I would dearly love to have included a picture of wonderful Lory Alder here,
but alas have been unable to locate one, although I have managed to contact
another one of her collaborators, Richard Dalby who co-authored The
Dervish of Windsor Castle: the Life of Arminius Vambery*
with Lory. Should he succeed in locating a picture, and get it to me,
I will add it to this page.
My own connection with Lory was formed when we met at one of the TV and
Screenwriters' Guild month reunions, discussed the work on which we were
each engaged at the time, and decided we would try collaborating on a series
of comedy TV sketches. Our idea was to have as the main character a
bumbling idiot who has set himself up as a private investigator and solves
cases despite himself. We envisaged the role being taken by Harry
Worth - a popular TV comedy actor of the time. This was actually fifty
plus years ago!
Harry Worth
Lory and I wrote a complete pilot script plus several other uncompleted episodes
and synopses for a further seven episodes. We failed to get it
accepted. One big snag was that before it even got offered to any TV
producers, two other series had appeared on TV that - while not being the same -
were sufficiently alike as to make acceptance of Your Humble Investigator
unlikely in the extreme. One of these was Get Smart. I can't
recall the name of the other. You can view the pilot script of Your Humble
Investigator at
http://www.conts.com/Pinoman/Humble.htm.
Some years later I showed the script to my literary agent of the time, the
well-known and very kind Dick Sharples. He was very encouraging about my
TV dramas, which he tried to help me with, but kindly suggested that TV comedy
was not really my forte. He, of course, has a very large number of
well-known TV screenwriting credits to his name. He also subsequently
published some novels, one of which Soap in the Afternoon still resides
on my bookshelves.
Anyway, Lory and I continued to try and collaborate intermittently, until in the
early 1960s I went to live in Switzerland and we lost touch. I was
astonished when 40 years later, in a secondhand bookshop, I came across a copy
of Paris Is Fun by Lory Alder, a bilingual guide. An excellent
guide book to Paris and an excellent example of Lory's bilingual abilities.
Alas, the device she chose of alternating paragraphs in French and English was
hardly likely to encourage sales. Even using the different languages on,
say, the recto and verso pages would have been better and I'm surprised that her
publishers Pelham Books didn't recognise that fact.
She is no longer with us and I have to add to my ever-lengthening list of
regrets the fact that we never met again. But I am so very pleased that
she did have two published titles to her name, even though one of them didn't
really make it.
* The book was inspired by a
Hungarian great-uncle of Lory, who travelled in central Asia disguised as a
dervish, and won fame and acclaim as a linguist in London in the 1860s.