Anthony Shaffer

Anthony Joshua Shaffer (1926-2001) was born in Liverpool, the elder (by five minutes!) of twins in 1926. Later on, the boys, Anthony and Peter, were taken by their mother regularly to the Liverpool Playhouse, where Anthony developed a taste for the thriller, the melodrama and the suspense play which was to remain with him for the rest of his life.

Evacuated to various schools around wartime Britain, they both won scholarships to St Paul’s School. Later in the war, they were also both conscripted for service in the coal mines of Britain – an experience Anthony described in his published memoir, So What Did You Expect?, as “three years of unrelieved hell.” In 1948, he and Peter went up to Cambridge, where Anthony read law and also became first assistant editor, then editor of the university magazine Granta. He sent a parody of The Leader magazine to its editor in London, who was so impressed he offered Shaffer a job. This in fact lasted less than a year, then he was forced to fall back on his career as a barrister, the exam for which in his own words he “somewhat shakily passed.” In the meantime, the two men had co-authored two detective novels under the pseudonym Peter Anthony, and it wasn’t long before Anthony decided to move to copywriting for advertising. In 1955, he began working with the company which dominated cinema advertising, Pearl & Dean. Five years later, he set up his own production company, Hardy Shaffer Associates, with Robin Hardy, working mostly on television commercials.

Then, at the end of the 1960s, Anthony received a kick in the pants from his brother Peter (himself by how a highly successful playwright) who said to him, “Is this really the way you want to live your life? You’re a natural writer—why don’t you stop avoiding it and get on with it?” The result was Sleuth, directly and eagerly commissioned by his twin brother.

Unfortunately, the brilliant script was actually turned down by many excellent producers, including the so-called king of London’s West End, Binkie Beaumont, who told Shaffer it wouldn’t last a fortnight. Despite its prophecy, in January 1970 it played that fortnight at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, received a long standing ovation, was described by Sir Laurence Olivier as a “piece of piss,” and went on to play 2,359 performances at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End, produced by the adventurous Michael White. On Broadway, it also topped 2,000 performances and won (appropriately enough) a Tony Award. Two years later, it was turned into a film, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, starring Michael Caine and… Laurence Olivier! Since then, Sleuth has been performed all over the world and has been recognized as a wildly sophisticated salute to the ingenious detective novels and plays of the twenties and thirties of the last century. As Shaffer said, “Audiences would have to be pretty dull dogs not to enjoy it.”

Shaffer had actually scripted his first film, Forbush and the Penguins, a comedy starring John Hurt and Hayley Mills, in 1971 but, after the Broadway success of Sleuth, Alfred Hitchcock had contacted him and the resulting collaboration was Frenzy in 1972.

The following year, he scripted a film that was destined to become a cult classic. His former partner Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man was set on a Scottish island. Charting the inexorable events of a collision between Celtic paganism and mainstream Christianity, the story swung well away from the usual preoccupations of the British horror film, despite featuring Christopher Lee as the laird. It was reputedly Shaffer’s favourite script.

More films followed, including three of fellow mystery writer Agatha Christie’s prolific output: Death on the Nile (1978), Evil Under the Sun (1982, his favourite of the three) and Appointment With Death (1988).

He also developed the storyline (from The Return of Martin Guerre) for Jon Amiel’s Sommersby (1993). But despite all these later successes, Sleuth was always the main event, and Shaffer was irritated when it was sometimes dismissed as just entertainment. His response to such put-downs was to the point, “What do you mean just? It’s a bloody sight harder to entertain than to bore.”

Married three times, Anthony Shaffer had two daughters and died in November 2001. He will be remembered as one of the leading international mystery writers for both stage and screen, justifiably renowned for his sophisticated double-edged dialogue, convoluted plots and unexpected conclusions—a consummate storyteller.