, a suggestion of genuine friendliness in the hearty treatment of menials – these few and so trivial solecisms shattered the image that Miss Sayers had worked so long and devotedly to create, and without which her detection and her books were nothing.
Television failures to transfer crime fiction from print to picture have been less grotesque than those of the film makers and have included some honourable tries. Generally speaking, the older the story, the more nearly satisfying has been the adaptation. Thus Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman have fared much better than authors still writing after the second war. The reason is only partly that the earlier work possessed more dramatic content and gave greater scope for characterization. A bigger help to producers and directors was the fact that these pieces came into the category of ‘period’, which television – in Britain, anyway – always has been able to do extremely well. It was the novels of the more recent ‘golden age’ of the detective story, the later 1920s and 1930s, which emerged, despite great pains and expense, as fricassees of unlikely behaviour, footling dialogue and forensic absurdities. Much safer was the American contentment to let Perry Mason play out his long television career without leaving the courtroom.
