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Philip Odell

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Lester Powell
(1912 -93)

Ad from the August 19, 1959 A.B.C. Weekly, an Australian radio and television guide.

Genial Irish private eye PHILIP ODELL (as played by Canadian Robert Beatty) was the star of a popular radio series that originated as part of BBC’s “Light Programme” back in the late forties, and ran right into the sixties, with various actors portraying the steadfast Heather McMara. The series was popular enough to spin-off not just a series of novels by Powell, but even a 1951 feature film. Its popularity apparently also spread to the Continet–about the only copies of the books yopu can find these days are French and German translations.

When we first meet Odell in the first radio series, Lady in a Fog, he’s in London on his way home to Ireland, when his flight is delayed by fog. So he decides to drop in his old pal Heather. But Heather’s brother has just been found drowned in the Thames, and Odell is reluctantly drawn into the investigation, much to the chagrin of Inspector Rigby, who considers Odell a viable suspect, especially when the murders continue.

Somehow, he never quite makes it back to Dublin–instead, he becomes a London-based private investigator. With Heather as his assistant, they stumbled, staggered and tripped over all sorts of strange cases, full of thrills and chills, such as when they’re hired by a famous detective story writer who is convinced that the character he created in his books has come to life and is sending him messages.

According to a 1959 article from The New Zealand Listener, Odell, at least as portrayed by Beatty, came across as an affable, down-to-earth type:

“… a humanitarian, interested and concerned in people (with) an instinctive understanding of their foibles and motives, and neither condemns nor approves. The opposition is tough, the men and women involved are hard, unprincipled, sophisticated and intelligent. It is small wonder, then, that Lester Powell admits, “Odell makes mistakes in a human way and puzzles out the solution of a problem much as you or I would.”

This may account for this perennial attraction for audiences: there are no hidden clues, no over-ripe red herrings, nothing kept for the denouement.”

Some of suggested Odell was a proto Jim Rockford, because he was “Not heroic, not tough, but smart, permanently broke and he used to charm his way out of difficult situations rather than fight,” and maybe they have somethiing there, although it’s a stretch. What interests me more (or at least the Canadian in me) is the final radio serial, Tea on an Island (1961), wherein Odell and Heather tangle with Montreal drug traffickers. One of the installments is tantalizingly entitled “Canada’s Cultural Conscience.” Let me assure you — my ears pricked up when I read that.

Alas, Professor Jeffrey Richards, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s series The Radio Detectives, stated in a 1999 article from The Sherlock Holmes Magazine that the BBC hadn’t preserved any episodes of the series, although since that article’s publication, there have been rumours that some episodes may have survived in private hands.

The feature film, Lady in a Fog (1952, Hammer) (known, inexplicably, as “Scotland Yard Inspector” in the States), had a young Cesar “Joker” Romero playing Odell as an American journalist (not an Irish private detective, and certainly NOT a Scotland Yard Inspector), whose flight is delayed, but in this one, he meets Heather for the first time in a club. Even cooler, the “bad girl” is played by Lois Mawell, the Canadian actor who went on to play Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Also inexplicable? Some people refer to this as a film noir. It’s about as noir as a pancake.

Meanwhile, actor Robert Beatty became quite well known in the U.K., and seemed to have had a long and successful career. He later starred as Det. Insp. Mike Maguire, a Canadian Mountie assigned to Scotland Yard, in the 1958-59 TV series Towers of London, and played Quentin Barnaby, an insurance investigator in Destination – Fire!, a series written by Philip Levene. He also played General Sternwood in the Afternoon Theatre adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep in 1977.

Canada, Montreal, Mounties, Chandler, Irish private eyes, Miss Moneypenny–I love the interconnectedness of it all!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Before becoming a writer for radio and television, Lester Powell was a draughtsman, poultry farmer, and journalist. He also created The Inch Man, a pretty much forgotten 1951-52 BBC television series about Stephen Inch, a house dick working in a busy London hotel, and The Hidden Motive, a 1952 BBC serial relating the efforts of “Doc” Job, an eccentric insurance investigator.

 

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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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