It was the second or third time that I ever saw Kind Hearts and Coronets that I noticed in the opening credits: ‘Based on the novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman’. It prompted a ten-year search for the book in secondhand shops that finished in a dusty corner of a Suffolk village more than a quarter-of-a-century ago. I am not given to hyperventilation, but on that occasion came perilously close to it. I have never seen another copy, and a search on the internet returns only pleas by would-be readers to find them a copy. Mine is the 1948 reprint, with an introduction by Hugh Kingsmill. In its tatty but intact dust-wrapper, and with a scribble telling me I paid 60p for it in 1982, it is apparently now worth hundreds. A first edition, by Chatto in 1907, must be akin to the crown jewels. One remained in the Horniman family, and from it Faber Finds have made the book available again by print-on-demand from their websit (see details below).

It is the most superb idea to do this. The film that, 42 years after the book’s publication, grew out of it is now part of our folk- memory; why not read the work that gave birth to it? More to the point, Israel Rank is a superb book. It is beautifully written in that laconic, highly educated Edwardian tone (others call it Wildean, but that is to pre-judge several issues) so superbly emulated by Robert Hamer and John Dighton in their script for the film, and memorably enunciated by Dennis Price as the murderer and counter-jumper Mazzini. But in the book there is no Mazzini: and that may be where some of the problems and controversies about this book start.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP