Disordered Daggers : The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning (1972)

[gervase_fen]

 

Winner of the Silver Dagger (i.e. runner up) in 1973, this floated up the pile of ‘to-read’ books because it meant I would finally get round to watching the film version- Alfred Hitchcock’s “Family Plot” (1976), a movie that I’ve bought twice now in boxsets.  Victor Canning came up with two very strong thriller concepts – the hunt for a successful kidnap and ransom criminal who targets members of the establishment,  and the long con of a medium and her shiftless boyfriend who does all the spadework so that she can have persuasive moments of spiritual insight.

Intermittently there are glimpses of a shadowy Whitehall department tasked with preventing another kidnapping, which is very much in the Callan / Sandbaggers / Slough House mould. (There’s a verisimilitude to the sledgehammer to crack a walnut methodology pursued which reminded me of The Day of the Jackal.)  There’s also falconry, old fashioned shoe leather detective work, and some vivid descriptions of the countryside around Hampshire and Wiltshire. The whole book is shot through with a bracing and timeless cynicism about human nature which is perhaps why it was thought to be a good fit for Hitchcock.

The 1976 film retains character names and about half of the plot, the rest supplied by screenwriter Ernest Lehman.  The best things in it are Barbara Harris (playing Blanche, the medium, looking incredibly like Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty) and John Williams’ score. Enjoyment depends on tolerance levels of Bruce Dern’s mugging and extensive blue screen work during a (non-book) action sequence.  Your mileage may vary.