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Thomson, Basil

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 1 month ago

Sir Basil Home Thomson (1861-1939) was a British writer. He was educated at New College Oxford and the Inner Temple London and called to the Bar. He married in 1889 and worked for the Foreign Service. This included a stint as Prime Minister of Tonga in the 1890s followed by a return to the Civil Service and a period as Governor of Dartmoor Prison. He was Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police from 1913 to 1919, after which he moved into Intelligence. He was knighted in 1919 and received other hours from Europe and Japan, but his career came to an end when he was arrested for committing an act of indecency in Hyde Park.

His series character was PC Richardson, who later rose through the ranks to Superintendent. He also wrote biographical and criminological works.

Mike Grost on Basil Thomson

Sir Basil Thomson's Mr Pepper, Investigator (collected 1925) contains a famous story about a woman whose mother disappears while they are on a trip to Paris. Or perhaps we should say a story with a famous plot, because it is much referred to, but never by name. For the record, it is "The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser". John Dickson Carr cited this story in his famous radio play, "Cabin B-13" (1943), where he gives a deliberately very different, and ingenious solution to same basic situation as Thomson's tale. In some ways Carr's solution is "fairer" and even cleverer than Thomson's, because he ... (well I shouldn't give away Carr's solution, but it is one of the more subtle pieces of misdirection I have come across: the reader expects one thing, and Carr does something else). Carr merely calls Thomson's tale "the old story" as if he wanted to give credit, but couldn't remember the name of the author. It is to be found in Dorothy L. Sayers' second omnibus, where I have finally read it, and a delightful story it is. There is a good deal of well done Parisian background, and the detection is vivid. The solution involves science, as in the realist tradition.

Thomson's tale reminds one of Anna Katherine Green's "Room No. 3", which takes place in a country inn in Ohio. Here the mother is found dead outside the hotel; but just as in the Thomson and Carr tales, everyone in the hotel claims not to have seen her. Green's version, probably the earliest of the three, shows an abundant, overflowing storytelling imagination, and is one of her best thrillers.

This story ultimately anticipated a whole lot of other writers as well. Evelyn Piper's Bunny Lake is Missing (1957) explores a similar situation, for example. I haven't read this book, but I have seen Otto Preminger's great film version: certainly the finest achievement in Preminger's distinguished career. Preminger is not interested in ingenious solutions, but has an emphasis instead on the social and moral implications of the plot. In the film, when the young woman reports that her daughter is missing, no physical evidence remains that the daughter ever really existed. Only the mother's love for the child has any survival into the present. The cold hearted police inspector doubts the child is real, and considers her a figment of her mother's imagination. He completely discounts the importance of the mother's feelings. This allows Preminger to explore his central personal theme of the privacy of subjectivity, the idea that people fail to penetrate to other's personal views (see Andrew Sarris' article in The American Cinema for a broader discussion of this theme in Preminger's movies). The mother's personal feelings fight a tremendous duel in the film with the impersonality of Society, in the form of the police. We see two worlds in conflict: an impersonal one, where society dictates what roles people are to play, and a personal one, where feelings of love are all-important.

On a more mundane level, Green's tale, and Thomson's after it, is the first I know of to contain a common suspense situation: people see something in a room, rush out and bring back the police, but when they return the room has been entirely redecorated, with new furniture, wallpaper, etc. This plot has been used a million times on TV, and is especially popular on spy shows. It is quite photogenic, and very effective in the film medium. However, there was already a long tradition of British thrillers and American dime novels when Green and Thomson's tales were published, with Edgar Wallace, J.S. Fletcher, Buchan, etc., and it is possible there are earlier appearances of this idea as well. (I also like that Green's story is one of the few classic detective works to mention my home town of Lansing, Michigan.)

Thomson's story is also an early burlesque of detective fiction. Mr. Pepper's dogmatic detectival pronouncements, half-wrong and half-right, and their collision with the ultimate realities of the case, reminded me more that a little bit of Jack Ritchie's 1970's Henry Turnbuckle stories. The comic tone nearly exactly matches that of Ritchie. I wonder if there are other good natured spoofs of detective stories in early Golden Age fiction. Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime were collected in book form in 1929; reportedly they appeared in magazines in 1928.

Thomson was a real life member of Scotland Yard, and most of his books are now considered to be early police procedural works. Like Freeman Wills Crofts, another early author of police fiction, he enjoyed writing about France. Here Britishers traipse over to Paris to investigate a crime, just like in Crofts' The Cask (1920).