Those celebrity crime authors: a name from the past

Epitaph for an Actor by Dulcie Gray

published 1960

[excerpts] The bedroom was one of the most sumptuous rooms John had ever seen… Mrs Strang was propped up on her pillows looking very pale She wore no makeup and seemed considerably older than John had expected but fragile and rather charming.

She was wearing an attractive quilted bed jacket. She smiled at him with great sweetness, and shook hands formally. ‘How good of you to come,’ she said in a small, exhausted voice.

[later] Ann Strang [was] sitting in her lovely drawing-room in Hamstead drinking a martini. She was looking fragile and pretty in a black, very simple dress. She was extremely pale.

comments: I don’t blame crime writers for getting annoyed about famous people jumping in and writing murder stories – the celebrities, who sometimes seem to think that it is easy to write a good detective story, get endless publicity and interviews and perhaps unwarranted sales. I have been slightly rude about a few of them, while standing firm that Richard Osman really can write good crime books. But I was surprised to find recent evidence of how long this has been going on – it is not the recent phenomenon you might suspect… bear with me while I explain.

A character called Dulcie turned up in a book/post recently – Patricia Wentworth’s The Gazebo, here - and there was some discussion of the name: one of my readers mentioned Dulcie Gray and soon I was off down the rabbit hole finding out about her. She was a very successful and well-known British actress from the 1940s onwards. Picking just a few of her achievements:

- She created the role of the waitress Rose in the first stage adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, and made a huge success of it.

- She starred in the film adaptation of Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair - a great favourite of crime fans. Though Tey has featured a lot, I have never actually blogged on Franchise, though it is mentioned in this post.

- She played Miss Marple in a stage version of  A Murder is Announced in the 1970s.

- And she was a mainstay of the drama serial Howards' Way in the 1980s – a BBC fixture on Sunday nights. She played Kate Harvey, a sensible mother figure. This blogpost is not about Howards' Way, but I cannot not reproduce this random line from the Wikipedia plot description - spoiler alert - in case you want to get an idea of what kind of programme it was:  'Gerald and Polly's marriage is a sham—an arrangement to cover the fact that Gerald is bisexual, to give him respectability in the business world and give a name to Abby, Polly's illegitimate daughter after an affair at university. Abby herself is pregnant, after a brief relationship in Switzerland.'

When Adrian reminded me of all this in the comments on the Wentworth, I said ‘

Howards' Way! there was a programme. All those men in blue blazers & women in cocktail dresses going over to the drinks tray in their over-decorated sitting rooms.
I just looked up Dulcie Gray and it says 'actress, mystery writer and lepidopterist'. And people think the Kardashians invented that kind of multi-tasking.
I am going to have to try to find a Dulcie Gray murder story now I think - your fault!’

And so I did, and here it is. 

She wrote a lot of crime novels, including one with the entrancing title Deadly Lampshade (available copies all too expensive, no matter how tempting the idea), and I picked on Epitaph for an Actor as I do always enjoy a theatrical connection, and it was relatively cheap.

It’s  a very mixed bag. The setup is a group of luvvies rehearsing for a future BBC TV drama, in a squalid rehearsal venue in Paddington. There are the usual connections among the actors, and tensions and undercurrents. Eventually a rather unpleasant man is found shot dead in the gents’ cloakroom. At this point I think the story rather loses it – until then it was at least a convincing setting, with interesting details of the rehearsal process. But Gray doesn’t seem to have much idea about structure, and we are taken off in many different directions with different characters. She keeps introducing new plotlines, new ways in which the dead man was horrible, new connections among the characters. There is an abduction scene that rather beggars belief. None of it convinces, and it is hard to care who sent him to his well-deserved fate. 

There are moments of interest, an attempt to look at the psychology of the victim. He was a divil with the women, and had no conscience, and there is a lot of discussion of what women will put up with, and whose fault is that, eh? Unfortunately I don’t think Gray succeeded in showing what was attractive about him – we all know there are men like that, who can seduce and persuade, and writers can make you believe in that.  But here he just sounded awful.

I have read a lot worse crime novels, but this didn’t tempt me to carry on with the author. She needed a rigorous editor, or to go on a creative writing course. It does not seem as though she had a ghost writer, though she thanks a (very senior) policeman friend for help with procedure. I think the couple of sentences at the top of the post sum it up - they are competent but not brilliant, and rather cliched. But then -  I'm always happy to illustrate a bed jacket and a plain black dress.

And: fair play to her, Dulcie Gray obviously lived a long, successful, and by the sound of things happy life, doing what she liked and enjoyed. She was married to another actor, Michael Dennison – they were a famous theatrical couple, and their marriage lasted and seems to have been a good one. In some ways a perfect career.