

Laurence Payne
Actor and author best known as the vintage detective Sexton BlakeLaurence Payne, who has died aged 89, was known offstage as "Larry Two" in deference to the king, "Larry" Olivier, and for a short time he was almost as well known. He was a stalwart of the Old Vic during the second world war and played Romeo opposite a 19-year-old Juliet, Daphne Slater, and Paul Scofield's Mercutio, as well as Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1947 in two famous productions by Peter Brook.
This fairly tall but certainly dark and handsome north London son of a carpenter found real fame, however, on television as the detective Sexton Blake, "prince of the penny dreadfuls" and seen as the office boys' Sherlock Holmes, on ITV between 1967 and 1971.
Blake was the fictional creation of Harry Blyth in the pages of the Halfpenny Marvel magazine in 1893, shortly after Holmes had plunged to his death into the Reichenbach Falls. Blyth sold his rights to the character, who was then written by more than 200 different hands into the 1970s.
Payne appeared in 60 episodes of the children's television series, which was set in the 1920s. He lost his left eye in a sword fight with the actor Basil Henson. But as Blake, he never lost his suavity or self-composure as he dashed about town in a Rolls-Royce with his trusty young sidekick, Edward "Tinker" Carter, and Pedro the intrepid bloodhound.
Carter was played by Roger Foss, now an arts journalist, who recalled that behind the handsome features and classy, baritone voice was a very funny man who was a stickler for the highest standards, even in a children's programme. "He'd tear up pages that clearly didn't work and we would improvise better scenes ourselves."
Payne's father died when he was three years old, and he and his elder brother and sister were raised in a strict fashion by their mother, a Wesleyan Methodist, in Wood Green, north London. He attended Belmont school and Tottenham grammar, leaving at 16 to take a clerical job. After training at the Old Vic School in 1939, he was exempted from war service as a conscientious objector on condition that he went on tour with the Old Vic during the war.
Between 1940 and 1945 he was directed by Tyrone Guthrie in She Stoops to Conquer, by Esme Church in Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor and in many others by John Moody and Noel Willman. Roles included Cassio in Othello, Sergius in George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice and early sketches for Romeo and Berowne. After short seasons with the Chanticleer Theatre Company and at the Arts Club in London, he toured Germany for three months with the forces' entertainment organisation Ensa in 1945.
Payne never worked in the West End, allegedly because he rebuffed the all-powerful producer Binkie Beaumont's invitation to appear in Brook's 1946 production of The Brothers Karamazov. Brook himself had no truck with such blackballing and invited him to Stratford to play Romeo.
He toured Australia with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (as it was known before it became the Royal Shakespeare Company) in 1949 and returned to play Hamlet at the Guildford Rep in 1951. It was a role he spoke with "brisk certainty", according to JC Trewin, who then applauded a more detailed portrait in the same role at the Embassy, Hampstead, in 1953.
Following several seasons at Guildford, and at the Bristol Old Vic, his television career was launched with D'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers in 1954. He took large roles in three series of Doctor Who before and after Sexton Blake.
In the movies, Payne played supporting roles in William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1959) and Roy Ward Baker's The Singer not the Song (1960), starring Dirk Bogarde, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. He had a busy television career after Sexton Blake and appeared as Professor Mueller in one of the better Hammer Horror films, Vampire Circus (1971).
His theatre career fizzled out with sporadic forays in the regions, including a tour of There's a Girl in My Soup in 1976 and an appearance as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons and Uncle Vanya at the Leeds Playhouse in 1978 and 1979.
But from 1961 he ran a parallel career as a crime writer, publishing 11 novels with recurrent detective characters. The first was The Nose on My Face, filmed as Girl in the Headlines (1963) and starring Ian Hendry as a police officer trying to solve a model's murder.
Payne was an enthusiastic oil painter, a self-taught pianist and an excellent fight director. In later years he worked regularly on radio, but in the 1990s he contracted septicaemia and there was subsequent brain damage. Suffering from vascular dementia, he spent the last three years of his life in a nursing home near Berwick-upon-Tweed.
He was first married to the actor Sheila Burrell in 1944 and a decade later to another actor, Pamela Alan. Both marriages ended in divorce and he married Judith Draper, an equestrian journalist, in 1974. He had no children and is survived by Judith.
Laurence Stanley Payne, actor and author, born 5 June 1919; died 23 February 2009
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