|
JACK TREVOR STORY |
OBITUARY FROM THE INDEPENDENT December 1991 |
JACK
TREVOR STORY was a writer more often in the news for his complicated
private life than for the books he wrote. His books (even his Sexton
Blake detective stories) were idiosyncratic enough;
his lifestyle
thumpingly so. There can have been, surely, few popular writers (as a
breed a fairly conservative bunch) who at one time shared a council
house with both wife and, for want of a better word, mistress, all three
having signed a contract setting out
future nocturnal
arrangements by rota, the fruits of
both
unions squashed up in the remaining bedrooms. Story
cheerfully thumbed his nose at the conventions and, like all genuine naifs,
was
always mildly puzzled when things —
as
they had a habit of doing --
got
out
of hand.
His invariable response to a trying domestic situation was to flee,
usually in the direction of someone younger, in some cases
preposterously younger.
He
seemed to spend his life fleeing —
from
wives, not-quite-wives, responsibilities, tax
inspectors —
and
never quite making it (his first wife Evelyn was still doing his washing
20-odd years after he had left her). He certainly never escaped the
Inland Revenue, who were the cause of his two famous bankruptcies. But
those were perhaps acts
of revenge on the
Revenue’s part at
his
incorrigibility. Over the years
Story’s books
rarely made money (once he received a royalty cheque for 72p), as he was
always very careful, at least in the public prints, to point out. But he
was even more circumspect about his earnings from films and television
series, rarely mentioning the rather large sums that went spectacularly
astray during the good
years
of the late Fifties and Sixties
(like the
£9,000
that
ran through his improvident fingers in New York in 1968). Perhaps most
of Story’s troubles could be placed at Alfred Hitchcock’s door.
Hitchcock bought the film rights to his first book,
The
Trouble With Harry (1949,
a black comedy about trying to dispose of an unwanted corpse) for £100
and then dealt them on to Paramount for over $20,000, of which Story
received not a cent. A shock to the psyche like that is enough to
destroy the financial sensibilities of a saint.
He
was always a writer, his first
published
work appearing in Electronics
and Instrumentation, because
after an assortment of jobs (butcher’s boy, clerk, lathe operator: a
period richly evoked in his autobiographical novel Hitler
Needs
You,
1970)
he had joined Marconi Instruments, becoming an electronics designer,
later head of special products, later still editor of their house
journal. He could still spout convincingly about conductivity
calibration and silver/silver/chloride-calomel cell chains 30 years
later.
While
at Marconi’s, and chiefly inspired by the American writer William
Saroyan (about whom he could get mildly tedious unless gagged), he began
selling neatly-turned short-shorts. He wrote Protection
For a Lady (1951),
a gangster-and-jazz novel whose only merit was that it did not read like
Peter Cheyney, and Green To
Pagan Street (1952), a
not too sentimental East End slice-of-life. Going freelance on the
strength of these he discovered that proper novelists do not make an
awful lot of money, and began hammering out pulp Westerns —
Pinetop
Jones: Fugitive, Blood
Feud, South of
Arroyo, etc
—
under
the name “Bret Harding”, urged on by his then “wife” Ross Woods
who also wrote Westerns, only better.
By
the mid-1950s he had two families to support (Evelyn plus five children,
Ross plus three) and writing short stories, scripting newspaper strips,
and becoming the editor of a magazine the month before the owner went
bankrupt, hardly covered the rent for one (the menage a trois
had
by now bifurcated). His fortunes revived when he began a six-year
association with the Sexton Blake Library during which he wrote 20
excellent Blakes and found his style (a distinctive blend of black farce
and comic paranoia).
At
the same time he wrote successful films for Anna Neagle and Herbert
Wilcox (Those
Dangerous Years, 1957,
Heart of
a Man, 1959,
Wonderful
Things), scripts
for a multitude of television series (including No
Hiding
Place, Dixon, Danger
Man and
Budgie),
as
well as what some consider his finest comic novels, the Albert Argyle
trilogy: Live
Now Pay Later (1963),
Something
For Nothing (1963)
and The
Urban
District
Lover
(1964).
Went
the day well? Due to his extraordinary capacity for self-sabotage, by no
means. He was a libidinous —
and
charming —
man,
and quite often events unrolled as they did (disastrously) simply
because he fancied an afternoon with
the
curtains closed. Film offers began to dry up and his television ideas,
never conventional,
became wilder and more unusable; on the domestic front plate-throwing
was a not uncommon occurrence.
In
a sense the best of times was the period (late Sixties/early Seventies)
when he inhabited a room overlooking Hampstead Heath with a poodle
(legacy of his exgirlfriend Jan, who had sensibly escaped to the
Channel Islands) and Maggie (30 years his junior), writing a hilarious
weekly column for The Guardian detailing their life together on
the edge of catastrophe. When Maggie left him, readers breathlessly
tuned in each Saturday to his state of mind, groaning at his failures,
cheering when he met Elaine (40 years his junior; later, for a time, his
second, legal, wife). The books-of-the-column, Letters
To
An Intimate Stranger (1972)
and Jack On The Box (1979), are among his most entertaining.
He
briefly flirted with the New Wave in British science fiction (pessimism
and apocalypse) and propagandists for the genre such as Mike Moorcock
(erstwhile subeditor on the Sexton Blake Library) hailed him as a
kindred spirit. But Story’s comedy had already taken on a bleaker
tinge after a night in December 1968 when he was dragged into Notting
Hill police station for a breathalyser test, emerging the next morning
on crutches.
This
traumatic experience was duly recycled into his fiction, for all
Story’s novels were autobiographical in the sense that they were
like a tracing of his life done with an unsteady hand. Nearly everything
that befell his narrators (chronic debt, film-scripting, wives, girls,
living on a caravan site) had happened, more or less, to him —
though
friends’ activities could sometimes spark off a useful idea.
A
little comic masterpiece was The Money Goes Round and Round (1958), a
fictionalised account of how a fellow pulp writer tried to smuggle into
England a fortune in thousand-peseta notes in the wheels of his car. He
became a public figure —
a
consulting bankrupt, ever to be relied on for a quote calculated to
enrage the prodnoses; the bloke to ring if you wanted a good,
self-mocking line on the trials and tribulations of leading a double
life. A hankerer after young girls (his record was probably —though
who knows? —
an
age-gap of 50 years between him and consenting partner), his fame
inevitably rubbed off on his various consorts, rarely to their
disadvantage (though one or two seemed later to forget they had taken
Story on with their eyes firmly open). Jack
Trevor Story was a maverick in a greying world. He was also —
this
has to be admitted —
often
utterly irresponsible, at any rate where dependants were concerned. Yet
most in the end —
family,
friends, ex-inamoratas, editors, producers (though probably not the
Revenue) —
forgave
him his sins.
His
later work was increasingly fantastic, bizarre, off the wall. Up
River, which dealt hilariously with a KGB experiment causing a
plague of permanent erections in
the
West, actually got published. A novel concerning Frank Harris in cahoots
with the Dutch Bulb Growers’ Association in a plot to unseat the
Kaiser did not. Alas. It
would be foolish to exaggerate his literary status. Many loathed his
books. Yet there are those who judged him to be, at his best and with
all cylinders firing, one of the most inventive comic writers Britain
has produced. Copyright
© the Independent 1991 |