The Trouble With Harry

Alfred Hitchcock generally gets too much credit for
The Trouble With Harry
. Some of his film’s best scenes were imported pretty much word for word from the novel. This was a bargain, considering that Hitchcock paid a pittance for the rights (but promised Story he would pay more for his next book – a promise that was famously broken). I think Shirley MacLaine was an inspired piece of casting in the role of Jennifer, a type who would crop up regularly in Story’s fiction throughout his career. It’s fair to say that most of what was best about the film could be found originally in the book. And, as you will see
here, the book is considerably subtler than the film.

Jack Trevor Story published
The Trouble With
Harry
in 1949 and followed it with two more novels mixing crime and wry comedy,
Protection for a
Lady
and
Green to Pagan Street
before turning his hand to a bunch of pseudonymous westerns, some in collaboration with his then wife Ros. He wrote dozens of short stories for the London evening newspapers and magazines like
John O’ London’s
and eventually a series of short crime comedy novels for the venerable Sexton Blake Library into which he breathed wonderful new life. I met him during the period when I was on SBL’s editorial staff. My job was to keep him working while he finished a novel long past its deadline. The day would pass with Story telling me anecdote after anecdote, falling silent only when the editor stuck his head round the door. His Blake novels are the most collected of that series.

Story was not the first writer to take a rejected ‘straight’ novel and turn it into a ‘Blake’ and neither was he the first to change the name of Sexton Blake to something less familiar and sell the same book to a prestigious publisher as happened with
Dishonourable Member
(Secker and Warburg, 1969). In the meantime he wrote many scripts for British films starring the likes of Frankie Vaughan and Adam Faith, including one starring Spike Milligan,
Postman’s Knock
(1961). All these films, as well as his later TV work for the likes of
No
Hiding Place
and
Budgie
, show at least traces of his distinctive comedic voice.
You’re Only Young Twice,
a TV comedy series, was instantly recognisable as his work. His last TV show,
Jack on the Box
, was a quirky semi-documentary which came the closest to revealing the Story his friends and family knew.

Three times married, with the kind of charm which made women want to take him home with them and even his children (he had eight), Jack Story had a relationship with the world which hardly changed. He was not a boy who wouldn’t grow up but a man living outside of time. He remained pretty much the same loveable, slightly naïve, wisely observant 25-year-old who really wanted to be a jazz guitarist and worked as an electrical engineer after a successful apprenticeship at Marconi, the prestigious British maker of radio equipment. Marconi sets,
sold on Hire Purchase, were in the homes of the same upwardly mobile
petites bourgeoisies
Story wrote about so well. His female protagonists (or sometimes antagonists) were frequently versions of his own wives and girlfriends. If they couldn’t always be told apart this was because he couldn’t always tell them apart himself. I was with him in a London nightclub one evening when he unknowingly tried to pick up the same woman he had come in with. After a while, I came to realise that the slightly vague, pixelated women of his fiction were not so much like the women he took up with; they were Jack himself. He was a man whose feminine side was a large part of his charm but which you did not expect to find under a face which looked as if it had been camped in by a tribe of tanners. He was at once innocent and clever, sentimental and selfish, and almost no one – man, woman or dog – could resist him. Hitchcock might have cheated him out of a fair price for this book (selling it on to Paramount for $20,000) but Story had a knack for getting advances from producers and publishers not unlike that of his tallyman character Albert Argyle of the
Live Now, Pay Later
series. He never borrowed from friends, however, and was impeccable about paying debts to individuals even if his attitude to institutions was rather more cavalier.

Every so often a group of Jack Story’s admirers get together to offer the Jack Trevor Story Memorial Cup which includes a prize – usually $1000 or £500 – to the writer whose work seems best in the spirit of the author. The cup itself is an ordinary china mug with the words inscribed in magic marker on the side. Previous winners have included comic writers Steve Aylett and Howard Waldrop. The prize’s condition is that by the end of fourteen days the winner must not have a penny to show for it. This reflects Story’s famous reply to a bankruptcy court judge who asked him what had happened to a vanished £2000 film advance: ‘Well, you know how it is, judge, two hundred or two thousand, it always lasts a week to a fortnight’. Another winner was a literary trawlerman who claimed he spent twice the prize money like a drunken sailor, celebrating his win the same night. ‘It’s what Jack would have done’ said his best friend Bill, who had originally
been a milkman but later made a living renting his Batmobile to fêtes and carnivals. Bill, like Maggie MacDonald and various ex-wives and relatives, became one of the regular characters to feature in Story’s long-running weekly column for the
Guardian
newspaper which brought him a much wider audience in the 1970s.

Bill was the original for Albert Argyle, the charming tallyman of another novel whose title added a phrase to the English language,
Live Now, Pay Later
. The film starred Ian Hendry in a classic British 1960s comedy with a cast familiar to everyone who ever watched an Ealing film. Lacking the subtleties and darker aspects of the book, it represented a kind of fiction which is not so commonly found today either in books or films, reflecting, like
The Trouble With Harry
, Story’s admiration for Saroyan, Bennett, Orwell and Kersh (as well as The Magnet), drawing its humour from the close observation of a particular way of life at a particular time, somewhere between the classes.

As clever an observer as he was, Jack Story did not begin consciously to turn this talent on his
own life until middle age with his autobiographical Horace Spurgeon Fenton sequence of which
One Last Mad Embrace
is his best. He was married three times (as far as he remembered) and had a number of other relationships, the most publicised of which was to Maggie MacDonald, whom he wrote about
ad infinitum
in his column, describing their life together. Their relationship began to break down after he was arrested and abused physically by the Ladbroke Grove police one Boxing Day night after playing guitar, enjoying a game of draughts and drinking cocoa at my house. The police hadn’t liked seeing a fifty-year-old man with a twenty-something girlfriend.

His writing had celebrated life and delighted in the strangeness of ordinary people. A natural optimist, he remained critically aware of the downside of modern consumerism, yet trusted in common decency to put matters right. After the Ladbroke Grove incident his writing darkened and he became pessimistic, suspicious of the world. Instead of being a wry and gentle observer of the bourgeoisie and the bumbling English bobby, he
began to write about sinister plots by the police in an England increasingly full of greedy snitches and ruled by authoritarian governments.
The Wind in the Snottygobble Tree
is a paranoid fantasy which we ran in
New Worlds
(together with photographs of Jack, Maggie and his injured foot) and was a very long way from the gentle and humane
The Trouble with Harry
.

Another relationship, with ‘Dwarf’, began and ended, to be celebrated by
Dwarf Goes to Oxford
(1987). No longer able to attract young women, he lived alone, becoming Writer in Residence at Milton Keynes, living, he claimed, over a stable as part of the permanent exhibit of the Rural Museum. Eventually he had a complete nervous breakdown, which physically affected his health when he began to live rough, convinced that relatives and friends were trying to lock him up in an institution. Gradually, he emerged from this condition and began to work again, though suspicious of the heart medicine prescribed to him. He returned to his flat in Milton Keynes. In December 1991 at the age of 74 he died of a heart attack after typing
THE END
to his last novel which he
believed to be his masterpiece, the autobiographical
Shabby Weddings
.

With
The Trouble With Harry
Jack Story began a rich and wonderful career as distinguished as it was varied. In it he marked out his own literary territory using a subtly distinctive style. His writing was fresh, his characters original, his plot a comic masterpiece. There is no better place to begin reading his work.

Michael Moorcock,
Rue St Maur, Paris,
Summer 2013.

The small boy named Abie climbed the woodland path that led to Sparrowswick Heath. His body lay at an acute angle with the steep and stony way, a toy gun was clutched firmly beneath his left arm. You could tell, by the expression on his face, that he knew where he was going and why. You could tell that he knew this path and where it led; that it held no terrors for him, even though the trees crowded thick and leafy on all sides, further than he could see or the sun could penetrate. You could tell that this was
his
hunting-ground; he did the scaring around here; it was not the things in the dark woods that
Abie feared, but the things that feared Abie. Abie was four; there was a strong, square look about his body, clad in long dungarees; he had a desperate set to his russet face, and the watered parting of his hair, running, as it did, half on the right-hand side of his head then cutting across and finishing up on the left-hand side, betrayed an adventurous spirit. Also Abie had the gun.

Up above the fringing woods the heath stretched out fine and beautiful and golden in the hot summer sunshine, spread with a ground fog of man-high bracken in all its pleasing shades of green. Here and there the bracken was broken by glades of silky grass, fine as a woman’s hair and as inviting. Standing solemn and silent on the hills and in the valleys and on the slopes were the big trees; the oaks, beeches, chestnuts, birches and ash. All between them walked like children the young trees: little scrubby oaks and upstart ash; prickly broom, blackthorn, rhododendron and sweet chestnut. And elegant little silver birch children standing sparse-leaved and open-branched with the just-so-ness of an exclusive window display.

Sparrowswick Heath was out of sight and out of sound of the world. A secret, remote place, safe from wheels. A place for the living and for the dead. On this particular afternoon a place for the dead.

Also it was a place of bungalows; incongruous, cheaply built. They stood at all kinds of funny angles down in the wood from where young Abie had come. They had been put there, deliberately and commercially, by a man named Mark Douglas.

Abie left the dark tunnel of the woodland path and came out into this golden country, his ears instant for the sounds of the big game that crowded the forests of giant fern. His small feet fell silently on the short, springy turf, and he walked with a special, wary step of his own invention.

Suddenly there came a thundering, roaring explosion that split open the soft bumbling silence and set all things quaking and shaking. Especially Abie. Abie knew it was the new captain out after game – but still! Abie turned around twice, quickly, and then fled into the bracken as swiftly as any game.

Presently he was sitting in one of the grassy glades, walled in by the bracken and listening. His face was
raised to the patch of chalk-blue sky which was so far above him as to be of little importance, and his eyes were big and round with his concentration. The new captain was a plump and jolly man and Abie knew he would not willingly shoot him. Nevertheless, he also knew that the new captain would be out after rabbits and a small boy creeping through the bracken was not so very unlike a rabbit.

There came another shot. This time closer, and the little boy thought he heard the sound of it whistling over his head. He reached a decision. He decided to retreat and leave the game to the new captain. Abie had all the time in the world for shooting, being still less than school age, whereas the new captain often had to go to town and an afternoon like this might well be precious to him.

Abie travelled through the bracken on his stomach. It was not a comfortable mode of progression, for the gun had to be dragged somehow and the stubbly stems of last year’s growth prodded him incessantly.

Just before he reached the pathway that led back to the woods he heard a commotion in the bracken ahead. A sudden burst of noise. Human exclamations
and grunts and feminine indignation. The man’s voice was subdued as if by intense feeling; the woman’s voice sounded muffled as though by a cloth or a hand. Abie was not interested in the sounds, but he knew he must avoid them. He had a pretty shrewd suspicion what he would find if he crawled in the same direction for the next two minutes. A nest of lovers. Like the nest he had disturbed only the other day – or was it week, or year perhaps; or was it tomorrow? Abie was easily confused about those things. He only knew he must avoid this nest of lovers as widely as the new captain’s gun. Lovers did not appreciate small boys. Abie had been most shabbily treated by them. On that occasion it had been George’s mother and the man who collected the rent and they had sworn at him and cuffed him and sent him away. Why, he could not tell. Certainly he was not disturbing their hunting, for they had no guns with them. They were just lying there and looking at each other. And when he had started to tell his mother about it she had said it was a nest of lovers and he was to avoid them. So he intended to do this and he would begin now.

Then there came a renewal of the sounds through
the bracken and it was like a dog-fight under a blanket. Stifled, yet violent and agitated. There was a noise like something hitting something. Wood hitting wood perhaps. This was followed by a very wicked swear word that was by no means stifled or under a blanket. Abie stopped and listened and the words he heard were destined to make him the envy of his class at kindergarten in the years to come.

‘Right!’ came a man’s voice. ‘Now you’ve asked for it!’

Abie made to crawl on, but his movement was arrested yet again by the sound of another shot, and this time he knew that the shots were flying through the bracken just above his head. The gun seemed to have nothing to do with what was taking place a few yards from him in the bracken, yet the two things were tied together by the afternoon and the pounding of the little boy’s heart.

‘Take that!’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Take that, you brute!’

Abie ducked, but then he concluded she had not been talking to him. So he stepped boldly out.

The noise he made must have startled the woman,
for there came an intaking of breath and an odd sob or two and the next instant Abie could hear the thoughtless breaking down of bracken as somebody tore a way through regardless.

Soon after this little Abie found the man.

The man was lying on his back and Abie nearly stepped on him. A big man with a moustache and wavy hair. He was lying staring up at the sky and not moving. From his head came a trickle of blood. It flowed from a wound above one eye and it was slowly soaking his white collar. Abie stared down at him for a little while, expecting to be sworn at. Then he tucked the gun under his left arm and walked away, not troubling about his special steps, but only eager to get into the woods and home.