A case of missing identity

This could have been a wonderful book. Take a scene from it which could so easily have been the start of a film. It is the 1920s, and in the garage of a large stockbroker’s mansion in the Home Counties two youths, the spoilt and jobless sons of a rich man, are noisily tuning a hell bat ( actually a modified Model T-Ford ), a car already capable of 100 m.p.h. Dissolve to the woods above them, to silence broken by tinkling notes.

Among the trees their elderly father is playing a musical box. A huge and powerful individual, with the sort of moustache then popular among army officers of field rank, he has, according to his earlier biographer Hesketh Pearson, ‘no more mystery about him than a pumpkin’. The only thing is, the pumpkin is playing the musical box with one hand to attract beings whom, a camera in his other hand, he expects to photograph.