Bernard Toms, the author of the original novel, had been a London police officer before finding success as a writer.
Bernard Toms, who also worked as a private investigator after leaving the police force, was paid £8,000 for the film rights to his 1966 novel, also getting a further payment of £2,000 when the film was actually made.
The terrifying character of Detective-Sergeant Pierce is clearly based on a real person, Detective-Sergeant Harold Challenor, a decorated war hero who joined the police in 1951 and was soon very well-known in London for his fierce devotion to law enforcement and his phenomenal arrest-rate. He was often accused of planting evidence or of beating up suspects, but as his accusers were usually known to be figures on the fringes of the underworld (or worse), these charges were ignored or dismissed until 1963, when he arrested a man on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon (a half-brick) during a demonstration. The man was a prominent member of the National Council for Civil Liberties and he protested his arrest in the strongest terms; an investigation eventually revealed that Challenor had indeed planted the evidence, and there was a considerable scandal. A report into the case was generally dismissed as a whitewash, with Challenor found to be suffering from mental illness. He was dismissed from the police force and died in his late eighties in 2008.
New Scotland Yard had moved from its old premises on the Thames Embankment earlier in the year (1967) and at the time of production there was no file footage available of the new building at St James Park. For the exterior shots of New Scotland Yard, an empty office block in Colliers Wood, south London was used with a dummy sign in front which, unlike the real sign, did not rotate.
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