The Black Abbot

A textbook Edgar Wallace krimi: a hooded figure haunts a country estate where a hidden fortune and a tangled inheritance have everyone suspicious of everyone else. Fog, secret passages, a comic-relief butler and Scotland Yard all feature, shot in the crisp black-and-white the German cycle favoured.

It is a fine representative of the form, twisty and atmospheric in a studio-bound England that never existed. The masked-killer-and-inheritance formula is exactly the one the Italian giallo would soon inherit and intensify.

A solid entry point to a cycle that shaped more than it gets credit for.