By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Forget about Chinua Achebe and his classic Things Fall Apart, the most popular author ever read in Nigeria was James Hadley Chase. James Hadley Chase was an Englishman whose real name was Rene Lodge Brabazon Raymond. He was born on December 24, 1906, and died on February 6, 1985.
A Londoner, he used to sell books of literature and children’s encyclopedia. It was after reading many celebrated thrillers written by American authors that the Englishman felt he could write better than the lot, and thus penned his own thriller, which he entitled No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
Never having visited the United States of America, he used maps and an American slang dictionary to write the book. When the manuscript got to the Hutchinson publishing house, the “half-mad” chairman of the board, Mr. Walter Hutchinson, needed two positive readers’ reports for the book to be published. Jim Reynolds, an editor in the publishing house, forged the two reports that convinced Mr. Hutchinson to publish the book.
James Hadley Chase published about 90 thrillers bearing such titles as The Vulture is a Patient Bird, Believed Violent, The Way the Cookie Crumbles, An Ear to the Ground, Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, Strictly for Cash, Coffin from Hong Kong, The Dead Stay Dumb, The Guilty Are Afraid etc. About 50 of his thrillers were turned into movies.
An advance of £30 was paid to Rene Raymond who had adopted the magical penname of James Hadley Chase. The highly prolific thriller writer had other pseudonyms such as James L. Docherty, Raymond Marshall, R. Raymond, and Ambrose Grant, but it was as James Hadley Chase that he conquered the world.
At about the beginning of the Second World War, that is in 1939, No Orchids for Miss Blandish was published, and quickly sold a staggering half-a-million copies. Before the end of the war in 1945, James Hadley Chase had published eleven successful thrillers.
In his lifetime, James Hadley Chase published about 90 thrillers bearing such titles as The Vulture is a Patient Bird, Believed Violent, The Way the Cookie Crumbles, An Ear to the Ground, Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, Strictly for Cash, Coffin from Hong Kong, The Dead Stay Dumb, and The Guilty Are Afraid, etc. About 50 of his thrillers were turned into movies, especially in France where he was so loved. He lived for a time in France before settling in Switzerland with his wife.
He was seen as “the king of thriller writers” and had plot twists that could twist the neck of the reader this way and that.
James Hadley Chase’s celebrated characters include Dave Fenner, Vic Malloy, Johnny Farrar, Vito Ferrari, Mark Girland, Frank Terrell, Tom Lepski, Dirk Wallace, Poke Toholo, etc.
There are pungent vistas of wisdom in James Hadley Chase’s thriller such as in The Paw in the Bottle where we learn: “Have you ever heard how they catch monkeys in Brazil, Julie? Let me tell you. They put a nut in a bottle, and tie the bottle to a tree. The monkey grasps the nut, but the neck of the bottle is too narrow for the monkey to withdraw its paw and the nut. You would think the monkey would let go of the nut and escape, wouldn’t you? But it never does. It is so greedy it never releases the nut and is always captured. Remember that story, Julie. Greed is a dangerous thing. If you give way to it, sooner or later you will be caught.”
The memorable lines from The Sucker Punch are: “It’s when a guy gets full of confidence he’s wide open for a sucker punch. I’ve seen it again and again in my racket. Some guy commits murder. He takes a lot of trouble and thought to cover it up, fakes himself an alibi, or maybe makes it look like it’s been done by someone else. Then he imagines he’s safe, but he isn’t. And, wham, he’s flat on his back…”
There is of course the guy with his ear to the ground, Al Barney, the beach drunkard of Paradise City in Florida, who tells the Esmaldi necklace heist story of An Ear to the Ground. Poke Toholo of Want to Stay Alive teaches that fear is the key that unlocks the wallets of the rich.
I read a whole lot of the thrillers of James Hadley Chase when I ought to be reading my schoolbooks, and that’s why I maintain that he was the most popular writer ever read in Nigeria!
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist, and author.
Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.
