Paris Archives - ACOMSDave

I watched Mad About The Boy the documentary about Noel Coward in the Queens Film Theatre, Belfast and was intrigued and entranced with Noel’s life, his ability to have escaped from poverty with a father who is mentioned briefly in the beginning and who was a piano salesman, and his mother who was his bedrock throughout his life until she died in 1954.

The Beginning

Coward was born on the 16^th of December 1899 and lived until 1973. He had very little formal schooling, leaving full-time education when he was 9 years old, but haunting his local library where he was a voracious reader and self-educated himself. But he had been bitten by the performing bug early on and at age 7 appeared in local productions. This was encouraged by his mother, who arranged for him to attend a dance academy. Then through a small (wee) advertisement in the Mirror which asked for young boys to apply for a part in a play with Lila Field The Goldfish. The road was set.

War Service

His career had its ups and downs, he didn’t see World War 1 service due to being ‘unfit for service’; however, during World War 2 he worked early on with the British Secret Service in Paris and then in the USA. In both locations, he gathered intelligence and passed it on, and he also sought to influence people to support the United Kingdom.

Unfortunately, during this time, the British Media were very anti-Coward – ‘why should he be able to prance about and live the high life, when his fellow countrymen were being killed’. Coward was deeply hurt by this but was unable to reply to their barbs due to the Official Secrets Act.

Relationships

Running in conjunction with his acting was his social life, including his gay life. He had a number of discreet relationships – most of substantial length, the longest being with the film actor Graham Payne, and this began in the mid-1940s and lasted until Coward’s death.

Noel Coward loved people, men and women, and had deep friendships with a select band throughout his life. Mad About the Boy

And binding all this together was his ability to act, write plays and musicals, write lyrics, poetry and also music – he was the ‘Quintessential British Gentleman’.

The documentary shows all of the above and more, being able to show highlights from home videos made by Coward and his friends, but also the newsreels of the time, picture archives and Rupert Everett reading some of his journals extracts, and Alan Cummings narration it is fully entrancing, you get some idea of the man.

I enjoyed the movie/documentary, but at times it felt weird to watch a current showing with black-and-white excerpts. Yes, the home movies probably did not have sound, but a lot of the films of his work would and I cannot understand why these were not included. Their silences did not add to the overall structure of the documentary.

The Man

Coward was a unique man, and like all of us had good and bad bits, but without doubt he was in most ways a renaissance man.

Links

Movie Information:

Directed by Barnaby Thompson

Writing Credits – Barnaby Thompson

Music by – Rael Jones

Editing by – Ben Hilton

Title: The Bookseller

Author: Mark Pryor

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

Current Price: £8.74 (PB)

ISBN: 9781616147082

The Bookseller

Link in Amazon: The Bookseller

The Bookseller harks back to the days of crisis being low key, it brings in World War 2 and collaborators but only as an aside, almost as a ‘red herring’.

The main character, Hugo Marston, fulfils the general characteristics of the hard-baked ex-cop, with a broken marriage; but here it departs from that genre, and develops the character. Yes, he is an ex-cop, but actually ex-FBI, now he is head of security at a US Embassy in Paris, speaks excellent French (something I have only just started to learn) and has a hobby of collecting books and visiting second-hand book shops and the booksellers in Paris, but in particular Max who is located about a quarter of a mile from Quai Saint Michel. He has friends in these places and feels at a lost when one of them (Max) is hustled away under threat!

There are a couple of side streams developed along with the main one; that of securing the release of Max. A mysterious feminine reporter, who has an equally mysterious past, and a policeman who seems to not want to do anything about the ‘kidnapping’ – indeed seems to be blocking anything from happening.

Hugo brings into use his contacts in the USA (Tom a spook for the CIA) and through a lot of misadventures and stumbling, not to say many side entries, the story comes to a resolvement.

However, the book is anything but predictable, and the many side trips, in conjunction, make for a very interesting, well written, and enticing book.

For me as a reader, I love a book which is subtle, one that does not throw guns at you at every corner, one that makes you think. It reminds me of Conan Doyle’s stories, off John Creasey’s stories about the Toff, or even of John le Carré’s stories with George Smiley.

Mark Pryor has written nine books with the main character of Hugo Marston, I will be looking to read the rest in the series in the coming year, I hope you will do so as well:

The Bookseller(2012)
2. The Crypt Thief (2013)
3. The Blood Promise (2014)
4. The Button Man (2014)
5. The Reluctant Matador (2015)
6. The Paris Librarian (2016)
7. The Sorbonne Affair (2017)
8. The Book Artist (2019)
9. The French Widow (2020)

Mad About The Boy – Noel Coward