Some prolific 20th century authors sink almost without trace.
I’m thinking of a man whose books I read avidly as a teenager. Apparently he wrote more than six hundred novels using more than twenty-eight pseudonyms giving Barbara Cartland (723 books) a run for her money. She has DBE and DStJ after her name; he has MBE and he got that, to his credit, for services to the UK National Savings movement in World War II; not for writing pulp fiction. Incidentally, Barbara Cartland earned a place in The Guinness Book of Records for writing twenty-three novels in 1976. I don’t want to split hairs but the author of which I treat today had twenty-nine books published in 1937.
Most of his books were published under his real name: John Creasey. I had completely forgotten about him and am as unlikely to re-read his books as those of Alistair MacClean or Dennis Wheatley. However, I was gripped when The Toff and the Runaway Bride was serialised on Radio 4 Extra last week. It was of course an old recording, nearly fifty years old and the book had been published in 1959. It creaked in the way a fine old wooden boat does; and it was as enjoyable as sailing in such a craft.
If you can remember The Marowitz Hamlet we were probably in the same house at school. It was our house play in 1971. It had been written in 1968 and televised in 1969. Hamlet, by Shakespeare, is not an easy play, as condensed by Charles Marowitz it is baffling. On the plus side, Marowitz’s version is shorter. Another more appealing version of Hammers is being serialised on Radio 4 Extra now; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This is Tom Stoppard’s “absurdist, existential tragicomedy”; a flight of fancy performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966 when he was a precocious 29 year old. I’m looking forward to hearing it over the next few wet March days: “the play’s the thing … “