Talking Pictures TV yesterday showed what they implied was the discovery of a lost film. Murder in Reverse (released as Query in the US) was in the UK cinemas in 1945, but I saw it on television in the 1950s so one wonders what caused it to disappear.
It was notable for William Hartnell's billing above the title, a rare distinction for someone who was known mainly as a reliable character actor before Dr Who made him a star for a new generation. There was solid backing from others in the cast, part of a virtual UK film repertory company of the time: John Slater, Brefni O'Rourke, Jimmy Hanley, Kynaston Reeves, Edward Rigby and John Salew. There was also an early appearance for Petula Clark.
The plot was a pre-echo of 1999's Double Jeopardy: someone is imprisoned for murder or manslaughter while the victim remains very much alive. On release, there is a search for the man who caused the miscarriage of justice. That is where the similarities end. In the 1945 film, Masterick has to give up his young daughter for adoption on his imprisonment. The young reporter who campaigns unsuccessfully on his behalf and his wife adopt the child as their own, with Masterick's agreement that she will never know her real parentage. The flashback is narrated by the reporter who has become his paper's editor. In the film, since Jill Masterick is already an alert schoolchild (a 12-year-old Clark playing 8) at the time of Masterick's arrest, this does stretch credulity. One wonders whether this was to allow the 25-year-old Dinah Sheridan (Hanley's wife at the time) to play a significant part in the plot whereas a more plausible 15-year-old might not, or whether it was to give Clark a leg-up. Or maybe the flaw was in the original short story on which the film was based?
This is when one of those rabbit-holes, to which I am addicted, opens up. The film is set contemporaneously so that Masterick would have been in Dartmoor since 1930, neatly straddling the war. The original story, "Query", is set in 1926 establishing the crime as being committed in 1911, again avoiding war years. It also makes more plausible the mis-identification of a body at a time when criminal pathology was not as advanced as it must have been in 1930.
The author was Austin Small, who lived from 1894 - 15 January 1929. Where he came from or how he died so young is still a mystery. He wrote prolifically as Seamark in the UK, though under his own name in the US, This is the most complete biography I have found:
In the days before radio and rapid transportation Seamark (Austin James Small, fl. 1919-29) roamed the wastelands of the world - mainly the Yukon and up to the Arctic Circle, but also around the Pacific, across the Kalahari, and through West Africa's fever-belt. He served in the British Royal Navy during the First World War and was in several actions, notably the attack on the German submarine pens at Zeebrugge.
He was a prolific short-story writer for the fiction magazines of the early 1920s, at one stage appearing in 20-Story Magazine under his own name as well as his somewhat obscure pseudonym (1. Landmark visible from the sea, navigational guide; 2. a coastline's upper tidal limit). He put a great deal of his own experience of the gruelling side of life into his stories, which are vivid and vigorously told, with just the right amount of sentiment and melodrama to appeal to his audience.
Coming under the spell of the thriller writer Edgar Wallace, in his last books he wrote of vast global conspiracies and insane criminals who used super-science to gain their ends: Master Vorst [1926]; The Man They Couldn't Arrest [1927]; The Avenging Ray [1930].
The rest of his work may well be worth mining for TV or film drama, especially as he is now well out of copyright.
