I was probably 12 or 13 years old when I discovered the seam of (sometimes blackly-) comic movies that came out of London’s Ealing Studios, with Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955) being among the most notable as far as Young Jim was concerned. I can’t remember when I found out that Kind Hearts was based on a novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman, but it’s to that book we turn our attentions today.

I’ll not talk about the film version because I haven’t watched it in 30-some years, but from my reading of this book it’s fair to say that the film really is a condensed version of the story, with actual jokes rather than just occasionally shocking-for-the-time attitudes…in fairness, some of which did bring me up short with their incision:

The woman of delicate upbringing, who astonishes her friends by her inexplicable infatuation for a boaster who is obviously a cad and a bully despite his physical advantages, is twin sister to the lady of the slums who worships the brute who blackens her eyes and kicks her as an amusing conclusion to the week’s work. The poor slut flatters herself that it is evidence of a strength which he would not fail to use in her defence, forgetting that a bully is only occasionally a brave man.

Born to modest beginnings in humble Clapham (“[I]t gets more and more sordid every year!”), Israel Rank finds that he “gravitate[s] toward wealth and luxury as the needle to a magnet”. His mother having married below herself, young Israel knows from an early age that he stands somewhere sufficiently far down the line to a title that he should expect no return on that investment, but when his efforts at betterment are thwarted, and when the love of his young life betroths herself to another man, he begins to investigate the path that may yet — and, from occasional comments in the text, we come to believe have — see him installed in the Gascoyne Earldom.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen this book referred to as a comedy, and to be honest that feels very much like people projecting the film onto the text whence it came — unless we take ‘comedy’ in its classical sense to mean ‘has a happy ending’. Via various means, Israel inveigles his way into the family who do not wish to acknowledge him, kills one of them — a poisoning here, an immolation there, some powdered glass in sherry elsewhere — and then sails on with only the barest lip-service paid to what might be construed a conscience.

As I opened the door it was as if the voice of an unseen presence pervaded the emptiness of the house, whispering: “Murderer!” and when I awoke the next morning it seemed as if the heavy gray light of dawn wove itself into haunting, opaque shapes. With a shudder I realised that never again should I be alone and at peace.

Between these very widely-spaced incidents, we get some trenchant thoughts on society…

Personally, I don’t think highly imaginative people are ever very studious in childhood or early youth. How is it possible? The imaginative temperament sets one dreaming of wonderful results achieved at a remarkably small outlay of effort. It is only the dull who receive any demonstration of the value of application.

…lots of reflections on the way Israel is treated due to his Jewish heritage (one of the all-too-rare moments of real insight sees a character dismissed as having “the natural contempt of all Westerns for anything Jewish, and…not the breeding to disguise the fact.”), and plenty of his lusting after Sibella Hallward, sister of his one true childhood friend, George. When Rank writes of his “slow subterranean tunnelling to the Gascoyne peerage”, yes, slow is most definitely the word.

The plot is, on the standards of 120 years to look backwards at it, not really a success, nor the light and humorous experience I had hoped for. You’ll doubtless call me beef-witted for failing to spot Horniman’s skewering of the niceties of Edwardian society, but the fact remains that the time has passed enough for that sort of thing to be lost on the average reader, I would suggest. It’s fun when occasional snarky insights bob to the surface, like Israel sitting down with a man whose son he has killed and reflecting that “[a]ccording to all rules of accepted psychology I should have had something unpleasant in my personality which he should at once have detected. It was extraordinarily remiss on the part of instinct that it should not have been so,” but these are mere fireflies in the mist of the novel’s slow, convenient pacing.

For all the apparent troubles our murderer should face, nothing seems to cause Rank a moment of doubt or reflection, and this could be seen as an example of early psychopathy in fiction were he not so ardently in love with Sibella and so keenly opposed to everything about Lionel Holland, her (eventual) husband. As such, the book comes off as somewhat soulless, especially in moments like Israel reflecting that the birth of a male child along the inheritance line simply means that “the child would have to be removed as well as his father”. It’s not chilling, it’s not even especially dramatic — it’s like he’s just realised he forgot to get stock for the soup he wanted to make that evening.

With three decades of intervening incident, I’m willing to bet that Kind Hearts and Coronets is that rare thing: an instance when the film is better than the book, and that the latter only retains a patina of relevance because of the excellent work done by the former. I can see someone picking this up and feeling a desperate urge to boil out all the excess verbiage and so improve the pace, focus, characterisation, humour, and relevance of it, and I hope in due course to revisit the film and confirm that this is indeed the case. For now, this ranks low in my estimations, and I’ll happily move on without giving it much more thought.

In brief: wait for a reprint of Heir Presumptive (1935).