Ernest Dudley R.i.p.

[julian_craster]

The Independent
6 February 2006

Obituaries - Ernest Dudley

Crime writer, dramatist and creator of the radio detective Dr Morelle, 'the
man you love to hate!'


Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen (Ernest Dudley), journalist, novelist,
playwright, scriptwriter and actor: born Dudley, Worcestershire 23 July
1908; married 1930 Jane Grahame (died 1981; one daughter); died London 1
February 2006.

The writer Ernest Dudley had an extraordinary career. He was largely
self-educated ("University of Life, dear boy", he was fond of saying), since
his father, a doctor, spy and failed hotelier, was suspicious of formal
schooling, but went on to produce scores of books - mainly crime fiction,
but non-fiction as well, biographies, flavoursome and quite erotic
historical novels, children's books - and create dozens of radio and
television series.

He wrote for the stage and the movies, composed songs and produced acres of
journalism: at different times he was "society" correspondent for the Daily
Mail, boxing reporter for The People, and "crime commentator" for any number
of rags. He acted for pennies per week touring the parish halls, cowsheds
and "blood-tubs" of rural Ireland, turned out copious amounts of copy on
jazz, and invented a new dance-step with Fred Astaire (Dudley enacting the
girl's role when they tried it out on the stage of the Palace Theatre, the
schema subsequently appearing in the columns of the Daily Mail).

For enthusiasts of classic mystery fiction, his most enduring achievement,
however, was the creation of Dr Morelle, psychoanalyst-detective and male
chauvinist pig of the first water, whose ratiocinative powers were dazzling,
but whose treatment of females, especially his fluttery secretary Miss
Frayle, verged on the abominable.

Overbearing, sarcastic, patronising, contemptuous, cruel and unusually
vindictive, Morelle was nevertheless doted upon by millions of listeners to
his adventures on the radio in the 1940s and 1950s, the majority of whom,
bafflingly, were women. Dudley, a dab-hand at self-publicity, quickly came
up with the line "The man you love to hate!" Morelle was based originally on
the tyrannical movie actor and director Erich von Stroheim (one of whose
quirks was striding around film sets in jackboots) whom Dudley had met
briefly in Paris in the 1930s.

The first radio Morelle was played by the acerbic and distinctly toffish
Dennis Arundell - a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, who later
starred in many West End productions. A second series featured the even
darker tones of Heron Carvic, later to write best-selling mysteries of his
own, featuring the interfering spinster-sleuth Miss Seaton. In the 1950s,
the part was played to pompous, thin-lipped perfection by Cecil Parker, an
actor Morelle's creator wasn't, however, terribly keen on ("Was he any good,
dear boy?"). Dudley held strong opinions about certain people who had
crossed his path over the years, and carried decades-long grudges.

The first Miss Frayle was played by Dudley's wife, Jane Grahame, while a
later incarnation was Sheila Sim, whom Dudley always remembered with much
affection and who was married to Richard Attenborough ("We won't talk about
him, dear boy").

Dudley created Morelle for a popular BBC radio "anthology" programme Monday
Night at Eight during the Second World War. He subsequently published three
volumes of short stories as well as nearly a dozen novels about Morelle, and
co-wrote (with Arthur Watkyn) a play, Dr Morelle, which scored a modest
success in the early 1950s.

He had no more than a ghostly presence in the only Dr Morelle film, The Case
of the Missing Heiress (1949). It starred the sinister-toned Valentine
Dyall, best known as "The Man in Black" and another actor Dudley viewed with
some misgivings ("Not much of a stage actor, was he?"). The best thing about
the film, he once said, was that he got paid £500 for staying well away.

Ernest Dudley was born Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen in 1908, and took his
celebrated pseudonym from his place of birth, Dudley, near Wolverhampton. He
moved as a child to Cookham, Berkshire, where his father was running the
King's Arms, a hostelry much favoured by the arty set of the day. Stanley
Spencer lived nearby (Dudley's father bought an early painting for a fiver);
Ivor Novello brought his louche friends to stay; Somerset Maugham slept
there. West End stars such as Jack Buchanan used it as a weekend retreat.
(Buchanan later gave Dudley the aspiring actor the priceless advice always
to check his flies before going out on stage.) The hotel failed in the end
due to Colman-Allen senior's drinking.

Dudley, aged 17, after a grim period boarding at Taplow School, fled to
Ireland with a travelling repertory company, living on potatoes and a
pittance. Moving onward and upwards he joined the Charles Doran Company,
which toured a slightly better class of flea-pit. He always said that he
only went on the stage "to meet girls". He met his wife in 1928, on a tour
of Margaret Kennedy's famous weepie The Constant Nymph.

Jane Grahame had started her theatrical career as a child actress. Her
stepfather was the silent film star Eille Norwood, a celebrated Sherlock
Holmes - he played the part in nearly 50 shorts during the 1920s. This gave
rise to an oft-used conversational gambit by Dudley: "You don't know it, my
dear chap, but you're looking at Sherlock Holmes's stepson-in-law!"

Dudley's finest hour as a touring actor came when he and his wife were
chosen to take out the first touring Private Lives after the West End
production transferred to Broadway in 1931, although by then he was
beginning to tire of the grind of touring rep. Through his theatrical
in-laws he had already begun to shift into the West End. He played (though
in minor roles) on the same stage as Fay Compton, Charles Laughton and
Madeleine Carroll, and was stage manager to a number of West End hits.

During the 1930s Dudley eased himself into full-time writing via his job as
society reporter on the Daily Mail. He wrote for the movies, two or three
scripts for the "quota" (shoestring melodramas to counter the growing
American monopoly), and began to sell ideas to the BBC, gaining a foothold
by supplying 10-minute crime and detective sketches for anthology programmes
such as Lucky Dip, Monday Night at Seven and its enormously popular
successor, Monday Night at Eight.

He turned out many series for the Monday evening programme, for an audience
that sometimes reached 14 or 15 million: "Crime Chasers, Ltd", "Calling X2"
(a spy series starring Jack Melford), "SOS Sally" (Grahame playing a girl
sleuth who solves department-store crimes), and, notably, the long- running
series about a rag-and-bone man who solves problems of the heart as well as
crimes, "Mr Walker Wants To Know".

The series made a star of Gordon Crier - who used to mutter into the
microphone in hoarse Cockney when each dramatic problem had been posed,
"What would you do, chums?" - transforming him virtually overnight from a
£15-a-week comedian into a £500-a-week comic actor. It gave Dudley his first
published book, the now scarce Mr Walker Wants To Know (1939), and also
gained him £1,000 for the film rights.

He adapted for the radio Edwy Searles Brooks's 1938 Sexton Blake story
"Three Frightened Men" into Enter Sexton Blake (1939), with George Curzon in
the lead role ("Not an inspiring actor, dear boy"), and had the ingenious
notion of basing a whole series of atmospheric playlets on the composer
Geoffrey Toye's ravishing and eerie melody "The Haunted Ballroom".

Dudley's other big radio hit, The Armchair Detective, began in 1942. It was
a sort of book programme, with dramatised inserts, in which Dudley himself
chatted about real-life as well as fictional crime and crime-writers ("Good
evening, fellow sleuth-hounds, here's another juicy bit of mayhem and
skulduggery to chill the spine . . .") With over 10 million listeners, the
show ran for years, helped by photographs of Dudley "buried alive" under
what looked like an avalanche of letters (in fact, a cleverly positioned
layers-worth).

A film of the same name was produced in 1951 in which Dudley himself -
perhaps unwisely - starred; he even took the show on the road, touring the
variety halls as "The Armchair Detective" and solving 10-minute problems
between comedy double-acts, jugglers, dog-turns, and speciality sand-box
dancers. A number of "novel-length" comic books featuring a fictional Dudley
ran in the Amalgamated Press's "Super Detective Library", illustrated by the
ex-Rolls-Royce draughtsman Reg Bunn and the brilliant illustrator Bryce
Hamilton.

Through the 1950s Dudley wrote for both radio and television. His most
popular TV series was Judge For Yourself, one of the earliest
viewer-participation shows, in which, after a half-hour "trial", viewers
were invited by Dudley to send in their verdicts, "Guilty" or "Not guilty".
His catch-phrase, spoken to camera at the end, was always "Remember - you
are the judge".

He hosted a series of adapted terror tales on the old Light Programme,
Dudley Nightshade; wrote a radio "thriller by gaslight" which featured Edgar
Allan Poe's celebrated proto-sleuth C. Auguste Dupin in the chilling and
atmospheric The Flies of Isis (1966, with Rolf Lefebvre in the lead role);
and then scored a late hit with The House of Unspeakable Secrets, an
eight-part radio comedy thriller written for Leslie Phillips in 1967.

An even later hit was a brilliant eight-part adaptation for radio of Proof
(1987, with Nigel Havers), the racing-and-whisky thriller by Dick Francis
("But we won't speak of him, my dear chap"). In 1997, on the threshold of
his 90th year, he reworked and adapted one of the Sherlock Holmes plays his
stepfather-in-law had made famous nearly three-quarters of a century before:
the actor Michael Cashman, as Holmes, toured in The Return of Sherlock
Holmes to glowing reviews.

Towards the end of his life, Ernest Dudley had a fitness regime which would
have floored many 30 years younger. In his seventies and eighties he
finished five London marathons and three in New York; he was still active in
his nineties. And virtually every day there was always something in the
typewriter to read through, correct and push forward.

Jack Adrian



Ernest Dudley wasn't very good at being old - and I suspect that was the
secret of his longevity, writes Matthew Sweet. At the age of 97, he was
trotting about London in jeans and a black leather jacket, playing football
in Regent's Park with my daughter, and alarming the staff of the Fountain
Café in Fortnum and Mason's with his amazingly violent method of opening
miniature pots of strawberry jam. And he never stopped working - hours
before his death, he was fretting about the fate of a typescript that
detailed an unfinished adventure of Dr Morelle.

A couple of years ago we went on a jaunt to the places of his childhood. He
charged across the grass under Maidenhead Bridge, throwing out his arms to
show me the site once occupied by Murray's - a joint with an illuminated
glass dance floor which came in handy, he noted, for clients in search of a
smooth surface from which to snort cocaine. After telling a story like this,
his face would crack with a great grin - as if he could see the scene played
out before him.

"Marvellous," he'd say, riveted by some image from the past of which he was
the only living witness. "Marvellous."

[plasticjock]

A late but nonetheless welcome additional obituary for Ernest Dudley.....cor blimey, they don't make 'em like that anymore!


W Ernest Dudley

Marcelle Bernstein
Monday May 8, 2006
The Guardian


W Ernest Dudley, who has died aged 97, was an actor, a novelist with three books filmed, a radio and television scriptwriter and presenter, a journalist, a screenwriter, playwright, jazz critic, dancer, songwriter, artist and one of the world's oldest marathon runners.

His real name was Vivian Allen and he was born in Dudley near Wolverhampton. He grew up in Cookham, Berkshire where his father owned a public house and the artist Stanley Spencer, lived next door and paid for his meals by washing up. Spencer's friends included writers and actors such as Ivor Novello and Jack Buchanan and the latter steered the boy toward acting - Ernest later wrote a stage show for him.

Ernest spent several miserable years at Taplow School, which was run by nuns. Perhaps the depression which haunted him all his life began then. At 17 he ran away to become an actor, joining a company performing Shakespeare in tiny Irish towns. Ernest said he only went into the theatre to meet girls and in 1930 he married Jane Grahame, who for several years played one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. Jane's connections propelled Ernest to the West End, where his good looks secured him juvenile roles: he shared stages with Charles Laughton, Madeleine Carroll and Fay Compton. Jane and Ernest took the leads in the first British touring production of Noel Coward's Private Lives unhampered by the birth of their only child.

Ernest considered himself only a mediocre actor and in the 1930s gravitated towards journalism. As "Charles Ton", a Daily Mail showbusiness gossip columnist, he frequented the Embassy and the Café de Paris, got to know the spivs, swells and showgirls of Soho and met Fred Astaire when they were both buying shirts in Burlington Arcade. They worked out a routine on the darkened stage at the Palace Theatre where Astaire was starring in The Gay Divorcee. His passion for watching boxing led him to cover that sport for the People. His first novel Mr Walker Wants to Know (1939), was a spin-off from a radio series he scripted. He also wrote scripts for Twentieth Century Fox and British International Pictures, but by the outbreak of war he and Jane were working fulltime on live weekly shows for BBC Light Entertainment..

Not considered fit enough for active service he and Jane followed BBC Light Entertainment, first to Bristol and later north Wales. In 1942 Ernest's famous creation, the sinister and sarcastic Dr Morelle debuted on the magazine-cum-anthology show Monday Night at Eight. Conceived in a Bristol cellar during an air raid, he was based on film actor and director Erich von Stroheim, whom Ernest had met briefly in Paris in the 1930s. With his secretary Miss Frayle - a part written specially for Jane - Dr Morelle featured in novels, short stories, a film -- The Case of the Missing Heiress (1949), a play and three radio serials.

In 1942 Ernest also got his own hugely popular Armchair Detective series, reviewing and dramatising chapters of detective novels. The Daily Express ran an Armchair Detective weekly column - illustrated by the cartoonist Giles - and in 1952 came a film of Armchair Detective, featuring Ernest. Ernest crossed easily to television and in the late 1950s came Judge for Yourself - trials where the audience was the jury.

Insatiable curiosity led him down odd paths. Historical and detective novels were followed by works such as Confessions of a Special Agent (1957), featuring the exploits of Jack Evans; The Gilded Lillie (1958), a biography of Lillie Langtry; and Monsters of the Purple Twilight, (1960) a history of the Zeppelin. Then he started on true stories of assorted animals.

In his late 60s, in the mid-1970s Ernest took up marathon running, which, he claimed, helped with his depression. He ran four in London, two in New York. Run for Your Life (1985) described these experiences and his training methods. He was still jogging in Regents Park last year. He was a lifetime member of Equity, and the Crime Writers Association, of which he was a founder in the 1950s.

In his mid-90s his career was revitalised by a new agent, and American and Canadian publishers are reprinting his work of the 1950s and 60s. Ernest was working on a new book - Dr Morelle and the LapDancer - and a short novel, the first of three planned, based on his radio play The Flies of Isis (1966), is soon to be published in a Canadian anthology. (The play was originally called The Beetles of Isis but the BBC changed it, because they could provide fly noises, but not beetle noises.)

A shy man, he was happy alone in his tiny, book-littered Marylebone flat. He had not a single comfortable armchair but two desks, 70 years' worth of diaries and lots of pictures (several his own work), many pairs of expensive shoes, a black umbrella and a walking stick. That was all - apart from the squirrelings of a long working life. He was still working and living completely independently when he had a stroke.

Ideas, conversation and recollections bubbled out of him in his 90s with enviable ease. Courteous, courtly, amusing, he was a charmer, listening to a child with the same keen interest he accorded adults.

Jane died in 1981. He is survived by his daughter Susan.

· Ernest Dudley (Vivian Ernest Coltman Allen) writer and broadcaster, born February 7 1908; died February 1 2006