Elleston Trevor — Bishop Exposed

The film was retitled for U.S. release

My great friend and mentor Elleston Trevor wrote novels that were made (and remade) into major Hollywood movies — The Flight of the Phoenix and The Quiller Memorandum. But after his stint fixing the Spitfires on World War II airfields and before his move to Phoenix in the 1960s, he wrote novels that were made into movies in England. He never liked to talk about them much, regarding them as inferior to Hollywood’s product.

I ran across this, Elleston’s 1952 novel Queen in Danger made into a 1953 movie called Mantrap and starring, of all people, Paul Henreid (of Casablanca), Hugh Sinclair (one of the Saints) and Lois Maxwell (of the James Bond films). It was directed by Hammer Films’ Terence Fisher. The whole movie’s here. Henreid stars as Hugo Bishop, Elleston’s amateur detective hero who studies humanity under stress. The Bishop novels all had chess references in the titles, and at the time Elleston was still writing under his original name, Trevor Dudley-Smith. After his Quiller novels became famous, the Bishop novels were reissued under his spy novelist pen name, Adam Hall.

Paul Henreid as Hugo Bishop