Who Put Back the Clock? by Gideon Forsyth

Thanks to Radio Times

Title: Who Put Back the Clock?

Author: Gideon Forsyth

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

Who knew Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Wrong Box? (along with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne).

I just thought it was a very funny film (only suggested by the book, not based on it) made in 1966 starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson, John Mills et al. It’s about an inheritance, and features virtuous maidens… cunning cousins… dastardly deeds… bodies in barrels… and boxes and boxes and boxes.

Apparently Who Put Back the Clock?, which features in the original book (I suppose, because where else did I find it) was sold on railway station platforms (once upon a time there was always a bookstall), and then it vanished from the face of the earth. Only three copies remain; one in the British Museum, carefully miscatalogued; one held in a cellar of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh; and the third, bound in morocco [leather], is owned by Gideon Forsyth who wrote the book, and not as everyone thought, his uncle EHB. The book was an alarming failure.

What is this about? And how did it become a much loved film?

Thanks to Rotten Tomatoes