The Silent Passenger

First feature film outing for novelist Dorothy L. Sayer’s popular amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The Silent Passenger was an original story written by Sayers specifically for the screen; unfortunately her amateur sleuth is portrayed as something of an eccentric twit who solves murders in spite of himself. A scurrilous blackmailer is murdered by the husband one of his victims, railroad detective Henry Camberley (Donald Wolfit), but it is the innocent John Ryder (John Loder) who is suspected of the crime when Camberley stuffs the dead body into his trunk. Making the casual acquaintance of Ryder, Lord Peter Wimsey (Peter Haddon) sets about to prove his new friend’s innocence. It all takes place on a train trip from London to the English Channel, with Ryder acting as bait to flush out the real killer.