Paul Winterton (1908–2001) was an English journalist and crime novelist. Throughout his career, he used the pseudonyms Andrew Garve, Roger Bax and Paul Somers.
Contents |
Winterton was born in Leicester on 12 February 1908. He was the son of George Ernest Winterton (1873 - May 15, 1942) who was the eighth Member of Parliament for Loughborough, serving between 1929 and 1931. He was educated at various schools before reading Economics at the London School of Economics, graduating (BSc) in 1928. The following winter he travelled to Soviet Russia and back, demonstrating a fascination for the country that was to bear fruit only a decade later. He joined the staff of The Economist at the age of 21. He stayed for three years before moving on to the News Chronicle (successor to the old Daily News, the great campaigning war-horse of the late 19th century)
Winterton stayed on the staff for more than a dozen years as general reporter, leader-writer and, for a hectic period (1942-45), as foreign correspondent reporting the Second World War from Moscow. During this time he published a number of books and pamphlets on Russia (he had already turned his brief excursion of 1928/29 into A Student in Russia in 1931), including Eye-Witness on the Soviet War-Front (1943) and Report On Russia (1945). His general experiences and views were summed up in Inquest on an Ally in 1948.
While on the News Chronicle he had travelled to Palestine, the trip suggesting the plot for a murder story which he subsequently wrote using the pseudonym Roger Bax. This was Death Beneath Jerusalem (1938) which was published by Nelson.
A few more Bax novels (all now published by Hutchinson) appeared after the war until the gripping sea drama Came the Dawn (1949), which appeared in the United States as Two If By Sea and was optioned by MGM. The subsequent movie, re-titled Never Let Me Go, starred Clark Gable and Gene Tierney and featured a script part-written by the young Ronald Millar; it was premiered in 1953.
By this time Winterton/Bax had become Garve, his publisher Collins; both pseudonyms and publisher became a permanent fixture in his life, and between 1950 and 1978 he wrote 30 detective novels for the Crime Club as well as a handful of pure thrillers as "Paul Somers". Most of this output was published in America by Harper & Row. Thus Garve's professional career was presided over by two legendary grandes dames of crime fiction, Elizabeth Walter in London, Joan Kahn in New York.
Garve's work exhibited an immense diversity, in locales as well as plot-lines. He loved the sea as a backdrop, and many of his heroes tried conclusions with danger not only on the high seas but in seemingly tranquil coastal waters where, on the contrary, violence lurked and dark deeds were planned and executed. Not unnaturally Russia was often both background and foreground in his books, one of his finest yarns undoubtedly The Ascent of D-13 (1969), an epic mountaineering thriller which takes place on the Russo-Turkish border.
Garve could be just as gripping, suspenseful and artful in a purely domestic setting: No Tears For Hilda (1950) brilliantly recounts the murder of a truly ghastly spouse, posing the ticklish question: should the murderer get away with it? He had a talent for writing stories that translated fairly effortlessly into film scripts, probably the best of these being A Touch of Larceny (1959), taken from his diverting and mildly cynical The Megstone Plot (1956).
He was a founder-member of the Crime Writers' Association in 1953 and, with Elizabeth Ferrars, its first joint secretary.
He died on 8 January 2001 in Surrey.