4. Harry Starks/Charlie Richardson - The Long Firm (2004)/Charlie (2004)
If there was one modern novel it seemed audacious to try to televise, it was Jake Arnotts 1999 The Long Firm. A rewriting of 1960s criminal and social history, its ingeniously allusive narrative was sectioned off into four discrete one-hour episodes. It was also a career best for Mark Strong as London gangster Harry Starks, before he took off for a solid career in Hollywood supporting roles. A reader of Charlie Richardsons self-serving autobiography (My Manor) would recognise shades of little Charlie in Harry, as he reminisces about joyful times spent tossing unexploded bombs to and fro with his father, an air raid warden. Both South Londoner Richardson and his rivals the Krays provided the framework on which Arnott built his alternative universe, with its allusions to other London figures of the time. (Like the un-businesslike, irrational Ronnie Kray, Harry is gay and a paranoid schizophrenic.) With Arnotts post-modern sleight of hand, one episode also draws in record producer and amphetamine psychotic Joe Meek - the Phil Spector of London N7, subject of the great biopic Telstar. One story strand not explored in that film is how, in January 1967, two suitcases were discovered in the village of Tattingstone, Suffolk, containing the dismembered body of teenager Bernard Oliver. Bernard was a rent boy and a friend of Meeks. Meek felt the walls closing in when Scotland Yard announced they would be interviewing all known gays in London (a very tall order). Then, on February 3, he shot dead his landlady and turned the single barrel on himself. Whether he was guilty or not, after his death no one was charged with the murder of Bernard Oliver. In The Long Firm, the murder of disintegrating Meeks rent-boy friend is revealed as an act of sadism by a member of the aristocracy: Lord Thursby (Derek Jacobi), who owns a country pile in Tattingstone, scene of the 1967 crime. Thursby, a corrupt and clandestine gay in the pocket of Harry Starks, is such an obvious caricature of Lord Boothby, Ronnie Krays tame MP, that some have assumed the Krays somehow imposed themselves into the life of Joe Meek. Such associations exist only in the imagination of Arnott, but avenging the boys death allows Strong, as Starks, to get righteously medieval with a red-hot poker. When he comes to trial, Harry is labelled with the Fleet Street title of Torture Gang Boss, just like Charlie Richardson. But no such mitigation exists for the Richardson gangs alleged deeds. According to A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson, fellow crooked businessmen whod fallen foul could expect the following treatment: At these torture sessions, Charles Richardson dressed himself up in judges robes, and conducted a mock trial. Then the victim was stripped naked, and a device known as the box was produced... Buckets of cold water were thrown over the victim to lower his electrical resistance. Teeth would be pulled out with pliers, and cigarettes would be stubbed out on the bare flesh. Charlie, in which 80s pop star Luke Goss is leeringly effective as the title character, features vivid glimpses of the torture; at the same time, a case is made for the gangs claims that most of it never occurred. (The box was certainly never found, with a substitute rigged up for court.) Its an ambiguity that led reviewers to accuse director Malcolm Needs of wanting to have his cake and eat it. They did tend to put cases together in them days to make dramas out of em, the police, didnt they? my sceptical underworld interviewee told me. They worked their story to a great height. But John McVicar, the writer and ex-armed robber (himself the subject of a biopic with Roger Daltrey), claims Richardsons crony Roy Hall told him of how hed seen torture crush a mans resistance. According to McVicar, the Richardsons, Hall and Fraser had descended to a level of profound evil.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
