Bodies from the Library 2

Swallow paused a moment. ‘I feel I owe you some sort of apology, but it’s strictly in confidence. We had orders from the Yard to let him have his head—they’re suspicious because he happens to be around when so many murders crop up. But he had nothing to do with this one.’

‘Nothing at all. Ah!’ said the sergeant as a constable brought in a tray of tea mugs.

‘Peter Antony’ was an alias adopted by the Shaffer twins, Anthony and Peter, both of whom became rather more famous under their own names. The twins were born in Liverpool in 1926 and, after the family moved to London, they attended St Paul’s School and then spent three years as Bevin boys in the Kent coalfields. At the age of 21, under the name ‘Peter Antony’, the brothers collaborated on what would be the first of three mysteries, The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951), How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952) and Withered Murder (1955). The novels feature Mr Verity, a detective cast very much in the mould of the sleuths of the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction.

On his release from the mines, Anthony Shaffer went up to Cambridge where he read Law at Trinity. In the early 1950s, he worked as a barrister and in 1954 he married his first wife, Henrietta Glaskie. The marriage ended four years later and Glaskie named the actress Fenella Fielding and two other women in her divorce suit.

Considerably more at home with the written word than the spoken one, Anthony did not enjoy the life of a barrister and moved into reviewing books and copy-writing for advertising company Pearl & Dean. In 1963, he produced his first play The Savage Parade , which had its roots in the abduction and trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. The play was criticised by some for taking an insufficiently serious approach to the Holocaust and by others because, in the words of one critic, it included ‘so many cases of mistaken identity as to be laughable were the subject not so serious and the author so obviously well intentioned’. The young writer learned from the criticism but nonetheless carried some elements of his first play into his next, Sleuth (1970), in which he celebrated the work of John Dickson Carr and other Golden Age writers while accurately skewering the more unpleasant tropes of the genre. Described by one critic as a ‘who-dun-what-to-whom’, Sleuth was an enormous success, playing for some years in London’s West End and in New York on Broadway.

While other stage thrillers would follow—including the over-elaborate Murderer (1975) and the unwisely titled The Case of the Oily Levantine (1977)—none would achieve the same success as Sleuth . He also wrote for the cinema, beginning with the charming Mr Forbush and the Penguins (1971) and the thriller Frenzy (1972) for Hitchcock before adapting his own play into Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s memorable film of Sleuth (1972) with Michael Caine amd Laurence Olivier. His next screenplay—for the cult mystery The Wicker Man (1973)—would eventually bring him almost as much fame as Sleuth , and he had begun his first of three high-profile Agatha Christie film adaptations, Death on the Nile (1978), before returning to his own work with another twisted mystery, Absolution (1978), directed by Anthony Page. He also worked with the director Nicholas Meyer on Sommersby (1993), which relocated a sixteenth-century mystery of imposture to the American Civil War.

Towards the end of his life, Anthony Shaffer lived in Australia with his third wife, the actress Diane Cilento, and it was here that his final two plays were performed, Widow’s Weeds (1977) and The Thing in the Wheelchair (1996), a ‘melodrama’ adapted from ‘The Case of the Talking Eyes’, a short story by Cornell Woolrich.

After his stint as a Bevin boy, Peter Shaffer also went up to Cambridge, on a scholarship, to read history. He graduated in 1950 and moved to America where he worked in the New York Public Library and then in a bookshop. It was while living in New York that he wrote his first script, The Salt Land (1955), a television play about the formation of the state of Israel. On returning to London, he worked for the classical music publisher Boosey and Hawkes on catalogues and publicity, specialising in the symphonic section, and he also reviewed books for the magazine Truth . As well as writing the libretto for a comic opera, he wrote a television play Balance of Terror (1957), a spy thriller about the theft of plans for an intercontinental missile by an unspecified foreign power, and a radio ‘parable’ called The Prodigal Father . His first major theatrical success was Five Finger Exercise (1958), a play about a warring family. Though it seemed to some critics rather old-fashioned, others praised the play for the way it explored sensitive issues without the strident tone of other playwrights of the new wave. Either way, the play won him recognition as the Most Promising British Playwright of the Year in the Evening Standard ’s prestigious theatre awards.

Peter Shaffer believed that theatre ‘should lead people into mystery and magic. It should give them a sense of wonderment and, while entertaining, reveal a vision of life.’ His many plays include The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), which explored Spain’s genocide of the Incas, the ‘farce in the dark’ Black Comedy (1965), Lettice and Lovage (1987) and Amadeus (1979), which probed the death of Mozart and the possible involvement of the composer Salieri. For many, Amadeus is Peter Shaffer’s finest play and it was filmed by Milos Forman in 1984, winning eight Oscars including one for Shaffer’s screenplay. But there is also Equus (1973), an ingenious whydunnit in which a psychiatrist explores the motives and meaning behind a case of horse-mutilation. The play was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, although, as the playwright observed, ‘In London, Equus caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.’

Anthony Shaffer died in London in 2001, the year in which his brother was knighted; Peter Shaffer died in 2016 while on a family visit to Ireland.

‘Before and After’, the only short story to feature Mr Verity, was published in London Mystery Magazine (Issue 16) in 1953, and ‘Part II: Mr Verity’s Investigation’ appeared in the following issue, credited to ‘J. M. Caffyn’, the name of a surgeon in Bram Stoker’s Dracula .