blandish

In Raffles and Miss Blandish he called reading the "tough" pre-war thriller No Orchids for Miss Blandish "a header into the cesspool".

100 YEARS AGO: At police court yesterday Edward Blandish was charged with having been on the premises of Meriden Lodge for an unlawful purpose.

For them, as for the real inventor of the discipline, the George Orwell of essays such as Boys' Weeklies, Raffles and Miss Blandish or The Art of Duncan McGill, capitalist society was as culturally impoverishing as it was economically exploitative.

After the success of The Second Man (1927), a comedy of manners, other comedies followed, mostly in the same vein: Serena Blandish (1928), a dramatization of a novel by the English novelist Enid Bagnold (1925); Meteor (1929); Brief Moment (1931); Biography (1932), about a woman portrait painter and a journalist; Rain from Heaven (1934), one of the earliest anti-Nazi plays; End of Summer (1936), a comedy on the use of wealth; Amphitryon 38 (1937), an adaptation from the French and, ultimately, from the ancients; Wine of Choice (1938), on liberalism and its difficulties; No Time For Comedy (1939), with a dramatist as protagonist; The Talley Method (1941); The Pirate (1942); I Know My Love (1949); Lord Pengo (1962); and But for Whom Charlie (1964).

He was also known for his fine adaptations, particularly Serena Blandish (1928) from the novel by Enid Bagnold, and Amphitryon 38 (1937), from the play by the French dramatist Jean Giraudoux.

Born in the Bay Area, they met in Los Angeles, made a name on Broadway, played the lamed London Palladium, and danced through Hollywood in films like No Orchids fur Miss Blandish and Happiness Ahead.

But probably the most exciting was No Orchids For Miss Blandish, an American kidnap story, later made into a movie called The Grissom Gang.