I decided to read The Well Meaning Young Man after stumbling across this passage:
Horatio Swann, the famous portrait painter, was at his wit’s end. Harry Ames, the well-known scene designer, was at his wit’s end. The Russian chauffeur, Boris, was lying upstairs under a neat check bedspread, in a bedroom of the inn, suffering from an overdose of cocaine. The only person who was enjoying himself was Gene Tunney the panther who, attached to the kitchen table by a stout chain, was guzzling his luncheon out of a wash-hand-basin. In the entrance hall of the inn, the Princess Vanda Fiorivanti stormed to and fro. Her tall, snake-like figure clad in a pair of seagreen pyjamas and a fur coat, quivered with rage. Her enormous, distraught yellow eyes, ringed with black lashes, appeared to swamp her emaciated white face. Her hair was like a crazy scarlet chrysanthemum and matched her scarlet mouth. Her general appearance at the moment closely resembled that of a vampire who had been carelessly buried without a stake in her heart, dug up again after some centuries, and was now giving vent to her feelings.
I am a sucker for over-the-top farces about the goings-on of silly rich people (viz. Five Days, The Ritz Carltons, Heart in a Hurricane, et al.), so this was enough to get me started.
The hero of The Well Meaning Young Man is not himself rich but he comes from a comfortable family. The younger son of Anglo-Irish gentry, Dan Cavanagh is already a failure. His father and mother (“a fine stand-up lump of a woman”) have shipped him off to join a family business in Sicily, thinking he had “a way with him” that “might be invaluable in charming intractable foreigners.” At the time he stumbles across the Princess and her entourage, however, he is trying to make his way there by foot, having squandered most of his travel budget with an old school chum in London. Dan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer: “He had not yet learnt to read except in the literal sense of the word,” and the authors esteem his handwriting “about one degree of culture superior to that of his valiant twelfth century ancestors, who came over to Ireland with Strongbow, and when occasion demanded, signed their names with an X.”
With her chauffeur incapacitated, the Princess hires Dan as a replacement, and he soon finds himself behind the wheel of a massive Pannonia-Svitza estate car, racing through the Black Forest towards Schloss Erlenburg, where American producer-tycoon Rex Guggenheim awaits the star of his new spectacle, “The Legend of St. Dorothea and the Heavenly Roses.” Unfortunately, by enlisting Dan, she also manages to hijack the narrative for the remainder of the book. What starts as a good-natured Bildungsroman with above-average comic writing swerves onto a side road and becomes mired in a seemingly endless opera buffa with all the fun and spontaneity as a Soviet rhythmic gymnastics demonstration. By the time poor Dan is spit out on the far side of the Alps, the comic spirit has been beaten out of us.
While The Well Meaning Young Man got waylaid with a narrative flat tire, I’m willing to give Magdalen King-Hall’s earlier solo attempt, with the intriguing title I Think I Remember, Being the Random Recollections of Sir Wickham Woolicomb, An Ordinary English Snob and Gentleman. I’m also a sucker for comic autobiographies of English snobs (viz. Lord Bellinger and the classic Augustus Carp, Esq.).
The Well Meaning Young Man is available on the Internet Archive (link).
There was also a 1983 version starring Faye Dunaway and Alan Bates.
The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (1949) by Magdalen King-Hall was filmed as a movie starring Margaret Lockwood and James Mason. Lady Highwayman – pistols masks – gowns – James Mason!!!! I have a copy of the book but it hasnt been read yet.