The main thrust seems to be a lost treasure of the Chelford family, in which most of the cast are interested, but you can also add: To be honest, my poor head was spinning with the complexity of it all, and I feel some kind of chart, perhaps involving arrows, should come with the movie, explaining the relationships between the characters. From this spirals off a severely tangled mess of suspects, plots, multiple blackmail attempts, red herrings and further deaths. Detective Puddler of Scotland Yard (Charles Regnier) and occasionally-amusing comedic sidekick, Horatio (Eddi Arent, another Rialto regular) are at Chelford’s manor to investigate a murder, after a man is found stabbed to death in the ruins of a nearby abbey. In this case, he plays Thomas Fortuna, butler to landowner Lord Chelford (Borsche), with a particularly unctuous nature. Kinski, too, was something of a regular, from 1960’s Der Racher through 1967’s Die Blaue Hand, typically playing a character of dubious morality. For example Fuchsberger, played in thirteen of Rialto’s Edgar Wallace production, usually as a Scotland Yard detective or other investigator, though here he plays estate manager Dick Alford – albeit a character with investigative tendencies. the studio had a stable of actors, many of whom appeared across multiple entries in the series, playing similar roles. Much like the horror films of Hammer, around the same time in Great Britain. His crime stories gained a new lease of life in the sixties when the German studio Rialto made a long – more than 30 – and successful series of film adaptations, forming a foundation of the genre known as Krimi s, an abbreviation for the term Kriminalfilm.

This was my first encounter with the cinematic works based on the books of Edgar Wallace, a prolific writer from the first third of the 20th century. Star: Joachim Fuchsberger, Grit Boettcher, Dieter Borsche, Klaus Kinski

The Black Abbot by Edgar Wallace