(10) Stairway to Heaven, a hit from Moscow on a man in the Iberian peninsula and Alekhine’s My Best Games of Chess 1924-1937.

V
On September 22nd 1985 I played in a rapid chess event in London which went on throughout the night.
During it I mentioned to Andrew Martin that I was intending to write a book about the nature of modern chess and to include in it some of my own games.
I mentioned that some would be annotated in full and that others would be included parenthetically as snippets. I mentioned that former World Champion, Alexander Alekhine, had used this format in My Best Games of Chess 1924-37.

This was not an obvious book to spring to mind in that context, for although the author does partly use this method of exposition, there are only a very few examples of it in the book.
After the event finished, at 7 a.m., I trekked across London to visit the late Bob Wade OBE. I also mentioned to him the planned book and its similarity with Alekhine’s.

Late that night I watched on BBC 2 a film which I had not seen before. It was from 1946 starring David Niven: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven in America).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Life_and_Death_(film)http://www.amazon.co.uk/Matter-Life-Death-David-Niven/dp/B00004CX5N

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t3Xv70vkY8

To my surprise I discovered that this book plays a key part in the plot.

Niven plays the part of an airman in World War Two who has suffered head injuries when his plane crashed. He is visited by a Heavenly envoy (Marius Goring) whose job it is to convey Niven (who "ought" to be dead) to Heaven. 32 minutes into the film he asks him if he likes chess and tells him that in Heaven they could play every day.

But Niven falls in love and "hallucinates" that he is in on trial in Heaven to see if he be permitted to remain on Earth.

Also note that in the film Officer Trubshawe was Niven´s good friend the actor Robert Coote, who, not long after the film´s release, was pictured with him at Niven´s wife´s memorial service.
http://classicmoviefavorites.com/niven/images.html

At 51:48 Niven is actually reading Alekhine´s My Best Games of Chess 1924-1937 when the reappearance of the Heavenly envoy awakens him and causes him to drop it. At 53:21 the envoy makes it rise up, magically, into his own hands and, having told Niven that he does not know the author but is acquainted with fellow Frenchman and greatest player ever, Philidor, goes on to offer Philidor to represent Niven at trial. He then asks if he may borrow the Alekhine book. Niven explains that it is not his but belongs to the psychiatrist who is attending him, Dr Reeves.

Niven will choose Dr Reeves to represent him at trial. 

At 1:12:08 the envoy hands this very book back to Dr Reeves, who has just died and entered Heaven. By so doing he reveals himself to the Doctor as the mysterious envoy, and tells him, "I will introduce you to Philidor".

The girl with whom Niven has fallen in love, Kim Hunter, appears at his trial in Heaven, for she is the reason he asks the court to allow him to return to Earth.

Right at the end, Marius Goring throws Alekhine´s My Best Games of Chess 1924-1937 down the stairway to Heaven to Niven, calling out "Peter! Don´t forget your book!"

Kim Hunter then discovers the book to have magically appeared in Niven´s jacket pocket. This serves to help the "was it an hallucination or did it really happen?" motif. Indeed, a close up of the cover would be one of the very last shots of the film. 

When Niven, following the trial and operation on his head injuries, tells her "We won", she replies, "I know darling". It is clear that it was her locating of the Doctor´s returned book of Alekhine´s My Best Games of Chess 1924-1937 that told her that.

It has been observed that of all the many references to chess and its literature in films, this is the only example featuring one specific book.

...   ...   ...

Alekhine died in March 1946. He was found in his hotel room in Estoril and the autopsy determined cause of death to have been choking on a piece of meat. Many think he was murdered, either by the French because of pro-Nazi articles he had published during World War Two or by the Russians.

I suspect so too.

A Matter of Life and Death was shot between September 1945 and December 1945. But it premiered in the UK in November 1946. So David Niven´s beloved first wife, Primula, was alive when they filmed it. She would die in May 1946 through head injuries sustained by a fall down a stairway.

In the USA.

In the USA that film was released as Stairway to Heaven. 

...   ...   ...

By way of a codicil, permit me to add that on February 24th 2024 I sent the above coincidence Entry to Grandmaster Raymond Keene after I saw his piece published in www.TheArticle.com - Pawns are transgender: d’Éon and Philidor | TheArticle

I was moved to do so because Keene´s article referred to Philidor, who was also the de facto World Champion of his day.

Later that same day I was to spot this in The Guardian - 

On the run from Russia: the defector to Ukraine shot dead on the Costa Blanca | Ukraine | The Guardian

On the run from Russia: the defector to Ukraine shot dead on the Costa B... Maksim Kuzminov flew a Russian miltary helicopter to Ukraine. Armed with a new identity, he moved to a Spanish r...

And just a couple of weeks before this man´s murder in Villajoyosa, I too was playing a chess match for a team in that town.

Because of his articles expressing anti-semitism, Alekhine never played outside the Iberian peninsula after World War Two. Indeed his participation in a strong event in London of January 1946 was vetoed by, amongst others, ex-World Champion Max Euwe and the United States Chess Federation. 

But the World Champion had also made anti-Bolshevik statements. 

Those led to the president of the Soviet Chess Federation, Nikolai Krylenko, publishing a memorandum stating that Alekhine should be regarded as an enemy of the Soviets, and the Soviet Chess Federation broke all contact with him until the end of the 1930s. His own son, Alexander Alekhine Jnr, would later comment on how "the hand of Moscow reached his father".

Canadian Grandmaster and former World Championship Candidate, Kevin Spraggett, has also written of how he believes the details of Alekhine´s death were covered up by the Portuguese authorities.

What happened in Villajoyosa on February 13th 2024 served to strengthen my already patent suppositions that Alekhine, who had himself "betrayed" Russia and then chose to take a kind of refuge in the Iberian peninsula, was also the target of a hit authorised from Moscow.