Pan’s People: Two Edgars (1956/57)

Many of the cover illustrations used for Pan’s innumerable Edgar Wallace paperbacks are a bit dull, but these two are both absolutely terrific I think, highlighting the same lurid / fantastical aspect of Wallace’s work which was exploited so wonderfully by the German Krimi productions of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

This edition of ‘The India Rubber Men’ was published 1956 with art by Bruce C. Windo, whilst ‘The Ringer’ is 1957 (fifth printing), signed “Silk” (an artist whose full name and identity appears to be unknown, but as ever, please do drop me a line if you have any further info).

‘The Ringer’, of course, was the basis for Alfred Vohrer’s highly entertaining ‘Der Hexer’ (1964), which I reviewed here back in 2019.

Krimi Casebook: Monk with a Whip (Alfred Vohrer, 1967)

There are few things in life I enjoy more than a mid-week Krimi. Settling down with a glass of single malt to savour the delights of ‘Monk with a Whip’, aka ‘The College Girl Murders’, whilst my neighbours presumably content themselves with whatever Netflix or Mouse Plus have to offer, I can’t help but feel I’m “living my best life”, as the kids might put it.

By 1967, it’s safe to say, Rialto Films’ prolific series of German language Edgar Wallace adaptations had already lived their best lives many times over. But, even as the well-worn formula began to look a little ragged around the edges, both the introduction of colour and the gradual retreat of censorship through the second half of the ‘60s helped the ‘krimi’ experience something of a second wind, and happily, ‘Der Mönch mit der Peitsche’ (as it was known to West German audiences) stands out as one of the prime beneficiaries of these developments.

Although the film is allegedly adapted from Wallace’s 1929 novel ‘The Terror’, by this point Rialto’s scriptwriters were no longer even pretending to tell a coherent mystery story. Instead, ‘Monk..’ foregrounds a startling succession of outrageous, mildly titillating pulp / comic book set-pieces, loosely tied together into a distinctly half-hearted whodunit narrative, the resolution of which singularly fails to address the questions raised by the improbable events which have preceded it. Which is fine by me, needless to say - the crazier these movies get, the better, so far as I’m concerned.

As such, the film begins in a mouldering Frankensteinian laboratory located beneath a fog-shrouded gothic church (elaborate beakers and test tubes full of bubbling, fluorescent potions present and correct), wherein an elderly, white-haired scientist has perfected a colourless, odourless poison gas. As he merrily demonstrates, this can achieve the frankly less than earth-shattering result of killing a bunch of mice in a matter of seconds. (Is it just me, or does this feel like pretty uncomfortable subject matter for a post-war German film? Let’s not even go there, shall we.)

Keen to test his invention out on a human subject, the amoral egghead orders his reluctant assistant to enter the new formula in the book in which they apparently record such things. But, as the assistant opens the book’s cover - boom! - the crazy doc has only gone and installed a miniaturised poison gas spray it! Down goes the assistant, cackle-cackle goes the prof.

Cue the reverb-drenched voice of “Edgar Wallace”, the obligatory blood-dripping crimson titles, and the explosion of a main title theme, which, though it is not on this occasion composed by primo Krimi maestro Peter Thomas, nonetheless provides a pretty good imitation of the squawking, lurching tones of his deeply eccentric psyche/jazz/exotica stylings. (Martin Böttcher, who handled pretty much all the key krimis not scored by Thomas, was the man responsible.)

Clearly intent on wringing some immediate profit from his dastardly invention, we next see the scientist above ground amidst the tombstones, where he hands over a poison-loaded prayer book and a suitcase full of other nefarious, gas-related goodies to an unseen criminal, who arrives in a chauffeured Rolls Royce. The doc doesn’t have long to gloat however, as - ka-pow! - he suddenly finds himself garrotted by the lasso-like whip wielded by a hulking ‘monk’ clad in bright red robes and a conical KKK hood! Ye gods.

It would be difficult for any movie to top the EC Comics-via-Mario Bava ghoulishness of this opening, but ‘Monk with a Whip’ keeps the motor running for its next, loosely connected, segment, which concerns a prison inmate who is sprung from the joint, only to find himself transported (blindfolded of course) to the lair of a Dr Mabuse-like super-criminal, who sits with his back to the interviewee, his voice seemingly booming from the walls of a darkened, wood-panelled aquarium, from which giant turtles, manta rays and suchlike cast eerie, green-tinted shadows.

(The antechamber the villain’s lair, lest I forget to mention it elsewhere, comprises a rickety indoor rope bridge over an artificial swamp populated by alligators and pythons!)

Equipped with the deadly prayer book seen in the earlier sequence, the prisoner is promised riches in exchange for assassinating - for no reason which is ever satisfactorily explained - a suspiciously mature looking pupil at a Catholic girls’ school. (“FINALLY,” exclaim the audience who tuned in for ‘The College Girl Murders’.)

It is the demise of this unfortunate young lady which attracts the attentions of Scotland Yard, and in particular, the indefatigable Sir John, played as always by Siegfried Schürenberg. “What will they try next?”, he exclaims, throwing down a report on the killing, before calling in our old friend Joachim Fuchsberger (here playing one Inspektor Higgins), who, as a veteran of both The Black Abbott and ‘The Sinister Monk’ (1965), should surely be well-qualified to get to grips with this particular case.

A cameo player in the earlier films in series, Sir John was usually found choking on his tea in response to Fuchsberger’s mod-ish behaviour, but here he finds himself promoted to a central character - essentially subbing for mercifully absent comic relief overlord Eddi Arent, as he goes out ‘in the field’ to assist Higgins with the investigation.

Sir John’s shtick here concerns his attempts to prove the value of the new, “psychological” detection techniques in which he has apparently received some training - a one joke set up which, sad to say, soon becomes quite tiresome, as he bumbles around making a fuss about the psychoanalytical significance of witnesses’ testimony and so on, all whilst Fuchsberger smiles indulgently in the background.

This does lead to one genuinely amusing moment, when Sir John declares that he will rush home and consult his reference books to ascertain the potent Freudian implications of a dormitory full of school girls experiencing a collective hallucination of a red-clad monk, only for Fuchsberger - who, as noted, has form in this area - to gently reassure him that, “they say they saw a monk because there was a monk”.

That aside though, I confess that the Scotland Yard elements of ‘Monk with a Whip’ didn't quite hit the mark for me. Fuchsberger in particular seems a bit tired here, both as an actor and a character. Lacking much of the ‘silver fox’ charisma he brought to earlier adventures, he is more of a straight up, down-at-heel detective in this one. Despite some token attempts at flirtatious banter with Sir John’s Moneypenny-ish secretary (played on this occasion by Ilse Pagé), the unlikely depiction of Scotland Yard as a kind of louche bachelor’s paradise, as seen in films like 1964’s Der Hexer, seems to have diminished considerably by this point.

Likewise, as per The Hunchback of Soho, this one comes up disappointingly short on the kind of incongruous, not-quite-right English detail we UK-dwellers love to chuckle at in these films. Set largely in anonymous rural locations, there is perhaps a sense here of the Rialto films attempting to increase their international appeal (foreshadowing perhaps the reliance on questionable co-production deals which would just about keep the Krimi brand on life support into the early ‘70s).

Changes were also clearly afoot in terms of casting, with few holdovers here from the ‘krimi gang’ who helped fill Rialto’s black & white era films with such a memorable gallery of rogues and red herrings - but, despite all this, if we can cease comparing ‘Monk with a Whip’ to earlier krimis for a few minutes, there is so much else to love here.

Primarily, the film’s lighting and production design - though evidently executed on a tight budget - is really rather wonderful. Nocturnal scenes (of which there are many) fare particularly well in this respect, as DP Karl Löb (who appears to have handled photography on the vast majority of ‘60s German cult films) intersperses fields of dark shadow and deep, mossy greens with occasional outbursts of searing primary colour - not least the crimson-clad monk himself - whilst the smoke machines are meanwhile working overtime, lending a bit of a ‘Blood & Black Lace’ vibe to proceedings; ‘60s pop cinema in excelsis.

Throughout the film in fact, colours are cranked up to an admirably extreme level of saturation; all of the female characters wear eye-popping, monochromatic dresses and swimsuits, whilst many of the sets find a way to glow with some kind of eerie phosphorescence or another, like a wild, candy-coloured riposte to the cheaper, more naturalistic brown n’ beige mundanity which begins to predominate during the less imaginatively shot interior dialogue sequences.

Director Alfred Vohrer may not manage to include quite so many of the baroque props or forced perspective / model-based trick shots which became his trademark (“Vohrer-isms” as I recently heard them described in the Projection Booth podcast’s Krimi episode), but he nonetheless does everything in his power to keep the film visually exciting.

In particular, Vohrer gets much mileage out of the scenes set in and around around the school’s swimming pool, which, inexplicably, includes a kind of ‘viewing window’ in the service area beneath the pool, allowing for a number of unusual/distorted shot compositions. (How exactly this airy, modern building fits in with the ancient gothic exteriors we see representing the school’s estate is anyone’s guess, but no matter.)

It is here that the film’s perpetually sweaty pervert science teacher character (played by Konrad Georg) likes to crouch, watching the bathing beauties swim by - but, the teacher’s voyeurism goes both ways, as, in one of the films best moments, the young heroine Ann (Uschi Glas) dives into the pool, and, gazing out through the submerged viewing window, spies the hanging corpse of the sweaty teacher, ironically deposited in his favourite peeping spot by the monk.

As such incidents suggest, there is still a strong undercurrent of macabre sordidness running through ‘Monk with a Whip, however light-hearted and campy things may become at times. As well as sweaty Konrad, characters like the shifty-eyed headmistress (Tilly Lauenstein) and menacing chauffeur (Günter Meisner) bring some fresh blood (so to speak) to the movie’s unwholesome ID parade of suspects, whilst the idea of the school’s pupils leaving the safety of their dormitories to ‘party’ in the red-lit lodge occupied by a shady writer and sundry leery teachers is also fleetingly explored.

Momentarily reminding me of 1962’s somewhat krimi-influenced Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory, this notion of lonely girls leaving the safety of their collective lodgings to drift into the dark woods, in search of illicit thrills, remains a potent addition to the mystery, and, though it is never fully developed here, we do at least get a nice piece of ‘Twin Peaks’-ish noir jazz to set the mood.

Then of course, there’s the whip-wielding monk itself - such a wonderfully absurd, surrealistic creation! Seemingly pulled straight off the cover of some especially depraved fumetti, it’s enough to make you forget that this was somehow at least the third film Rialto managed to make about malevolent masked clerics knocking people off in the dead of night before being subjected to an inevitable, ‘Scooby-Doo’-esque unmasking.

(If the plot is not complicated by at least one instance of an innocent character dressing up as the monk, or an unconscious hero being left lying around in monk robes, or multiple monks, or something, I believe you’re allowed to ask for your money back.)

As to that whole business with the odourless/colourless poison gas meanwhile, well, given that by the second half of the film the villains have been reduced to loading it into guns and squirting it into their victims’ faces, leaving a thick layer of fake cobwebs, I’m not really sure what advantage it holds over just, say, shooting people, especially given that the same criminal cartel employs a crimson-clad maniac with a lasso, but…. there I go with that pesky ‘logic’ again. It all adds to the fun, and boosts the body count - which at the end of the day is very much the point here.

I mean, let’s face it, but the time we account for Not-Dr Mabuse in his study / aquarium, with his snakes and crocodiles, and eerie florescent lighting, we’re pretty far gone into the realm of euro-cult delirium and - in my case at least - enjoying it all immensely.

As noted, the eventual ‘resolution’ to this mystery proves a complete damp squib, doing very little to rationalise any of the preceding carnage and leaving us essentially non-plussed as to why any of this madness really needed to happen, but at the end of the day - so what.

So long as that bloody monk gets his comeuppance and Higgins and Sir John can head back to the Yard in one piece for a pot of tea and some banter with the girls in the typing pool, all will be right with the world. As the nation’s foremost experts in the field of crimes involving girls’ schools, poison gas, secret passages, crocodiles and/or evil monks (we get a lot of that sort of thing in the home counties, don't you know), I’d like to think they have a long and rewarding career ahead of them - in my dreams, if nowhere else.

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Krimi Casebook: Der Frosch mit der Maske / ‘The Face of the Frog’ (Harald Reinl, 1959)

The phenomenal popularity in Germany of British mystery writer Edgar Wallace, which continued in spite of two apocalyptic world wars between the nations, is one of those odd twists of popular culture that seems to largely defy explanation. The truth is, I suppose, that whilst he had a more pronounced influence upon German culture than that of other countries, Wallace’s work was basically popular more or less everywhere it was published. Though rarely read these days, he was unquestionably one of the most successful authors of the early 20th century, with sales of his work reaching an oft-quoted estimate of 50 million copies worldwide.

Though he died in 1932 (whilst hard at work on the screenplay for ‘King Kong’), Wallace nonetheless maintained enough popularity to justify a huge number of film adaptations in his native land during the 1960s - The “Edgar Wallace Mysteries” series of b-pictures, shot at Merton Park studios by Anglo-Amalgamated, ran to 47 installments between 1960 and 1965, and numerous other adaptations were made around the same period, including a number produced by the ubiquitous Harry Alan Towers.(1)

Often though, these British Wallace films turned out to be quite dreary, uninspired affairs. Possibly this was simply due to the fact that, for those working in the film industry in the British Isles during the mid-20th century, Wallace’s writing evoked a landscape and culture as depressingly familiar as a cold cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon. From the sampling I have taken of the British Wallace films, it seems that this familiarity resulted in scores of grimly utilitarian sixty minute murder mysteries, largely set within pebble-dashed suburban bungalows and Bayswater solicitors offices; the kind of films in which about the most exciting scenario you’re likely to encounter with is that of John Le Mesurier waiting for a malfunctioning lift, or someone who once played a supporting role in Dr. Who tampering with Her Majesty’s Mail.

Thankfully, the German film industry took an entirely different approach to adapting Wallace for the screen, with the very cultural barriers that separated them from the quote-unquote ‘Britishness’ of their source material ironically leading them to hit upon a far more exciting formula whose results remain thoroughly entertaining to this day.

To the Germans you see, the very same Wallace stories that seemed so dull to us Brits became rich with exotic, escapist possibility, offering them a springboard into a whole world of bizarre and fantastical adventure. With crowd-pleasing thrills and censor-baiting transgressions firmly in mind, scriptwriters and directors soon began forcing the lurid imagery of Victorian penny dreadfuls through the merciless meat-grinder of 20th century urban thrillers, wantonly mixing in elements pulled from noir and gangster films, gothic horror and Bond-style comic book action capers along the way, creating an entirely new genre of pulp cinema that went on to dominate the lower reaches of the European box office throughout the ‘60s – the hallowed ‘Krimi’ (a shortening of the self-explanatory ‘Kriminalfilm’).

Though other studios and producers would go on to release their fair share of ‘Krimi’s later in the game, the genre’s aesthetic was initially defined and popularised entirely by the series of German language Wallace adaptations produced by a Denmark-based company named Rialto Film. Though Rialto’s loosely connected series of Wallace films rattled on in some form into the early ‘70s, it began in 1959 with the movie we’re looking at today – Krimi ground zero to all intents and purposes - Harald Reinl’s ‘Der Frosch mit der Maske’, which for the sake of argument we shall henceforth call ‘The Face of the Frog’.(2)

Often, retrospectively defined, time/place-specific movie genres such as the Krimi have a tendency to begin slowly, gradually coalescing over a number of years into what later generations of fans recognise as their ‘core form’, as formulas and clichés slowly solidify alongside audience expectation. By contrast though, what is so refreshing about ‘The Face of the Frog’ is that these Rialto cats apparently had their game-plan down right from the outset, as the movie explodes out of nowhere with a full set of the kind of ridiculous and lurid traits that would go on to define the Krimi.

Set within a “London” largely defined by shaky second unit footage of Westminster landmarks and Piccadilly Circus, life in Britain’s capital according to Reinl & his collaborators is a breathless whirl of everything a young German inexplicably raised on a diet of dusty Anglophone pulp might have hoped for: masked criminal master-minds skulking around abandoned Limehouse dockyards, cult-like fraternities of flat-capped henchmen, dogged Scotland Yard detectives getting hassled by their titled superiors, knife-throwing assassins lurking amid National Trust woodlands, aristocratic amateur sleuths and their kung-fu fighting butlers, seedy Soho nightclubs, daring jewel heists, poison gas canisters, tommy guns and trap doors.(3)

Needless to say, it’s a hoot. Do you really need to know the story? I hope not, because I certainly haven’t got the energy to bother coming up with a full synopsis, but let’s just say that events herein concern a master safe-breaker and criminal overlord known only as The Frog. The Frog preserves his anonymity by way of a neat diving suit/gas mask-styled outfit and accompanying croaky voice, whilst the distinctive seal that he brands upon the wrists of his henchmen and leaves prominently displayed at the scenes of his robberies also does wonders for his brand identity. For reasons that remain vague at best, a number of innocents (OR ARE THEY?) find themselves drawn into the web (or maybe, I dunno, frogspawn..?) of The Frog’s nefarious endeavors, with only playboy crimefighter Richard Gordon (Joachim Fuchsberger), his two-fisted butler James (Eddi Arent) and the shrewd Inspector Elk of Scotland Yard (Siegfried Lowitz) on hand to figure out what’s what and bring the assorted evil-doers to justice.

Beyond that, there’s not a great deal I can tell you that cannot be gleamed from the list of exciting elements featured in the preceding paragraphs, but needless to say the script here is slapdash, overly convoluted and frequently ridiculous, offering little in the way of actual ‘mystery’ beyond an inevitable Scooby-Doo style final reveal and generally refusing to cohere into anything that makes any more than the barest minimum of surface level ‘sense’… and, frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The great thing about the German Wallace films y’see is that they’re not so much interested in presenting logically coherent mystery stories as they are in simply reveling the more ghoulish and fantastic aspects of the ‘mystery’ genre – an approach that, as well as greatly appealing to me on a personal level, also gives the films a breezy, self-aware “fun for the sake of fun” kind of feel that allows them to remain quite engaging to us over-stimulated 21st century viewers, where so many other low budget ‘50s thrillers now seem plodding and tedious by comparison.

Indeed, the comic book unreality of the film’s world allows for a fast-paced yarn that moves from one suspense / action sequence to another (together with a few comedy asides and saucy night-club sequences for good measure) with only a bare minimum of expositional connecting tissue, demonstrating a dedication to pure entertainment value that it is hard not to applaud. It helps of course that the film is very well made – in fact it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that we’re looking here as a Germanic equivalent of the kind of craftsmanship & professionalism mustered by Hammer in the same period.

In between all the whiz-bang good times, a certain amount of stuffy drawing room chit-chat and weak family/romantic sub-plotting inevitable remains, but Reinl’s roving camera is almost always on the move around the lavishly appointed sets, with smooth tracking shots keeping things visually interesting even through the story’s duller passages. The B&W photography is top notch too, full of rich, deep shadow, and the densely cluttered mise en scene seems designed to compliment the rambling baroque madness of the storyline, never missing a chance to throw a wrought-iron railing, dusty lampshade or suit of armour into the foreground.

The cast meanwhile comprises a small army of what I assume to be West Germany’s finest character players, featuring a delightful variety of heavies, weirdos and misfits, many of whom look like they could have walked straight out of a Warner Bros gangster flick, including numerous ‘faces’ who would go on to carve out a niche as regulars in subsequent Krimis.

Even the film’s imitation of an English setting isn’t too bad, relatively speaking. There are a few details that will almost certainly seem a little ‘off’ to British viewers (a reference to somebody being taken to “central prison”, the misspelling of ‘Salisbury’ on a sign-post, etc), but no absolute howlers are in evidence, whilst bowler hats, hook-handled umbrellas and police helmets were clearly in plentiful supply from the costume department, lending a nice, pre-Avengers sort of feel to the more outré events portrayed.

My guess is that some second unit stuff WAS actually filmed in London (rather than just relying on stock footage), and I enjoyed the way that the mixture of authentic London locales with (presumably) German sets and locations serves to create weird, non-existent landscapes for the characters to rampage around in, thus further aiding the film’s distance from reality. The fog-shrouded ‘abandoned cement factory’ where The Frog has his HQ, looming upon some desolate vision of the Limehouse docks adjacent to a riverbank that really doesn’t look very much like the Thames, provides a good example, as did the somewhat Bavarian looking thatched cottage sitting neatly at the side of a road junction “exactly eight and a half miles from London”, and the German-themed ‘Lolita Club’ lurking in the middle of a particularly shadow-haunted Soho Square.

‘The Face of the Frog’s already slightly murky cultural heritage is muddied further when the name of no lesser personage than HARRY LIME suddenly pops up mid-way through the story, almost prompting a comedy double-take from yours truly. As in ‘The Third Man’, Mr Lime is introduced as a reclusive and infamous villain whose whereabouts are unknown even as his name is whispered in hushed tones. I tied my mind in knots trying to figure out the hows and whys that led to Graham Greene’s shadowy avatar of post-war corruption and black market cynicism suddenly popping up in the middle of a German Edgar Wallace adaptation at the dawn of the ‘60s, but as it turns out, it’s probably just the result of a particularly uncanny coincidence.

The name “Harry Lime” appeared in Wallace’s original story, published in 1925, and, according to ‘The Face of the Frog’s Wikipedia page, the film’s producers actually changed it to avoid confusion with the character in ‘The Third Man’. For reasons unknown, the name seems to have been subsequently changed back to ‘Harry Lime’ in the dubbed American version of the film I watched, and, well - there ya go, another potentially intriguing bit of pop culture symbiosis scrubbed forever from the blackboard.(4)

Yet another thing that stands out about ‘The Face of the Frog’ in comparison to its contemporaries in the thriller market is the sheer level of violence. The movie is big on enthusiastically rendered fist-fights and gun blasts throughout, with a couple of gleefully bloody murders that sit just about at the limit of what a British or American horror film might have gotten away with in 1959, but all of this is blown out of the water by one absolutely staggering moment of brutality that occurs during the film’s finale. Herein, a provocatively dressed showgirl, already looking battered and bruised as she is tied to a chair in the villains’ lair, is graphically machine-gunned to death by the now-thoroughly-crazed Frog, in full-on Peckinpah blood-squib style. I tell you friends, as an amateur historian of early on-screen nastiness, my jaw just about hit the floor.

A wholly shameless moment of unhinged, sexually charged sadism, this ‘shock’ moment provides a clear pointer toward the increasingly salacious and blood-thirsty content that would come to dominate the Rialto Krimis as the cycle went on. Indeed, as has been noted by the few English language critics who have written on the genre, the bold, style-over-content approach pioneered by the Wallace films, in combination with their increasing fixation on gruesome and often misogynistic violence, exerted a powerful influence upon the parallel development of the giallo aesthetic in Italy.(5)

Beyond this, it could even be argued that films like ‘The Face of the Frog’ helped to cement the more visceral, thrill-packed style of filmmaking that went on to define the entire spectrum of exploitation movies in the 1970s, and that in fact remains the dominant mode for thrillers, action films and self-aware “cult movies” to this very day.

For this reason alone, the case could be made for ‘..Frog’ being a film of significant historical importance, and whose potential field of influence stretches way beyond anything its makers could possibly have imagined. But, even if you disregard such high-falutin’ claims entirely, what he have here is, at the very least, a movie that when viewed today seems refreshingly ahead of its time whilst still being very much OF it - a witty, smart and thrill-packed pulp time-bomb that easily transcends it’s b-picture programmer status, and a testament to the wisdom of a notion I believe all potential filmmakers could learn from.

Namely, if you’re working with source material that’s basically quite hackneyed and childish and have no particular drive to rework it into a great work of cinematic artistry, then just being all dour and boring about it certainly isn’t going to get you on the Oscars short-list. Instead, embrace the stupidity, keep things moving, give the people what they want, and who knows; ‘The Face of the Frog’ spawned over twenty-five follow-ups, countless imitations, and nearly 60 years later there are still rubes like me sitting here on the internet praising its virtues. We now cut to the image of a hoity-toity British film director circa 1960 looking all flustered and disgusted, and look forward to evaluating whatever these wacky Edgar Wallace-adaptin’ Germans bring us next.

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(1) Though their titles and casts may sound tempting, readers are advised that Towers/Wallace flicks like ‘Circus of Fear’ (’66) and ‘Coast of Skeletons’ (’65) rank amongst the most extraordinarily tedious motion pictures your correspondent has ever sat through.

(2) Literally translating as ‘The Frog with the Mask’ and based on a Wallace story entitled ‘The Fellowship of the Frog’, this film is known in English both by that name and also the slightly snappier ‘The Face of the Frog’, which I’ve gone with here.

(3) Actually, James the butler practices a novel form of callisthenic wrestling alongside his master, but let’s not split hairs.

(4) Of course, you COULD argue that perhaps Greene took the name “Harry Lime” from the broadly similar character in the earlier Wallace story, but I distinctly recall Greene describing, in his introduction to his prose treatment for ‘The Third Man’, how he and Carol Reed came up with the name by combining a deliberately prosaic first name with the surname redolent of (at the time) potentially dodgy importing of exotic fruit. I’ll leave you to decide whether or not you want to take Britain’s foremost 20th century novelist at his word, but to further stoke the fires of coincidence, I will needlessly point out that the aforementioned Harry Alan Towers, who produced a number of Edgar Wallace adaptations during the ‘60s, first name his name in radio, producing the Third Man-inspired series The Adventures of Harry Lime for the BBC in 1951-52. COINCIDENCE?

(5) At this point, it would be remiss of me not to point out that Mario Bava’s pivotal ‘Blood & Black Lace’ began life as an attempt to jump the Wallace/Krimi band-wagon, and indeed, the tangled bloodlines intersecting the krimi and giallo genres are more complex and varied than I could possibly expound upon in this already over-long review. Hopefully we’ll get around to looking at it in a bit more depth if this review strand continues as planned though.