Brian Clemens is one of those many prolific British writers who toiled in radio, TV, and / or movies from the 1950s well into the present, but whose aesthetic roots hark back to the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Seasoned professionals, they liked tight narratives, solid dialogue, and cunning twists. Others in his vast and varied fraternity include, at one end of the scale or the other, Dennis Potter, who wrote many original TV dramas including The Singing Detective, and Nigel Kneale, whose career ranges from The Quatermass Experiment (which inspired Hooper’s Lifeforce), to Halloween III: Season of the Witch (recently mimicked in Stay Alive). Clemens worked in movies and television simultaneously, penning such films as Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, as well as See No Evil, Kronos and The Watcher in the Woods. For TV he was involved with Danger Man, and later The Professionals. But for spy fans, humor buffs, and fetishists alike, his crowning achievement is The Avengers, that show that agitated the febrile minds of adolescents through the 1960s.

Clemens is also the brains behind the series Thriller. Not to be confused with the NBC series with host Boris Karloff that aired from 1960 to 1962, Clemens’s Thriller is nevertheless also an anthology series of horror tales with a twist, but different from Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents in that all of the shows were either written or outlined by one person, Clemens. Made for ATV, it aired from 1973 to 197x and comprised some 42 tales. But what would be a burden for most writers with Clemens seem seemed to be a joyous, easy task. Ideas just seemed to pour out of him. As he says in introduction to one of his tales, “The Color of Blood,” when people ask him how he comes up with his ideas, he tells the story of visiting Europe for a conference and being picked up at the station by a young student. In the car, she asked him the same question, and he turned to her and said, “How do you know I’m Brian Clemens?”One doesn’t know the fate of that young girl, but we do know the fate of the reply: it got him to thinking and resulted in the story “Color of Blood,” in which a bank employee unwittingly picks up a serial killer at the train station. The story has even more twists, but they shan’t be spoiled here.

A&E has now released the first season (of six, lasting through 1976) of Thriller, in a four disc set that hit the street Tuesday, September 26 (for $79.95), and would make the perfect Hallowe’en gift for budding Hitchcocks or Harlan Ellisons. Thriller collects the 10 episodes of the first season, with the addition of three interviews, first with Clemens, discussing how he came up with the series, the next with director Shaun O’Riordan, who discusses the techniques of staged, videotaped episodic television, and the finally one with producer John Cooper. Packaging for the set is good, with a nice ghostly yellow logo, a horrific image on the cover, and the discs in individual flat packs. (Several of the shows were retitled and aired on ABC late at night.)

Each hour long episode (divided into three parts) begins with a quasi-comical Tales from the Crypt style intro by Clemens, followed by a few screens of text trivial about the ep, and then a video interview except in which Clemens discusses its genesis and trivial about the cast. The credit sequence to the show features a haunting, Herrmann-esque theme, composed by Laurie Johnson, the same man behind the catchy, memorable Avengers theme. The shows appear to be a blend of 16mm exteriors and videotaped interiors, but the interiors might be multicamera 16mms.

The stories themselves are a blend of Hitchcockian (TV Hitchcock, that is) domestic crime and creepy tales of innocents stumbling into a dire enviroment. The first, “The Lady Killer,” concerns a Honeymoon Killers type story about a serial marrier and murderer (Robert Powell), whose partner is the divine Linda Thorson (sadly underrated and denigrated as Diana Rigg’s Avengers replacement all because of her haircut). This show sets the tone. The dialogue is sharp, but there is also a feeling that it is padded out to fill the hour; there are several sharp twists in the plot; and the setting is rural and quaint.

The third ep, “Someone at the Top of the Stairs,” is about two students, Judy Carne and Donna Mills, who rent a small room only to learn, eventually, that the house, the very house itself, is a malevolent entity.

Certain themes recur. Clemens is obsessed with blindness. The condition has appeared in several of his other works. Here it figures in one of the best tales, about assassins who take over a school of the blind because it offers the best vantage to kill a visiting dignitary. Clemens, perhaps for budgetary reasons, is interested in the small, out of the way rural areas that might harbor evil. He is fascinated by the chronology of murder, as in the tale, “Murder in the Mind,” and “second wives,” especially those who suspect that something odd happened to the first one.

Clemens’s tales are clever, but also comforting. They take their time to establish settings, relationships, and potentialities. Thriller is right up the alley of those who relish tales of suspense in the Hitchcock Presents mode.

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