EXPRESS TO ISTANBUL....

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 655, 25 January 1952, Page 7

EXPRESS TO ISTANBUL....

from Ostend to Stamboul; three days and nights have to be spent on the train; and it is the time between departure and arrival that Grahame Greene is concerned with in his novel Stamboul Train, and which is an integral part of the story as it has been dramatised for broadcasting. It will be heard on Saturdays at 7.0 p.m. and will begin at 1ZB on February 2,.2ZB on February 16, 3ZB on March 1, and 4ZB on March 15, For Carleton Myatt, a young and wealthy London Jew travelling to Stamboul for his firm, it was just another business trip, a period of relaxation to be spent eating, drinking, sleeping and wondering what schemes rival firms might have up their sleeves. The possibility of meeting a young woman like Coral Musker did not enter his head. To Coral Musker the journey represented a chance to survive. Calls on London theatrical agents had brought her nothing until at last she had been offered a chorus position with Dunn’s Babies, a variety show playing in Constantinople. There was nothing she could do but take it, buy a second-class ticket on the Orient Express and hope that the strange land would not be too inhospitable to her. On the train, however, her plans underwent a miraculous transformation, helped by luck, Carleton Myatt and Mabel Warren: On the staff of the Clarion, Mabel Warren was something of a legend. She was hard as nails, ugly and a ferocious man-hater, yet she could squeeze the last sob out of any story, no matter how unpromising it looked. And she had a pretty girl, Janet Pardoe, for companion. She had set off on the Stamboul Train to wring an interview out of Quin Savory, a Cockney novelist of a certain amount of standing. It was only after she got her interview and was leaving the train that she saw a man in another compartment; she leaped aboard the express again. To look at Richard John could have been what his passport said, an old [' takes a long time to travel

school teacher taking a _ long-needed holiday. But there were things about him that did not fit. How, for instance, did he come to acknowledge himself to be a doctor of medicine when Coral Musker had a mild heart attack in the corridor in front of him? And how, too. was it that a man with such an English name spoke with such a strange accent? For Mabel Warren the answer was obvious. Her memory took her back five years to the Kamnetz affair. Kamnetz, a Government official, had appeared on trial. Richard John, then Dr. Karl Czinner, a man known to hold revolutionary ideas, had given evidence for the prosecution. The General was acquitted-the jury had been "packed"

-and Czinner’s life had been known to be worth very little. When he disappeared most people assumed that the Government had liquidated him. And yet here he was, on a train bound through Belgrade, the city where the trial had taken place. For Mabel Warren this enigma made a story of stories. To Dr..Czinner it was nothing more than a final gesture. He was going to Belgrade not to ferment another revolution, but. voluntarily to stand trial. Yet it was to be more than a gesture. The cause he believed in needed the strength and the inspiration that only a martyrdom could give it. He had to stand trial in public, to make his last defence in the pre-

sence of the people fot whom he had worked, and the representatives of the world press, As in the case of Coral Musker, though, events turned the course of his plans. There was heavy snow, the train was delayed, Mabel Warren’s story reached London. and richochetted back to Belgrade before he arrived. There was a seareh, soldiers on the line, a secret court-martial, an escape ... Stamboul Train is a story that deals with individuals, their motives and their actions living together for three days and yet almost as far apart as if they had never met. In the radio version which was dramatised for broadcastt% by Richard Lane, Allan Trevor plays Carleton Myatt, Alfred Bristowe plays Karl Czinner, and Margot Lee (who was Sally in Dossier on Dumetrius) has the role of Coral Musker.