Tonight’s offering is from 1945 and is a Sexton Blake detective tale about a string of grisly murders happening in and around a Cornish tin mine.

The owner of the tin mine begins to believe that his life is in danger, which turns out to be true, and because of he fears for his life he consults with the London private detective Sexton Blake. Sexton Blake, for those who don’t know the character was a fictional British detective sometimes referred to as a poor man’s Sherlock Holmes.

The fearful man, the owner of the tin mine, not wishing to write down his fears, speaks then into a recording device and thereby commits his words to a wax cylinder, which was the instant recording medium of the time. He posts the cylinder to Blake who plays it, is intrigued by it and then sets off to Cornwall to find out what is happening and why a series of murders has occurred.

Centre to the story line is the control of the tin mine but it later transpires that it’s not greed for the contents of the mine but a greater prize that could be gained by controlling this particular set of underground workings.

I’ll not give too much away but what I will say is it starts of slow but gets going. I apologise for the technical quality of the film as it seems to be a digital copy from a poor quality print.

I enjoyed this film even though I struggled with it at the beginning and I hope others like it too.