Class IX Unit - III Tales of Toil - The Man who Knew Too Much (Short Story)

Alexander Baron

He was a British author and screenwriter. He is best known for his highly acclaimed novel about D-Day entitled From the City from the Plough (1948) and his London novel The Lowlife (1963).
Baron was born in Maidenhead on December 4, 1917, and raised in the Hackney district of London to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents. He attended Hackney Downs School.
During the 1930s, with his schoolfriend Ted Willis, Baron was a leading activist and organiser of the Labour League of Youth (at that time aligned with the Communist Party), campaigning against the fascists in the streets of the East End. Baron became increasingly disillusioned with far left politics  and finally broke with the communists after the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 1939.
Baron served in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army during World War II, experiencing fierce fighting in the Italian campaign, Normandy and in Northern France and Belgium. As a pioneer, he was among the first Allied troops to be landed in Sicily, Italy and on D-Day.
He used his wartime experiences as the basis for his three best-selling war novels.[ After the war he became assistant editor of Tribune before publishing his first novel From the City from the Plough (1948). At this time, at the behest of his publisher Jonathan Cape, he also changed his name from Bernstein to Baron.
In the 1950s Baron wrote screenplays for Hollywood, and by the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC's Play for Today. He wrote several episodes of the A Family at War series: 'The Breach in the Dyke' (1970), 'Brothers in War' (1970), 'A Lesson in War' (1970), 'Believed Killed' (1971), 'The Lost Ones' (1971), and 'Two Fathers' (1972). Later he became well known for drama serials like Poldark and A Horseman Riding By, and in the 1980s for BBC classic literary adaptions including Ivanhoe, Sense And Sensibility (1981), Jane Eyre (1983), Oliver Twist (1985) and Vanity Fair (1987). He contributed several episodes to Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984–1985).
Baron's personal papers are held in the archives of the University of Reading. His wartime letters and unpublished memoirs were used by the historian Sean Longden for his book To the Victor the Spoils, a social history of the British Army between D Day and VE Day. Baron has also been the subject of essays by Iain Sinclair and Ken Worpole.
Since Baron's death on December 6, 1999 his novels have been republished several times, testifying to a strong resurgence of interest among in his work among the reading public as well as among critics and academics.