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102 pages

English

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First published in 1957 The Strange Case of Mr Pelham is Anthony Armstrong's masterclass in suspense, a slow-burning examination of one man's descent into paranoia.Filmed several times for television in both the UK for the BBC, and in the US as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Armstrong's Pelham eventually hit the big screen in 1970 as the movie The Man Who Haunted Himself, starring Roger Moore.Reissued here for the first time in more than half a century, this classic period piece is set to bring one of the great 20th century thriller writers to a new generation of admirers.

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Thriller

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	05 octobre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781914169342
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Strange Case of Mr Pelham
Anthony Armstrong

First published in 1957
This edition published in 2021 by
B7 Media
www.b7media.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 1957, 2021 Anthony Armstrong
Introduction Copyright © 2021 Nick Smith
The right of Anthony Armstrong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Edited by Nick Smith

Introduction
There can be little doubt that Anthony Armstrong would have whole-heartedly approved of this reissue of his classic 1950s thriller The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham. This conclusion can only be drawn indirectly, but there exist the sort of clues that Armstrong himself would have liked, if you know where to look for them.
Writing from his country cottage Margarets, deep in a leafy corner of Hampshire, Armstrong—a man who produced so many words that you can only deduce that he loved the process of committing them to paper—is apologising to one of his readers over the lack of availability of his earlier books. In a surprisingly long note to a stranger, he confides in Mrs Hislaw that he shares her sense of an injustice perpetrated. “I am sorry,” he types on an old manual typewriter early one September at some point in the 1960s, “but nothing can be done about the books, except keep an eye open for them at second-hand bookshops. They have been out of print for some years now and I am constantly getting letters—to my annoyance, for the publishers would not reprint them – telling me there was no longer a demand. My daughter has picked up Village at War and We Keep Going on a second-hand bookstall at Cambridge, but those are the only spares even I have!”
What’s interesting about this unpublished letter, signed in his customary turquoise ink, is not so much that Armstrong is referring to his quintet of ‘Country House’ memoirs that were so popular during the Second World War and the decade that followed. Rather that he mentions towards the end that, as he is now a presenter on a national television gardening show, he had assumed that this would lend his out-of-print works the kind of sympathetic magic that might get the presses rolling again. His letter finished on a plaintive note, wondering if publishers will ever again be interested in his earlier books. Sixty-four years after it first appeared in our bookshops in 1957, and nearly half a century after its author’s death, The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham has finally caught a publisher’s eye. With the publication of this edition of Pelham, we have the only 21st century reissue of this superb British tale of suspense, welcomed by one of today’s finest spy thriller writers Mick Herron, who expresses a sentiment that will be echoed by aficionados of the genre: “It’s a pleasure to see Anthony Armstrong’s classic back in print, ready to unnerve a new generation of readers with its eerie tale of fractured identity.”
While it is tempting to construct from Armstrong’s letter to Mrs Hislaw the picture of a struggling author who’d never quite fulfilled his potential, nothing could be further from the truth.
Although we can’t be exactly sure of when he wrote his characteristically charming note, the evidence points to it post-dating the publication of The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham . Arguably his most successful novel, it was published on both sides of the Atlantic, translated into several languages, dramatised for radio broadcast and committed to celluloid for both television and the silver screen. The fact that the cover design of the British first edition of Pelham includes a superb duotone illustration commissioned from a hugely popular artist of the day, Albany Wiseman, suggests that the publisher Methuen & Co took the book’s production and reputation seriously enough to invest real money in it.
Although it has fallen into a deep and, some would say, unjustified obscurity, the name Anthony Armstrong was once one to be reckoned with. Although it’s hard to be certain how many books he wrote in a career spanning six decades, once the thrillers, romances, comedies of manners, war memoirs, country house reminiscences, plays, collections of journalism, children’s books and anthologies are taken into account, it’s a safe bet that he saw to press more than a hundred, and that untangling the oeuvre would present a serious challenge to a bibliographer. Despite being such a prolific author, outside specialist book collecting circles, these days Armstrong is only really remembered for his novel The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham (that started out as a short story), and perhaps his play Ten Minute Alibi (that ended up as a novel). That these works have remained in the public eye at all is largely due to the fact that they were both made into classic British crime films. Ten Minute Alibi was produced in 1935 at Beaconsfield Studios (now the National film and Television School), while Pelham, after a long and complex history of radio and television productions (in which the legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock plays a significant part), went on to become the 1970 psychological thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself , starring Roger Moore, fresh off the back of the success of The Saint .
While Moore was to scale even greater heights playing the role of secret agent James Bond in seven of the 007 movies, in his memoir – My Word is My Bond – he says that he rated Harold Pelham as his apex character performance: “it was a film I actually got to act in, rather than just being all white teeth and flippant and heroic.” Moore recalls how he immersed himself in the narrative to produce an intense and layered role. He seized Pelham with gusto, portraying his psychological deterioration as his reputation and family life are dismantled by outside forces. As one commenter says: “Moore expertly worked the source material and screenplay to show the horror of a decent, successful family man reduced to insanity as he’s stalked by an unexplained doppelgänger, indulging in the excesses of London society in the late 1960s.”
The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham is Armstrong’s own novelisation of a short story dating back to the 1930s, in which the protagonist is an innocuous, conventional, traditionalist English bachelor, who acquires a doppelgänger with an opposite personality and a sinister agenda. Opening in Monte Carlo, the story is told through the eyes of a young couple exploring a casino, where they learn of a mysterious gambler by the name of Pelham. Intrigued by both Pelham and his glamorous companion, they delve into the stranger’s past, only to discover that not long before he had been a different man. In the manner of the suspense thriller of yesteryear, Armstrong’s narrative deftly unfolds as Pelham becomes aware of a mystery ‘double’ taking advantage of his socially distant life. As this almost paranormal figure makes its influence more known, a creeping terror begins to infect Pelham, whose inconspicuous existence is thrown out of equilibrium. A series of apparent coincidences and mistaken identities initially creates moments of confusion and mild levity, only to gradually accelerate into something more sinister, causing Pelham to spiral into a psychological crisis as his doppelgänger takes control.
While most contemporary reviews tended to politely agree that The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham was “a lightly amusing tale of suspense and terror,” perhaps the most perceptive analysis came from one critic—his name now lost to history—who read the tale as “an extraordinarily irritating piece of cleverness.” Although his letter to Mrs Hislaw may not have overbrimmed with confidence about the future of his series of memoirs recounting the bucolic idyll of family life at Margarets, Armstrong was much more optimistic about the path ahead for a story that was to stay with him in one form or another for much of the second half of his career.
In his unpublished four-volume autobiography Funny Side Up, he goes into some detail about the trajectory of his most famous creation:
“As a matter of interest that original short story, The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham, had a most profitable and varied career. It was first published in the American magazine Esquire in 1940, was next broadcast over there as a playlet in 1941, done three times on BBC Radio in 1946, and later twice on TV, published over here in Britannia and then in two other magazines, turned into a film script (as stated above), published again in America and three times on the continent. In 1955 it was done yet again on both BBC and US TV, and also in Australia and New Zealand, after which I turned it into a full-length novel which was published here and in New York and finally in Italy. Not bad for one small short story. It’ll probably bob up again somewhere yet.”
Nick Smith
Swansea
December 2020.

A Note on the Text:
This edition of The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham is based on the text of the first UK trade edition published by Methuen & Co in 1957. While every reasonable care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the original text, the opportunity has been taken to silently correc