Chapter 1: What challenges do writers face when adapting their work for the screen?
Being a writer is a funny business. You work alone most of the time. Sometimes that work just involves staring blankly into space. And even once your project is finally released to the world, it can be hard to gauge if you've done well. Some would say that just getting a book published at all is an achievement. But there are so many other potential benchmarks that the waters get a little muddy.
What was the advance? Did it sell? Is there going to be a sequel? Is anyone translating it? Did you win awards? It's easy to get a bit lost among it all. There is one near-universal milestone for a writer, though, that everyone understands as a sign that you've made it, and that's having your book adapted for the screen.
The process is so convoluted and expensive that it's honestly a miracle that anything ever gets made. So if your book is thus chosen, it means you've ascended to a new level as a writer. Or at least, that's the popular assumption. Dorothy L. Sayers felt differently.
In the mid-1930s, when she was arguably at the height of her powers as a detective novelist, she worked on a cinematic outing for Lord Peter Whimsey. It was the next logical step for such a popular and beloved character. Except his creator hated the results so much that she vowed never to dabble in film ever again. This is the story of The Silent Passenger. Welcome to She Done It.
I'm Caroline Crampton.
The 1930s was a very busy time for Dorothy L Sayers. She had finally handed in her notice at her full-time job, the advertising agency Benson's, in August of 1929, in order to write full-time. And as anyone who has left full-time employment for the freelance life knows, the anxiety about where the next bit of money is going to come from is hard to quell.
She worked furiously through the next few years, putting out at least a detective novel a year, as well as short stories, and increasingly as the decade went on, plays and non-fiction too. She and Antony Barclay also co-founded the Detection Club in 1930 and and she played a big part in its various collaborative publications over the next few years.
These included the round-robin novel The Floating Admiral in 1931, and the co-authored volume Ask a Policeman in 1934, in which members swapped detectives and had them solve a mystery plotted by John Rode. Sayers took the reins of Barclay's Roger Sheringham for a memorable send-up of the amateur sleuth's familiar style.
The novels that she put out during these few years stack up among her best, too. Strong Poison and the Documents in the Case in 1930, The Nine Taylors in 1934, and of course, Gordie Knight in 1935. Whimsy shifts from being the silly-ass gentleman about town into being that and more. He meets Harriet Vane in 1930, and more of his psychology comes to the surface.
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Chapter 2: How did Dorothy L. Sayers feel about her first film adaptation?
She produced a story she called The Silent Passenger, which was duly sent off to Basil Mason, and at some point she also met with the actor Peter Haddon, who was considering whether to accept the role of Peter Whimsey. Haddon was about the right age for Whimsey, being 37 in 1935, and had been educated at Caius College, Cambridge, before going on the stage.
His film career, especially at this point, came second to his theatrical work, but in 1934 he had appeared in another Reginald Denham Phoenix Films project, Death at Broadcasting House, also adapted by Basil Mason from the murder mystery novel by Val Gailgood and Holt Marvel.
Val, the older brother of the actor John Gailgood, was good friends with Sayers and eventually elected to the Detection Club in 1947, the same year as Edmund Crispin. Death at Broadcasting House had been a relative success, especially given its low budget and quick shooting time. It drew heavily on the BBC experiences of its two writers.
Val Gailgood was a prolific producer of radio dramas, and Holt Marvel was the pen name of Eric Mashvitz, the director of BBC Light Entertainment. You might also know Mashvitz's work as a lyricist, because he wrote the words for songs including A Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square.
The film has a great opening scenario, with an actor murdered during the live recording of a radio play, so that the show's purported 25 million listeners are witnesses to the crime, alongside the cast and crew at the BBC.
I'm sure that everyone at Phoenix Films thought that they could repeat this formula with The Silent Passenger, with Reginald Denham directing a script by Basil Mason, and Peter Haddon starring, this time as Whimsy. Unfortunately, they hit a bump in the road before they even shot a yard of film, and that bump's name was Dorothy L. Sayers.
To say that she didn't like Basil Mason's script is an understatement. it would be more accurate to say that she hated it, with a violent passion. We know this because in March 1935, she wrote to Peter Haddon to update him on the progress of the film, telling him that she had advised her agents to withdraw her consent for her name or whimsies to be used in connection with the film.
She felt that Mason and the producers had so utterly ignored her story that she could have nothing more to do with it. Her whimsy had been rewritten as a kind of lounge lizard, she said, and he now bore very little relation to the character that her readers knew from her books.
The size of his role had also been diminished, and she advised Haddon that he should not accept the part in its current form. She said she was willing to revise the script herself, but that it was unclear how willing the producers would be for her to do so, and if they would accept her modifications. The tone of the letter is bitter.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the 1930s for Dorothy L. Sayers' career?
A man and a woman are waiting in a London railway hotel for the departure of the boat train. She's been scandalously carrying on with him behind her husband's back, and he's now blackmailing her into fleeing with him.
Soon we realise that this man has multiple blackmail rackets on the go, and so it's not that surprising when he's dispatched from this life and the body hidden in his own trunk within the first few minutes of the film.
Then there are some travel-based shenanigans, during which we see that Whimsy and Bunta are coincidentally travelling on the same train – it's not a coincidence at all, they're investigating the blackmailer – and so they are present when the body is discovered by French customs.
The husband of the woman who had been absconding with the blackmailer is immediately grabbed as the most likely suspect, but Whimsy believes in his innocence and spends the rest of the film trying to prove it. The story is sound, if not that thrilling.
It brings to mind various other staples of the things-hidden-in-luggage mystery subgenre, such as Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Spanish Chest and The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts. It also made me think of the Sayers' short story The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question from Lord Peter Views the Body, in which Whimsy has a similar role to play at French Customs.
There's one clumsy bit of clueing around the murder weapon in The Silent Passenger that I feel wasn't really worthy of sayers, but largely as an hour-long screen mystery, it's not half bad. Dorothy L. Sayers would probably hate me saying this, given her poor relationship with the filmmakers, but the best thing about The Silent Passenger is the direction.
Reginald Denham makes some interesting choices that elevate the picture. The first five minutes are completely free of dialogue, for instance, which makes the viewer focus completely on the details of the train journey that is unfolding. There's some good use of shadow and silhouette for depicting a violent moment,
and I like the use of rapid string music and quickly interspersed shots of newspapers and Fleet Street to get us through some investigative exposition.
And there are a couple of moments that are genuinely funny, such as when Molly, the flight risk wife, settles down to read a murder mystery for relaxation during a boring moment in the investigation of her husband for murder, and also when Whimsy and Bunter are travelling by train and the former puts his hand on the latter's knee to stop him twitching nervously.
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