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Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The August 2012 edition of 'The Journal of the Whitechapel Society' carries an article by Thomas Toughill which reveals that Basil Thomson and his elder brother, Wilfred, were at New College, Oxford at the same time as Montague John Druitt, the man identified by Basil and Sir Melville Macnaghten, his predecessor as Head of CID at Scotland Yard, as their prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Erdbeben (talk • contribs) 19:37, 19 August 2012 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Perhaps worth noting (though maybe not in the article itself) is that Thomson is a fairly prominent character in Ken Follett's fiction novel The Man from St. Petersburg. It's set in 1914, and Thomson appears as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, attempting to catch a Russian anarchist seeking to disrupt the Anglo-Russian alliance. (The novel incorrectly states that Thomson had been Prime Minister of Tonga, rather than assistant to the Prime Minister.) Aridd (talk) 14:25, 30 April 2013 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 10 months ago3 comments3 people in discussion
It should perhaps be noted that in addition to the works on Tonga mentioned in the article Thomson also wrote a number of detective novels, most notably the eight books of the Inspector Richardson series. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Exbeardy (talk • contribs) 12:47, 3 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
True - and one of the later ones involved faking up the identity of a dead body. This inspired intelligence officer Ian Fleming to contrive ‘Operation Mincemeat’, a plan to mislead the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. All in the wiki article on ‘Mincemeat’.
Ian Fleming didn't actually work on Mincemeat, and Lt-Cdr Ewen Montagu, who did, along with Flt-Lt Charles Cholmondeley (in the Admiralty's basement Room 13, one floor down from Fleming's Room 39), later said he didn't recall seeing Fleming's famous Trout memo, in which the idea of planting fake documents on a corpse, derived from Thomson's novel The Mystery of the Milliner's Hat, was mooted. Montagu claimed that Mincemeat was an original idea by Cholmondeley (who was RAF, not Navy, but was secretary of the MI5-led Twenty Committee -- also called the XX or Double-Cross Committee, and chaired by Oxford don John Masterman, who had also written a detective novel) and sat in Room 13 for Mincemeat. Not everyone believes Montagu's denials -- intelligence people do like to make stuff up -- and it's odd that the article omits Thomson's detective novels, which sound pretty awful but clearly made an impression at the time, have been reprinted in recent years and certainly influenced Fleming and may have influenced Mincemeat. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
