Section:GDN 1J PaGe:8 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 18:09 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Thursday 8 Aug ust 2019
8
Prof Sir Jack
Baldwin , chemist,
81; Earl Cameron ,
actor, 102 ;
Keith Carradine ,
actor, singer and
songwriter, 70;
Sarah Dunant ,
writer, journalist
and broadcaster,
69; Chris Eubank ,
boxer, 53 ; David
‘The Edge’ Evans ,
rock guitarist, 58;
Roger Federer ,
tennis player,
38 ; Angus
Fraser , cricketer ,
54 ; Richard
Harwood , cellist,
40 ; Helen Hayes ,
Labour MP, 45;
Dustin Hoff man ,
actor, 82; The
Right Rev Nick
Holtam , bishop
of Salisbury, 65;
Nigel Mansell ,
racing driver, 66;
Huey Morgan ,
musician and
broadcaster, 51;
Sarah Nancollas ,
chief executive,
World Association
of Girl Guides
and Girl Scouts,
58; Prof Sir
Roger Penrose ,
mathematician,
88; Jan
Pieńkowski ,
children’s writer
and illustrator,
83 ; Svetlana
Savitskaya ,
cosmonaut ,
71; Connie
Stevens , actor
and singer, 81;
Simon Weston ,
Falklands war
veteran and
fundraiser, 58 ;
Marianne Young ,
diplomat, 48.I
nspired by the performance
of Orson Welles as the
crusading attorney Clarence
Darrow in the 1959 fi lm
Compulsion, the young
Marcel Berlins set his sights
on the law. Although he
was never to emulate his
legal heroes in any courtroom
drama , the law was an important
strand throughout a career in which
Marcel, who has died aged 77 after
suff ering a brain haemorrhage,
became a prominent legal journalist
and broadcaster. In a sense, law-
breaking played an important part
in his second career, as a highly
respected critic and reviewer of
crime fi ction.
His distinctive voice and
delivery became familiar to BBC
Radio 4 listeners on Law in Action,
which he presented from 1988 to
2004, and, from 2007, as a south
of England team member on the
cryptic Round Britain Quiz. His
judg ments on the latest crime
fi ction in his regular reviewMarcel Berlins
Legal journalist, crime
fi ction reviewer and
presenter of the
BBC’s Law in Action
resistance leader Roger Simon, for
the duration of the war.
In peacetime, the Berlins returned
to a battered Marseille but opted for
a future in South Africa, emigrating
in 1951 to Johannesburg, where,
as a teenager, Marcel perfected his
English by a dedicated reading of the
works of Agatha Christie and Peter
Cheyney. He began to read law at
Witwatersrand University but was
tempted to return to France to study
Chinese art at the Sorbonne. On his
arrival, he was promptly arrested for
avoiding his military service, despite
claiming, rightly, that his call-up
papers had not reached South Africa.
Although he remained a proud
French citizen to his death, Marcel
saw no benefi t in military service
and moved in 1962 to London, where
he studied law at the London School
of Economics. On graduation, he
took work writing law reports for
the Times and never qualifi ed as
a barrister, seeing an alternative
future in legal journalism.
He became a legal correspondent
and leader writer for the Times in
1971, but with a change of editorship
he opted for redundancy in 1982
and went freelance, although he
returned to the paper as a reviewer
of crime novels the following year.
His weekly legal column transferred
to the Guardian in 1988 andcolumn in the Times for 37 years
became required reading for
thousands of aspiring crime writers,
agents and publishers, and he wrote
a legal column for that paper and,
later, the Guardian.
Marcel’s early life, in fact, could
have come from the pages of
a thriller. The only child of Pearl
(nee Glauber) and Jacques Berlin ,
he was born in Marseille in 1941,
in what was then Vichy France. It
was a local offi cial registering his
birth who carelessly added an “s”
to his surname. His father, originally
called Jacob and from Riga in
Latvia, was a hotelier who became
a person of some interest to the
Vichy authorities for being Jewish,
leftwing and a suspected member of
what was to become the resistance.
Following the Nazi occupation of
southern France in November 1942,
the family fl ed to the remote village
of Cabrières d’Aigues , a resistance
stronghold in the mountainous
Vaucluse region, where they were
sheltered by a friend , the localBerlins was
an aff able,
thoughtful and
fair-minded man
LINDA NYLIND/THE
GUARDIANcontinued up to 2010. In 1988, too,
he began to present Law in Action,
eventually recording 435 episodes.
His Guardian columns ranged
above and beyond legal matters into
fi lms seen, music concerts attended
(he was a great lover of classical
music and a competent pianist),
even meals consumed and, often,
his split allegiance between his
native France, where he had lived
for only 13 years, and his adopted
England. He was once particularly
exercised at the prospect of
Olympique Marseille meeting
Aston Villa in a European Cup
match, as he had opted to support
Aston Villa as a youth, it being one
English football team he could
pronounce confi dently.
His impish sense of humour
shone through in many of his
columns and in one, in 2002,
ostensibly about bizarre trends in
litigation, he claimed the right of
every newspaper columnist “to the
occasional shameless plug”, in this
case to announce the premiere of
a new play, Best of Motives , written
by himself and the theatre director
Lisa Forrell, who was to become
his wife in 2005.
He wrote several books on legal
themes and in 1982 he co-authored,
with Clare Dyer, a Guardian
colleague , The Law Machine , a
guide to the justice system, which
became a standard text. In the 1990s
he taught media law as a visiting
professor at City University.
Exactly how many crime novels
he reviewed in print over the
years is open to question. In 2008,
prompted by two fellow critics
to compare numbers, the count
certainly exceeded 1,000 and he was
to continue to review regularly for
a further 10 years. Not surprisingly,
he was called upon as a judge for
the Crime Writers’ Association
Daggers and for awards at the
annual Crimefest convention.
He was universally regarded
as a fair and generous reviewer
and one who always sought out
and encouraged new talent in the
genre. A few words of praise in
a quote by Berlins on the cover of
a paperback remain a treasured asset
for hundreds of crime writers who
never met him in person. Those who
did remember an aff able, thoughtful
and fair-minded man who was
exceptionally good company and
could light up a room with a raucous,
infectious laugh. Whil e he took his
reviewing duties seriously, in private
correspondence he was hilariously
funny and referred to invitations
to lunch as requests to join him in
“sluicing and troughing”.
When he married Lisa , he
embrac ed the role of father fi gure
to her children, Edward and Anna.
They all survive him. Although
resident in London, he was a regular
visitor to France.
Mike RipleyMarcel Joseph Berlins, legal
journalist, broadcaster and crime
fi ction critic, born 30 November 1941;
died 31 July 2019Birthdays
Obituaries
Whil e he
took his
reviewing duties
seriously, in private
correspondence he
was hilariously funny [email protected]
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