The Silent Passenger Transcript

Caroline: 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 you've "made it", and that's having your book adapted for the screen. The process is so convoluted and expensive that it's a miracle 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 Wimsey. 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 every again.

This is the story of The Silent Passenger.

Music

Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Music

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 Anthony Berkeley also co-founded the Detection Club in 1930 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 Rhode. Sayers took the reins of Berkeley'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 Tailors in 1934, and of course, Gaudy Night in 1935. Wimsey 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. Not everyone takes success as an opportunity to experiment and innovate — some writers are more than content to keep producing more of the same thing that their readers love. Sayers wasn't one of them, though. She kept trying new things, not always so successfully, as her foray into Freeman Wills Crofts-style unbreakable alibi fiction with 1931's The Five Red Herrings showed. One of her most important moves, though, was towards drama, with the Wimsey play Busman's Honeymoon that she worked on with her friend the historian Muriel St Clare Byrne.

Sayers was excited about this project, which saw Wimsey and Vane take on a case on their honeymoon in the English countryside. Only problem? She had to get them married first, and that required her to write a novel that would bridge the gap from where she left Wimsey at the end of The Nine Tailors. That meant Gaudy Night, written at the same time as they were working on the play. And just to prove that it never rains but it pours, around this same time Sayers got an approach from the film studio MGM. They wanted to pay her $10,000 for the rights to make a Hollywood film of Murder Must Advertise, an amount of money that is worth about £90,000 today. She declined, preferring to keep a closer eye on her sleuth. The offer did show that there was most definitely potential for her to explore film adaptations, though, and she ended up in discussions with Phoenix Films, a British production company, about making a Wimsey film.

Although this was the first time Sayers had got this far in the film-making process, it wasn't actually her first contact with the film business. Right at the start of the 1920s, when she was working as a teacher at a London school and writing in her free time, she met socially a film producer named Cyril Mannering, who suggested that she try her hand at writing some scenarios that could be sold to producers for their screenwriters to work up into full pictures. He assured her it was a well-paying business, if done right. Full of enthusiasm for writing work that actually paid, Sayers had a go and produced a couple of options for him, including one based on the Spanish novel Blood and Sand by Vicente Blasco Ibañez. I haven't been able to confirm whether she actually got paid for either of these, or if they ever resulted in actual films, but I think the fact that she stopped trying to do it pretty quickly speaks for itself.

The discussions with Phoenix Films did go somewhere, though. Once again, Sayers undertook to provide the story, which would then be turned into a script by a screenwriter – in this case Basil Mason. Mason was a fairly prolific presence in the British film industry of the 1930s and 40s, although I must say that I, a non film buff, had not heard of a single one of his over thirty films. He worked quite a bit with the director Reginald Denham, though, who also ended up helming the Sayers project. A fun little bit of extra trivia for you: Denham was the first husband of Irish actress Moyna Macgill, who after their divorce married Edgar Lansbury and had a daughter, Angela, who ended up being fairly prominent in the world of mystery cinema herself.

Anyway, in 1934 and 1935, Dorothy L. Sayers had a lot on her plate: Busman's Honeymoon, Gaudy Night, and now this film as well. 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 Wimsey. Haddon was about the right age for Wimsey, 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, Death at Broadcasting House, also adapted by Basil Mason from the murder mystery novel by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell. Val, the older brother of the actor John Gielgud, 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 Gielgud was a prolific producer of radio dramas and Holt Marvell was the penname of Eric Maschwitz, the Director of BBC Light Entertainment. You might also know Maschwitz's work as a lyricist, because he wrote the words for song including "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley 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, with Peter Haddon taking on the role as Wimsey this time. 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 did not 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 Wimsey's 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 Wimsey 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: it's not hard to feel her frustration at how much time this project has already consumed, only for it to come out far below the standard she had been expecting. The stakes probably felt all the higher to Sayers because this was her first attempt at a film adaptation. If it went well, there could be a lucrative series or franchise to follow. If it went poorly, it might have a ripple effect on her status in the publishing world, especially in America, or even put people off her books in future. From her point of view, no film was definitely better than a bad film.

Ad break

Against the odds, The Silent Passenger did get made. Sayers was able to compromise with the producers and beef up Wimsey's part again, as well as removing some of the dialogue that was so egregious to her. It was shot at Ealing Studios in London and released on 11th November 1935 — a nice coincidence for fans of Sayers' earlier novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

So, what is it like, this first outing for Peter Wimsey on screen? Having read about it before I watched it, I was braced for scenery-chewing awfulness, and then pleasantly surprised when no such thing occurred. The film is short, just over an hour, and as the title suggests, focused on a railway journey. 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 and the body hidden in his own trunk within the first few minutes. Then there are some travel based shenanigans, during which we see that Wimsey and Bunter 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 Wimsey believes in his innocence and spends the rest of the film proving it.

The story is sound, if not that thrilling. It brings to mind various other staples of the "things hidden in luggage" 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 Wimsey has a similar role to play at customs. There is 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 a 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 liked the use of rapid string music and quickly interspersed shots of newspapers and Fleet Street to quickly get through some investigative exposition. And there are a couple of moments that are genuinely funny, such as when Mollie, the flight risk wife, settles down to read a murder mystery during a boring moment in the investigation of her husband for murder, and when Wimsey and Bunter are travelling by train and the former puts his hand on the latter to stop him twitching nervously. The big finale is somewhat cliché, with the miscreant chased down in a railway yard and a fight scene that takes place while a steam engine inexorably rolls towards the combatants, but sometimes you just need that in a 1930s film. It works.

Which brings me on to what doesn't, and that's Peter Haddon's performance as Peter Wimsey. Some of the wrongness is the script, it's true — his dialogue isn't funny or charming or suave in the way it should be. Even with the modifications, he's so unlike the book Wimsey that I think you wouldn't recognise him if the name was taken away. There's a moment early on where he has to flirt slightly with a hotel receptionist and the slightly leering quality to it is quite repellant. But other bad things about it are definitely down to Haddon. He affects a slow, drawling manner of speech that mostly just makes him sound drunk, and it also completely throws of the rhythm of the dialogue. Everyone else is doing your classic 1930s rat-a-tat-tat, while Haddon's in a completely different register. It's interesting to contrast what Sayers says in their correspondence about how she wants Wimsey to be a really meaty, dramatic part for him with what he ends up actually doing on screen. The two don't really bear much relation to each other.

But what did the critics at the time think of The Silent Passenger? They were almost universally positive, from what I can make out — although they were clearly measuring the film against the fairly low standard of a quickie hour-long mystery, rather than as a great work of cinema. The story was praised everywhere and Picturegoer magazine even went as far as to call it an "extremely well-made detective drama". From a reputational standpoint, at least, Sayers could breathe a sigh of relief and draw a line under the whole thing. Despite all the problems, she and Wimsey had largely escaped unscathed. And the arrival of Gaudy Night would soon wipe it from memories.

Dorothy L. Sayers did not forget, though. Just a few months after The Silent Passenger, she wrote to her literary agent Nancy Pearn to say that she wouldn't be doing a film again for any amount of money, unless she had complete control over the script and the casting. She was slightly more circumspect later on in 1936 when more interest came from America, but she still directed her agents to say that she would only discuss further Wimsey adaptations if the final say on the character remained with her. She was willing to work with a company that granted her that privilege, but obviously nobody wanted to, because other than a filmed version of the Busman's Honeymoon play in 1940, there were no more Wimsey films made. And I suppose, in a way, we have The Silent Passenger to thank for that.

There are lots of reasons why The Silent Passenger didn't turn out well, and at least some of them come back to Dorothy L. Sayers herself. Her correspondence shows that, other than with a few trusted people, she could be a prickly and intractable collaborator. She went into the project fearing that it would not turn out well, and was proved right. No wonder she lost her appetite for future attempts.

But perhaps there is a larger problem with putting Lord Peter Wimsey on screen, so that even had the production process been smooth, the results would still have been disappointing. On the page, it's easier to navigate Wimsey's complexities and contradictions. He's a wealthy aristocrat with a penchant for detecting among the lower classes, a man carrying severe trauma from his war service who can nonetheless project authority in any room, and someone who frequently affects a silly voice and manner yet is magnetically attractive. Oh, and he speaks in a polyglot muddle of quotations that even the most well-read person in real life would need a reference library and several hours to decode.

Translating all of this onto the screen and making it seem natural in a contemporary, non-fantasy setting, is a formidable challenge for a writer. And an even bigger one for the actor who has to embody it all on screen. When I think about the Wimsey-era detectives who have been reincarnated over and over again on screen, they're ones who can be boiled down to a few easy-to-access traits — the moustache, the little grey cells, justified arrogance. The character might be deeper than that, but the surface level portrayal is less complicated. It's an easier sell.

Sayers fans have always been a bit sore that there have been so few attempts to adapt her books for the screen, relatively speaking, and none since the Edward Petherbridge-Harriet Walters in 1987. I'm one of those fans. But after watching The Silent Passenger and exploring Sayers' fraught history with it, I feel a little less aggrieved. She preferred to preserve her character rather than seek the validation of the film industry. And maybe she was right to do so: perhaps Lord Peter Wimsey is better off staying on the page, where he can be exactly as complicated and quixotic and confusing as his creator intended him to be.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. Special thanks to past guest Sergio Angelini for his assistance with the research.

There are links to all the books and stories referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thesilentpassenger. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly Shedunnit newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. It's the best way to get more murder mystery reading recommendations and know what's coming up on the podcast before anyone else.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.