Author: The Good Reader

Up On The Downs by John Masefield

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John Masefield (1878–1967) had a long and productive career in both prose and poetry, but comparatively few of his works are well-known today. He was appointed poet laureate in 1930 when that was a job for life, so held the position for thirty-seven years. His Collected Poems is a hefty volume, yet it is only two short poems, “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”, that turn up in anthologies. I think there might be other gems waiting to be re-discovered. For example, I recently came across, almost by accident, “CLM”, a poignant poem about his mother, who died when Masefield was a small boy.

I suspect that Masefield has different readerships for different aspects of his work. For example, his 1937 children’s novel The Box of Delights has never been out print, almost having a cult following, helped perhaps by the 1984 BBC television adaptation. His 1917 description of the topography of the Somme battlefield, The Old Front Line, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing and could be called the first battlefield guide. A theme that runs through much of his work is the sense of history in the landscape.

The poem below is another that I discovered through the BBC Radio 3 programme, Words and Music, in the edition entitled The Haunted Landscape. The format of this programme is that the titles of the pieces and their creators are not identified. You can get that information from the programme website. It works quite well if you listen to the programme, then go back and identify the things that made a particular impression on you.

I was amazed when I found out how old it is and who had written it. I had assumed it was by a more recent poet. It actually dates from the first world war period, when Masefield was living at  Lollingdon Farm in Berkshire. I had also rather lazily assumed that the human sacrifice in the 1972 film The Wicker Man was a scriptwriter’s invention. Whether it is an invention or not, the idea is clearly not as new as I thought.

Masefield was too old to be a fighting soldier but did see the western front both as a hospital orderly and later, as a journalist. I have seen it suggested that this poem can also be interpreted as referring to conditions on the battlefield. However one interpretates it, this is a powerful and atmospheric poem, collapsing the distance between past and present with something of the atmosphere of what is now known as folk horror.


Up On The Downs by John Masefield

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.


Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

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Lawrence Osborne was the third writer commissioned by the estate of Raymond Chandler to write a Philip Marlowe continuation novel and Only to Sleep was published in 2018.

The brilliant idea here is that it is 1988, the tail-end of the Reagan era, and Marlowe is seventy-two, retired and living in the part of Mexico that is just south of California. When an insurance company in San Diego approaches him to investigate a claim, he can’t resist accepting the case; one last job to stave off the boredom and inertia of retirement.

It’s the sort of mystery familiar from Marlowe’s earlier career. Wealthy property developer Donald Zinn has died in Mexico and his Mexican widow is making a claim on the life insurance. The company suspect it may be a fraud and that Zinn is still alive. Marlowe is despatched to Mexico to find out the truth.

Marlowe is not quite what he was, though. That’s hardly a surprise given the hard living that was depicted in Chandler’s books. He has got his drinking just about under control, but tends to have strange dreams. He has a limp because of arthritis and walks with the aid of a cane. It’s suggested that he is impotent now. Something of what he was remains though, because the cane is actually a swordstick. His determination and quick wits in a sticky situation are still intact, too. So is that moral sense, the feeling that in the end he will do the right thing because he can’t help it. 

Marlowe laments the way the world has changed, and what he sees as debased modern tastes in clothes and music. He remains a suit-and-tie man, fond of the old jazz songs. As much as a detective story, this is a meditation on the passage of time, ageing and retirement, and facing up to mortality.

Pretty soon the plot turns into a pursuit of a man who may or may not be Zinn. There’s a hint that Zinn is a sort of sinister double of Marlowe, being another retiree yet married to a Mexican woman half his age. It has the same dream-like feel of never quite coming into focus that you find in Raymond Chandler’s books. This is reflected in the title, taken from an Aztec song: “We come here only to dream/We come only to sleep”.

The real main character of this book is Mexico, described with such vividness that you have to read quite slowly to take in the precise, descriptive prose. Osborne is also a travel writer, after all, and catches the bright light and colour of Mexico. He has reproduced the distinctive tone of Marlowe’s first-person narration, but also subtly adapted it. Marlowe is as observant as ever, but the setting is Mexico, not Los Angeles. He is older and a bit gloomier.

Once again Marlowe is on a quest, a road trip from hotel room to hotel room as he goes further south into Mexico and further from America in every sense. Much as the book recalls Chandler, it also reminded me quite strongly of Patricia Highsmith. I am thinking of those tales of American expatriates adrift in Greece or North Africa where dollars will buy a lot of things not available at home. There’s also a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald in a rather sinister Gatsbyesque masked party.

This is that rare thing, a continuation novel that is based on the work of another writer yet stands up on its own as work of fiction. I don’t think you have to have read Raymond Chandler to get a lot out of Only to Sleep.   

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

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Something funny has happened to my sense of time during the various lockdowns. Memories of things I thought I had forgotten keep popping up into my mind and they seem as vivid as the present. Time has collapsed, and the barrier between the past and present has broken down, it would appear.

Perhaps it’s not just the strange circumstances of 2020 that has caused this. It might also have something to do with my experience of major surgery in hospital during the summer of that year.   

It feels appropriate, then, to look at a poem where Thomas Hardy reflects on his past and the passage of time.

I heard this poem in an edition of the BBC Radio 3 programme Words and Music, entitled “The Haunted Landscape”. The readings are not identified, so I did not know who had written it. The effect was quite interesting; something about the poem made me think it was comparatively recent. The word “wagonette” called to mind an American station wagon.

I was quite surprised that the poem turned out to be by Hardy. That demonstrates quite neatly, I think, why his poetry has lasted. He gets to grips with fundamental things that do not change. Although a Victorian, his sensibility feels curiously modern.

As in some of his other poems, in this one he contrasts the history of the landscape with the personal history of the speaker of the poem.  

The date at the bottom tells us that it is one of his “poems of 1912–13”, a series of elegiac poems where Hardy remembers his first wife and looks back on their life together.  

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
   And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
   And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
         Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
   In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
   To ease the sturdy pony’s load
         When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
   Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―
Something that life will not be balked of
   Without rude reason till hope is dead,
         And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
   A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
   Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
         By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
   And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
   But what they record in colour and cast
         Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
   In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
   Remains on the slope, as when that night
         Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
   I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
   And I shall traverse old love’s domain
         Never again.

March 1913

Have his Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

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This is one of the later novels by Sayers featuring her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and was published in 1932. Detective novelist Harriet Vane is on a walking holiday in the west country when she discovers a dead body lying on a large rock on the beach. The corpse’s throat has been cut. She takes photographs and recovers some of the man’s possessions, but this remote spot is some distance from the nearest village. By the time the police have been summoned, the body has been washed out to sea.

Lord Peter arrives from London, where he has read about the case in the papers, and he and Harriet investigate the mystery together. They are able to find out the dead man’s identity and piece together the details of his life as a professional hotel dancer in the coastal resort of Wilvercombe. It appears that he had no reason to commit suicide; there is someone who had a reason for wanting him dead and so the case becomes a murder mystery. The two men encountered by Harriet on the shore, a hiker and a camper, become suspects and when the fatal razor is found it becomes a key piece of the puzzle.

There is something very appealing about stories of a man and woman investigating a crime together and this one brings to mind other detective duos such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple and Steve, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

I listened to a very good 1981 dramatization of this on BBC Radio 4 extra. Wimsey is played by Ian Carmichael and Harriet by Maria Aitken. In some ways, this has dated less than a TV adaptation from the same era might have done. On radio, there is none of that contrast between filmed exteriors and interior scenes shot on videotape that used to be the sign of a BBC TV drama series, for example.

Nonetheless, I don’t think a radio version made nowadays would come out quite like this. Ian Carmichael gives Wimsey a no-holds-barred, upper-class, huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ accent and Maria Aitken gives Harriet a clipped, rather Noel Coward way of speaking. This is all to the good as it suits the characters and the story perfectly.

Ian Carmichael had played Wimsey on television in the 1970s and perfectly captures the feeling that his mannerisms are all an act. In the earlier stories one felt this was a defence against his memories of the great war. Here, as he confesses at one point, it is to hide his true feelings about Harriet. He is in love with her, but she wants to retain her independence and repeatedly turns down his proposals of marriage. This is all complicated by the fact that they only met when Harriet was on trial for the murder of her lover. Wimsey solved the case, found the real killer and secured her acquittal. She hates feeling obliged to be grateful to him.

The relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter extends over four novels in the series, but it isn’t really necessary to know that to enjoy Have his Carcase as a standalone mystery. Yes, there is the slight irritation of the constant deference shown by everyone to Wimsey, the constant “my lording” by all and sundry. You just have to accept that as a sign that the book was published in a different era.

The part that really matters, the well-constructed mystery, retains its freshness. It isn’t easy to guess the outcome, even today, and the solution is highly ingenious. It’s basically an “impossible crime” mystery with a small circle of suspects, but something about the seaside setting gives it a very different feel to a mystery set in a country house. This is clearly the North Devon coast, with Wilvercombe standing in for Ilfracombe. Both the setting and the various characters are rendered with greater realism than was usual for this sort of story in 1932.

Then there is Wimsey himself. Under the “silly ass” act, he is a very shrewd individual indeed with a great knowledge of people. He is a little like a serious version of Bertie Wooster. Ian Carmichael really did make the role his own, both on radio and television. After all, he had already played Wooster by the time he came to play Wimsey.       

Ring Out, Wild Bells by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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If ever there was a year we wanted to say goodbye to, it is this one. This poem is part of Tennyson’s long elegy, In Memoriam A H H. It was inspired by the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in 1833 at the age of twenty-two, which led Tennyson to question his Christian faith. He thought it through for many years, before the poem was published in 1850.

The Ring Out, Wild Bells section comes near the end, where, after confronting his doubts, Tennyson has found his faith again. The bells of the local church are ringing in the New Year. We don’t have to be practising Christians to respond to the poem’s powerful and moving message of renewal, and hopes for better times to come.

Tennyson did not actually invent the unusual stanza form, but it has come to be so closely identified with his use of it in this long poem, that it is known as the “In Memoriam” stanza. As so often with Tennyson, if you read it aloud, it sounds like music. No other poet does that so well, in my opinion.       

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

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If you have never read anything by John le Carré I would recommend that you begin at the beginning. George Smiley arrived fully formed in John le Carré’s debut novel Call for the Dead, published in 1961. Everything that was to become so familiar about this much-loved character is there, right from the beginning. We learn how the academically inclined Smiley, who “had dreamed of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany” was recruited straight from Oxford into the nascent secret service in the 1930s.

He had been let go after a stressful undercover role during the second world war, but recalled to duty in the early days of the cold war. As this novel begins, Smiley is already middle-aged and somewhat at odds with his superiors, a rather marginalised figure. His role in this novel is more that of security officer than spy and may reflect le Carré’s own experiences in MI5. I think he might have had the real-life Portland spy ring, who were arrested at the beginning of 1961, in mind for this tale of spies passing on information in suburban Surrey.  

It’s apparent reading this novel now, that le Carré started his writing career in a very different world from the one we are used to today. It was published a mere fifteen years after the end of the second world war, after all. This is a time when displaced Jewish Germans are worried about the re-arming of West Germany and fear where it may lead. In fact, like so much of le Carré’s earlier fiction, there’s a sense that the real subject here is Germany. After all, Smiley’s love of German literature and language is le Carré’s own.

Smiley is called in to investigate Samuel Fennan, a civil servant who was a communist at Oxford in the 1930s, and who has been anonymously accused of being a spy. Smiley clears him in the vetting interview, but Fennan commits suicide that evening. If he had decided to kill himself, why did the man book an early morning alarm call for the next day?

Fennan’s wife is a concentration camp survivor. A German ex-agent of Smiley’s from the war years turns up in London, with tragic consequences. The introverted and scholarly Smiley may approach the business of counter-espionage as an academic exercise, but here he finds that danger has come to London, in the form of a network of East German spies. He is back in the field once again without leaving home.   

This is a taut, compact and atmospheric novel, only 160 pages or so, written in pin-sharp prose, very different to the more drawn-out style of his later novels. The key themes of loyalty and betrayal that will feature so prominently in the later novels are here. Le Carré’s descriptive talents and gift for believable dialogue are apparent at this early stage and his subtle feel for the nuances of English class distinctions makes its first appearance.

The downbeat atmosphere so associated with le Carré’s fiction is here, too. The only locations are a drab post-war London and its suburbs. It seems to be raining most of the time and the climactic scene takes place in the yellow London fog. Security is depicted as just another branch of the civil service, and a crucial conversation takes place in St James Park, a convenient place for those working in Whitehall to avoid being overheard.

We are told about Smiley’s troubled marriage to the wayward Ann. Characters are introduced who will feature in several future novels, Smiley’s younger colleague, Peter Guillam, and the dogged special branch officer, Mendel.

So much that le Carré was to develop further in later books appears here for the first time. There is Smiley’s prodigious memory, his ability to recall the numbers of all seven cars parked near his home in Bywater Street, Chelsea. The secret service is based in Cambridge Circus, and Guillam refers to it as “The Circus”.  The term “tradecraft”, a le Carré invention, meaning the mechanics of espionage, also originates here.

I am not sure if le Carré originally intended to write another novel about Smiley at this stage, because his career seems to be coming to an end even in this first book and it ends with his future uncertain. Fortunately for us, Smiley did resume his career as an intelligence officer. The events in Call for the Dead have a direct bearing on the plot of le Carré’s hugely successful 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which Smiley plays a minor role. Indeed, that later novel is actually a sort of sequel to the earlier one, Another good reason for starting at the beginning, with Call for the Dead.

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

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One of the few pleasures of this strangest of years has been re-discovering the works of Joseph Conrad. Here are my thoughts about his 1903 novella, Typhoon.

Captain MacWhirr is a man of absolutely no imagination. He is also a man of few words. When his chief mate, Mr Jukes, uses a figure of speech, he takes it literally, much to Jukes’ amusement. MacWhirr’s distrust of language applies to the written word, too. When the barometer drops alarmingly, promising extremely bad weather ahead, he consults a book in his cabin. The advice is to change course and avoid the storm altogether. MacWhirr cannot see the point of this, just as he did not when  he heard something similar spoken by a fellow captain. Lengthening the voyage will cost time and therefore money, so how can he justify to his owners a diversion to avoid a storm he has not actually seen? He decides to head straight on into the typhoon and power through it.

One always thinks of Conrad as a writer of the age of sail, but the ship here is actually a steamer. In every other way, though, we are in the pre-technology era. There is no radar and no wireless communication to warn of tricky conditions ahead.

When the storm hits, it is of a fury and violence that no-one on board has experienced before. They are dependent on themselves and the judgement of the captain. “Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from anyone on earth. Such is the loneliness of command.” Fixtures and fittings are swept from the deck by the fury of the gale. So much water falls on to the deck that Jukes believes himself to have been swept overboard at one point. If the wheelhouse or the funnel are lost, the ship will be helpless.

Pretty soon we are in that familiar Conrad territory of men battling the savage elements, while fearing that the ship may be plunged into oblivion at any moment. How do they hold their nerve when every moment could be their last?

This is described with that almost hallucinatory vividness that is so characteristic of Conrad’s writing. The reader feels as if they on that ship.        

In his author’s note, Conrad is careful to point out that this story did not derive from direct personal experience. Nonetheless, it is steeped in Conrad’s deep professional knowledge of the sea, ships and the kind of men who sail them.

It shows his mastery of the shorter forms and he skilfully expands our insight into the characters’ thoughts by including some of their letters to family and friends.

In many ways, it is the opposite to Lord Jim. In that novel of 1900, Jim has a romantic conception of himself, deriving from his reading of boys’ adventure fiction, as a man who will rise to the occasion when the moment of danger comes. When he submits to panic like the others, it shatters his idea of himself, and he takes drastic steps to atone for his failure.

Here, through sheer stubbornness and determination, MacWhirr faces the danger head on. He restores Jukes’ flagging resolve with these words: “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head.”

He even tries, in his way, to do the right thing by the Chinese coolies in the hold below, unlike Jim’s fellow sailors who abandon the pilgrims aboard the Patna to their fate.

As always with Conrad, there is a lot going on here and you certainly do not need to have read Lord Jim to appreciate Typhoon. It stands up by itself.

To his wife and grown-up daughters MacWhirr has become a distant figure, a mere financial provider. In a brief coda, Mrs Macwhirr is shown yawning over the letter her husband sends her describing his experiences in the typhoon. There is a certain irony in Conrad, that supreme man of words, giving us characters who place so little importance on language, whether spoken or written.                

Walter de la Mare looks back at childhood

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For many years, I avoided the writing of Walter de la Mare under the impression that he was a children’s author. He did write many poems and stories for children, but he also wrote for adults. In fact, his work rather blurs the distinction. The subtitle of his 1923 poetry anthology, Come Hither, makes this clear: “For the young of all ages”.

I suppose De la Mare is best known today for his adult short stories. These are often described as ghost stories, but the presence of the supernatural is so subtle and elusive, hinted at but barely seen, that they may disappoint those readers expecting something more conventionally spooky. You often finish a De la Mare story with a feeling of “what just happened there?”, but rather than being frustrating, this makes them all the more fascinating.

The Almond Tree is a story about a child written for adults. Indeed, it is a story about a child’s misunderstanding of the behaviour of the adults around him. It is not a ghost story, but shares the sense of mystery, the feeling that the explanation is there somewhere if only one could grasp it, that De la Mare’s ghost stories have.

As with a lot of De la Mare’s stores, it is quite difficult to convey the atmosphere of The Almond Tree. It is at first warmly nostalgic although it goes on to deal with a tragedy that is never fully explained.

The narrator is a man recalling his early childhood years as an only child at an isolated house in the deep countryside, with only adults for company. He observes his father’s absences from the household and feels the tension between his parents. He does not really understand that the lady his father introduces him to is his mistress.

As the situation worsens, so does the weather, and the climactic events of the story take place in a beautifully described wintry landscape.

Towards the end of the story, we realise what the boy has not understood – that his mother is pregnant. 

The main body of the story is framed by another narrative, that although short, is very important to our understanding of what has happened. Without giving too much away, there is a further twist. Two scraps of dialogue right at the end prompt us to think again and re-interpret some of what we have just read, and may possibly explain the source of the problems between the narrator’s parents.

De la Mare’s finely wrought prose style and narrative method do not make his work the easiest of reads. The reader has to do quite a lot of work, but for me the reward is worth the effort.

The Almond Tree gives you plenty to contemplate once you have laid it aside. Like other De la Mare stories, it reminds me quite strongly of the later stories of Rudyard Kipling, the ones that employ a similar method, where what is missing from the story, what is not said, is as important as what is said.

The Almond Tree was first published in 1923. I think it may have been quite influential on later writers, because I can see traces of it in Graham Greene’s story The Fallen Idol and L P Hartley’s novel The Go-Between.

There is an excellent 2010 BBC radio version of The Almond Tree, read by the actor Julian Wadham, whose voice suits the story perfectly. This was included in a series called Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare, rather oddly.

If the above makes you think that De la Mare’s writing might be for you, I have also written about another of his stories, The House. 

The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

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It can often be difficult to date a Hardy poem exactly. He wrote poems for many years before he started to publish them in the early twentieth century when his  career as a novelist began to wind down.

There is no such problem with The Darkling Thrush, because Hardy included a very specific date at the bottom of the poem. This confirms for us that the note of hope the speaker of the poem finds in the song of the bedraggled thrush, was a hope for the new twentieth century.

It’s one of Hardy’s best-known and best-loved poems, and it’s not hard to see why. With its strong rhythm and end rhymes it is powerfully musical, and a vivid evocation of a bleak, dead, and inhospitable wintry landscape. What is the message here? I think it is that when all seems lost, there is some hope, if only we can find it.

It’s a little early in the year for a winter poem, perhaps, but after the year we have all just experienced, Hardy’s song of hope speaks to us once more, as strongly as it ever did.   



The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
      The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

31 December 1900

Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich

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I haven’t written about a film for a while, but I enjoyed this one so much I really felt I had to. Night Train to Munich is an earlier film directed by Carol Reed, now most famous for The Third Man.

Rex Harrison plays a British agent who impersonates a German officer in order to exfiltrate a Czech engineer and his daughter from Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the second world war. His manner is very characteristically English: flippant on the surface and deadly serious underneath.

This 1940 film is best described as a comedy thriller. If you like the earlier sort of spy fiction, the chances are you will enjoy this, because it feels like a compendium of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Sapper. Indeed, at one point our hero says “I’m not Bulldog Drummond, you know”. It’s also an example of that genre of films and novels set on long-distance trains that flourished in the 1930s.

One of the things that is striking about this film today is the strength of the anti-Nazi propaganda message. No opportunity to either ridicule or criticise the Nazi regime is missed. It’s depicted as a mixture of brutality and absurd bureaucracy. Early scenes take place in a concentration camp, at this stage depicted as a place for political prisoners. Even Mein Kampf is sent up: “They give a copy to bridal couples over here.” “I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old boy.” It’s almost shocking to hear Harrison, in his guise as a loyal Nazi, say that “England is controlled by the masons and the jew Churchill”.

An awful lot is packed into a suspenseful and brisk ninety minutes or so and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace, with several clever plot twists, and one in particular that is a real surprise, even today.

I found myself thinking that this is like a Bond film before there were Bond films, and indeed, wondering if Ian Fleming saw it. The finale on the Swiss border will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Where Eagles Dare, so again, I wonder if Alistair Maclean saw the earlier film at some point.

The film has been considered as a sort of follow-up to the earlier and more famous The Lady Vanishes, also written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the scriptwriters here. Despite the repeat appearance of the Charters and Caldicott characters and Margaret Lockwood, I think the resemblance is overstated. For a start, despite the title, far less of Night Train to Munich actually takes place on the train. Carol Reed’s directorial style is also quite different to Hitchcock’s, grittier and more realistic and this, as well as the urgency of the wartime situation, gives the film a very different atmosphere.

John Buchan wrote that thrillers should have “a story that marches just within the bounds of the possible” and that is very much the case here. If you fancy a bit of lockdown escapism, Night Train to Munich is available free on Amazon Prime.