Ellery Queen - A Study in Terror (Lancer, 1966: 1969)
SOLVED!
The savage killer roamed the dark streets and alleys of London. No woman was safe from his swift, gory attacks as murder followed murder. No man could stop the menace or even guess the identity of the brute called...
JACK THE RIPPER
No man...except Sherlock Holmes.
Now it can be told -- in this gripping modern thriller. Sherlock Holmes did stalk Jack the Ripper in 1888, and through a quirk of fate that is a mystery in itself, Ellery Queen follows in his footsteps in 1966. The two greatest detectives of all time match wits with each other -- and together arrive at a solution that will stun you. Watched the film on the box the other night and loved it for the gloriously cliched, beautiful rubbish it is.
A wonderful, gratuitously violent opening: A silk clad tart chirps "'allo darlin. Like a bit of fun?" in the shadows of the
Angel & Crown: the Whitechapel murderer strikes and leaves his knife stuck clean through her throat. An older woman passes and yells "'P'lice! P'lice! 'elp! Murder!" and we're off into the opening titles. As far as I can make out, this gruesome business with the embedded blade makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the film - the Ripper uses a scalpel - but what does it matter? There's also a truly weird cameo from Barbara Windsor whose performance as the doomed Annie Chapman is inseparable from her
Carry On persona (which makes the Babs gets stabbed moments truly shocking) and loads of Cockerney malarkey including a load of classic "ta-ra-ra boom ba-ay!" sing-a-long bollocks dahn the local. The plot is creaky, it incorporates the "facts" only to get them wrong, and Holmes runs like a gurly, but I'd take
A Study In Terror over ten poker-faced
From Hell's any day you care to mention.
The novelisation: well, the first time I read it, I didn't get along with it at all, and now I've reached the half-way stage during the rematch it's easy to see why - the framing story. This being an Ellery Queen novel, he's been grafted into the story, and his inclusion is a distraction as far as I'm concerned. We catch up with him as he's struggling with his latest novel. His playboy friend Grant Amos III has been passed a manuscript by a mystery woman, and this purports to be an unpublished story by Dr. Watson. Between typing up his own detective caper, phoning his dad in Bermuda and bandying insults with Amos, EQ runs through the paper, trying to establish whether or not it's a hoax.
The Holmes versus the Ripper stuff is far more engrossing although so far the murders themselves have been skipped over. We know five have taken place and Holmes takes them seriously enough to call a temporary truce with his old sparring partner Lestrade. There's enough variation from the Fords' screenplay to give it at least some semblance of coherence (like Robert Bloch's
The Night Of The Ripper the film is festooned with red herrings), and Sherlock even comes over all fallible - he is indirectly responsible for Polly Nichols' death when he mistakes Watson for the Ripper (Watson, stung by Holmes kid-gloves treatment had visited
The Angel & Crown under his own steam, and had been chatted-up by the victim to be for his trouble: "Ere's luck, luv. If yer don't want me lily-white body, yer don't. But yer a good bloke, and I wish yer the best."). Most of the suspects are now in the frame, so if we can get through the remaining chapters with a minimum of interruptions from Quinn and Amos things should be OK.
pulphackIs it a novelisation? I've never seen a copy, but I was under the impression that the Queen version came first, and the movie was a piece of rights plundering?
Sounds quite irritating, really: Queen was always schoolmarm'ish, and I'd probably skip over those bits. The film, on the other hand, is a gem: lots of cliche, but non-stop fun and like Murder By Decree without the the pretensions.
demonikYeah, it's a novelisation as far as I can tell and the Ellery Queen sites seem to agree. I'm reading it from the Martin Greenberg anthology
Red Jack, but there seem to have been several editions.
Queen is getting on my nerves and, to crown it all, he evidently points out where Holmes has got it
all wrong at the end - you big silly, Sherlock! - which is certainly something to look forward to. Gimme De Grandin over him every time.
I love
Murder By Decree: say what you will about his "research", but it would have been a travesty if the Stephen Knight version of events hadn't been used as the basis for at least one movie and
Decree is pretty close! Matter of fact, it's been a few years since I read the Robert Weverka novelisation, so I guess that's next on the agenda ....
marksamuelsDem
I enjoyed that film too. The thing was a really good romp and almost had a Hammer Horror atmosphere about it. The only thing that bugged me (apart from the omelette on one side of Lady Carfax's face) was the casting of Holmes. The whole time I was thinking; "surely Peter Cushing was available for this role?"
All best
Mark
pulphackBlimey, was the Queen franchise so on its uppers in the mid-sixties that they were reduced to novelisations when they used to have movies based on them? I'm surprised, both by that and by the fact that they were allowed to fuck around with the project so much. Unless, of course, some bright spark thought that it could cover two markets and double sales...
As it goes, I like Murder By Decree, but I do think it's like the Knight book (which I also like) in that it likes to scream 'THIS IS THE REAL TRUTH, YOU FOOLS!!!' a bit too much to be the real trash delight that it could be. Although I'll admit that this opinion has only come on me after too many years of my mate Paul thrusting conspiracy theory movies and books at me. Yes, some conspiracies are true. Others aren't. But me? I just want to see Barbara Windsor being killed...
(No, seriously, I'm getting sick of her in eastenders...)
Unless, of course, some bright spark thought that it could cover two markets and double sales...
Having now finished it, I think there might be some truth in what you say. The Quinn stuff is piss poor, tacked on just because smug-bollocks and friends have to appear in it - wouldn't qualify as an EQ title otherwise. I'm now very confused on the matter of which came first, the novelisation or the screenplay as just about all they have in common are the dramatis personae - and they both opt for a different Ripper.
Quinn
doesn't point out where Holmes went wrong at the end as I'd been lead to believe, BTW. Rather, he susses that Holmes deliberately mislead Watson to save a family's reputation, etc. It's an OK novel but, unlike the film, it only qualifies as horror if you like yours in its most diluted form IMO.