Murder Quartet
MURDER QUARTET
Suddenly at Home by Francis Durbridge
Murder Without Crime by J Lee Thompson
Murder on the Nile by Agatha Christie
Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, 1995
PS
This was a lot of fun. The theatre was putting on a season of murder mysteries and some clever person in the office – not me – came up with the rather brilliant idea of binding the four together by compiling a rolling glossary of the kind of hoary old elements most commonly associated with the genre.
As a huge fan of the murder mystery, I hardly had to do any research. I think the most I did was consult a list at the front of an Agatha Christie to see how many of her titles contained the word ‘Murder’. The rest was all happy reminiscence and cheerful invention. (And no, I don’t know what happened to R. The fancy initials probably petered out through lack of space, but the absence of an entire letter probably had more to do with faulty proofreading than any lack of imagination on the part of the over-enthusiastic author.)
Having said that, there was another fly in the ointment. I had originally entitled the article about J Lee Thompson A Brief History of Blondes, since it fitted the established format, I liked the consonance of the Bs, and at least it had a bit more snap than, say, A Brief History of Some Actresses Between Five Foot Four and Five Foot Seven Inches in Height. I was amazed, therefore, to be upbraided by my female boss who told me that I needed to change it. She was supported by my male colleague who, I might add, had no jurisdiction over me whatsoever. At first I thought they were joking. I assumed they had only read the title and did not appreciate that most of the stars mentioned in it (Diana Dors, Sylvia Syms, Hayley Mills) were famously fair-haired. This was the only thing that connected them and I was making no other comment, implication or inference about their characters, their abilities, their morality, their behaviour or their IQ. Didn’t make any difference, they said, change it. What about the pleasing consonance of brief and blonde, I whimpered? There’s enough consonance in history and heroines, they said. Change it.
Stunned and resentful as I was, it would have been pointless to have gone on arguing. Their minds were made up and I had to concede. But the sheer injustice (as I see it) of this mealy-mouthed and blinkered attitude still makes my blood boil. I try to be equable in life since great shows of passion, in my experience, are generally un-English, usually self-indulgent and ultimately embarrassing for everyone concerned, but I thought then and still think now that they were the ones being sexist and not me. I freely admit that I have made my mistakes in this area in the past, and I don’t always think as carefully as I should about how my words may be taken, but on this occasion I remain convinced I had no case to answer. They were, in my opinion, virtue signalling. And now it only sounds like I’m protesting too much, so let’s just say there were perhaps lessons to be learnt on both sides and leave it at that.
(…though please note that in the article I even suggest that Diana Dors was a better actress than she is usually given credit for, and she was hardly alone in ending up being limited by the very asset that attracted notice in the first place. How many people today, for instance, are aware that Hedy Lamarr was awarded several patents for scientific inventions during the Second World War? Maybe if she had been blonde my colleagues would not have been quite so indignant on her behalf – though of course they probably wouldn’t have let me specify her hair colour at all, would they?)
But in a larger context the incident does serve to indicate that the question of a writer’s ownership of their own words and the lengths to which they can go to protect them is a complex one. In journalism (as in this case) one is at the whim of one’s editor or superior, and in fiction any disagreements may hopefully be resolved by sober discussion and compromise and the published version is the one that everyone has to live with.
In drama, though, things can become more complicated. The words on the page are the author’s, but as soon as they have been appropriated by the actor, then it is they alone who have the power on the stage. It’s completely within their gift to say whatever they like once they’re in front of an audience – at which point, what comeback does the author have? And what of the director? Whose side are they supposed to be on, artistically, historically and theoretically?
A few years before the minor spat over this article ruffled my feathers, this very situation had played itself out for real in a sketch I’d written for a local revue. It was actually to be performed by a professional cast, but one of them refused to say the word ‘niggardly’. “It means ‘mean’,” I explained, bewildered. “Look at the root,” the actor replied, “that’s not the kind of language I’m in the habit of using, and I’m certainly not going to say it in front of an audience.” Quite apart from the fact that it wouldn’t be ‘them’ using the language but the character they were portraying, I for one could not think of a sufficiently delicate way of pointing out that the only problem here was their ignorance of etymology. (I think this may even have pre-dated the notion of ‘political correctness’ as a thing.) So short of thrusting an OED under their nose and pointing with a self-righteous finger, I had to accept that there was nothing to be done, and “mean” was all this actor was ever going to say at that point in the dialogue, thereby ruining the rhythm of the sentence and so scuppering the joke I had so laboriously sculpted into being. (They weren’t necessarily the only pompous prick in this story.)
A fellow writer tried to console me by explaining that whereas the writer only had to write it once, it was the actor who had to go on night after night to sell the part to an audience, and they needed to feel comfortable and secure in order to do their job to the best of their ability. Whose bloody side were they on? For a start, the actor has surely undertaken to speak the lines the author wrote, not just deliver as many of them as they deemed fit and the rest can come out any old how – and sometimes not at all if they forget the bloody things they’ve been paid to learn.
Anyway, all water under the bridge now, and there are other details to be annoyed about, including, for instance, the fact that I managed to spell Horst Buchholz’s name wrong in A Brief History of Blon—, dammit, Heroines. It’s something I would check today, but back then it was harder to quickly look these things up, so I didn’t. You remember Horst Buchholz? He was the Berlin-born actor who played Mexican peasant Chico in The Magnificent Seven (1960). Of course he did. I mean, who else could they possibly have cast? Some blonde who might even have said the words properly without picking a fight?