This is a guest post by David Quantick.
“I got the idea from a detective novel. I read a lot of detective novels…”
The 1970s were full of the 1940s. In fashion, Halstead and Yves St Laurent brought out lines based on the 40s’ look. In music, Bette Midler and The Manhattan Transfer were reviving Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters, while in Britain, Roxy Music sang 2HB, an ode to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But it was in cinema that the 1940s – and noir in particular – came back with a vengeance, like a spurned lover with a gun in her hand: Play it Again Sam (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), all updated noir tropes to suit the times. Perhaps it was all the old movies being rerun on US TV, maybe the scepticism of the archetypal 40s PI suited the post-idealism of the 1970s, or perhaps people just liked the clothes, but there it was: the 70s were full of the 40s.
Ahead of the game were two British movies: 1972’s hard-bitten classic Get Carter (based on Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home) and the much more low-key Gumshoe, from 1971. Written by Neville Smith and directed by Stephen Frears, Gumshoe is a fantastic movie, set in contemporary Liverpool, starring Albert Finney as Eddie Ginley, a dreamer and would-be stand-up comedian who puts a joke ad in the paper on his birthday (see above) and gets more than he bargained for. With superb performances from Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and a host of local actors, including the great Bill Dean, Gumshoe is a perfect marriage of old and new, understated Liverpool wit and noir attitudes (and there’s an astonishingly good pastiche soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Webber).
But it’s the script that makes it. Neville Smith was to become a popular actor in the 1970s – best known for playing the lead in Alan Bennett’s Me, I’m Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (Trevor, a surrogate for Bennett himself), as well as his work with Ken Loach and others. Smith also wrote The Golden Vision, a Loach-directed television play about a group of Everton supporters and Long Distance Information, another TV play about a Elvis fan coming to terms with changes in his life on the night the King dies.
Smith’s central character Eddie is an Elvis fan too, his nostalgia for the past all mixed up, but what he mostly resembles, of course, is a Raymond Chandler hero. But Gumshoe is more than a pastiche of noir thrillers: it contains all the elements – a dame, a fat man, a murder, a betrayal, and plenty of mean streets – but adds to them a sense of the now. Eddie Ginley is not Philip Marlowe. He’s a socialist, a Labour voter. He signs on (“Down at the dole things move slowly. Down at the dole things always move slowly.”) He lives in a world not of night clubs, cabarets and torch singers, but working men’s clubs where the bingo takes precedence over the acts. (And there are odd little Beatles references throughout: Ginley lives in Gambier Terrace, as John Lennon once did, and has a friend called Mal Evans, the same name as the Beatles’ roadie).
Stephen Frears met Neville Smith in 1968 and, recognising his talent, asked him to write a thriller. As a writer, Frears said, Smith had “the grace of Jackie Milburn* and the wit of SJ Perelman**” – but he also saw that in Gumshoe, “within the framework of a pastiche of a film noir there lurked a human story.” Frears wrote in the introduction to the 1998 reissued paperback, “I had thought he was writing a thriller. In fact, he was constructing a self-portrait; a record of what it was like to have been a teenager in the English provinces in the Fifties.” Frears is right. Eddie Ginley is no hard man, no Spillane anti-hero packing heat. He’s a boy, with the sense of right and wrong of a boy. He wears the costume of a cynic – the trenchcoat, the whisky, even the gun – but he’s an innocent and, like all innocents (like all great movie private eyes), he’s going to get hurt.
The movie was made, released and went on to become, quite rightly, an acknowledged classic of British cinema. And before it came out, Neville Smith was asked to write a novelisation. Experienced screenwriter or not, he never written a book before. “I dithered and ended up with a week to the deadline,” he recalled later, and – borrowing a room at Frears’ house – dictated the book, as he had done the film, this time to a typist from a firm called Graduate Girls.
Perhaps it’s these unusual circumstances – dictating a novel in a few days from a script – that give Gumshoe the novel its voice. Laconic, but fast-moving. Drily funny, but also desperately melancholic. World-weary but also innocent. It’s a perfect noir and a perfect book. Is it better than the movie? Impossible to say: but without Finney and Frears, there’s more of Smith’s voice, and that’s not a bad thing.
Gumshoe the movie wasn’t a hit. Its stars continued their brilliant careers. Its soundtrack composer reused the movie’s main theme for another piece rooted in nostalgia, his musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Stephen Frears went on to well-deserved international success as a director, and Neville Smith continued to write and act (now in his 80s, he politely declines invitations to events where his work is shown).
It’s only the novel of Gumshoe that rests in the cold cases files. Issued by Fontana in paperback in 1971, it was reissued by Slow Dancer Press in 1998 with an introduction by Stephen Frears and a pithy afterword by Neville Smith: since then, nothing, which is a pity. Both versions can be acquired cheaply. Acquire them.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.