For me, the broadcasting highlight of the holiday season was on the radio rather than the television. It was the play Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton. Actually, it wasn’t on the radio; it is a BBC recording from a few years ago that someone had kindly loaded on to YouTube.
A little research revealed that this was written for radio in 1937, shortly before Hamilton’s great stage success Gaslight. It is a gripping suspenseful piece, quite short and essentially a two-hander, a series of increasingly disturbing telephone calls. As the title suggests, it becomes clear that what we are dealing with here is blackmail. Part of the fascination for Hamilton admirers is the slow, insinuating way that “Mr Poland” tortures his victim. He talks round the subject in his dry voice and refuses to come to the point, stringing out the agony. It is almost Pinteresque.
This sort of thing features strongly in Hamilton’s novels. I am thinking of Mr Thwaites in The Slaves of Solitude, whose victims are stuck with him at the breakfast table. It might almost be a grown-up Ralph Gorse on the other end of the line. Those unfamiliar with this nasty piece of work, can make his acquaintance in my post about The West Pier.
The mechanics of suspense are worked out very cleverly. We are in the world where telephones were situated at a specific place, not carried in one’s pocket. The blackmailer leads his victim in a merry dance around the west end of London, from one phone booth to another. The telephone call provides many possibilities for radio drama. How do we know that the person on the other end of the line is who they claim to be? Francis Durbridge used this sort of thing to great effect in his Paul Temple series.
Thinking further along these lines reminded me of Ford Madox Ford’s 1912 novel, A Call. As far as I know, that was the first novel where the plot depended on the use of the telephone.
Without giving too much away about Money With Menaces, what seems to be increasingly absurd turns out to have a logical explanation. There have been later works on a similar theme by Roald Dahl and William Boyd.
I thoroughly recommend this as a gripping forty minutes or so on the radio – or should I say wireless?
The Good Reader 