Chorus of Echos by Elleston Trevor (later writer of The Flight of the Phoenix and The Quiller Memorandum among other titles) was published in 1950 by White Lion Publishers.
Julian Vane’s suicide attempt goes wrong when he throws himself onto an underground electric rail just after it has been switched off for the night. While he evades the authorities in the tunnels, he remembers how he had got to that point in his life.
He had been involved in a car crash while giving a couple a lift. The husband was killed and the wife, Paula, suffered facial disfigurement. Although the accident was not his fault, Julian is obsessed with trying to find a means to fix Paula’s scars, learning plastic surgery techniques after hours from his hospital work. Working with her night after night, he falls in love with his assistant, Jacqueline. Now we learn that Paula is Julian’s estranged wife, which triggers a flashback within the flashback.
After the accident, Paula had manipulated Julian into marrying her, proving to be both unfaithful and an incipient alcoholic before he left her.
Flashing forward again, Paula tries to kill herself and Julian by causing another car crash. Later, she tries to seduce him. She’s also trying to cause problems with his career by portraying herself as the abandoned wife so he is called to appear before the committee at his hospital. She has also written a scandalous letter to Jacqueline’s wealthy parents. Meanwhile, Julian learns from a friend that Paula had a highly dysfunctional personality even before the accident. She had been married to a much older man whom she had cheated on constantly and she had had an alcohol problem even then. She had left her husband (who then killed himself) for the man who had been killed in the car crash.
We get to see Julian in action when he is on hand when a train crashes. He attends to several badly-injured people, including a six-year old girl whose leg he has to amputate on the spot. With Jacqueline away seeing her parents, Julian goes to see Paula to try to persuade her to stop causing trouble but instead she reveals her cruelty and craving for control. Later, Julian is called to the hospital where the little girl is still critical because of a heart condition. Julian operates on her but she later dies because the surgery has been too late. He finds out that the hospital had been trying to reach him earlier and realises that a phone call that Paula had taken while he was at her flat had been from the hospital but she had told them that Julian wasn’t there. He goes round to Paula’s again and finds himself attacking her.
We’re back in the present now as an exhausted Vane allows himself to be discovered in the tunnels from where he is taken to the police station. He learns that Paula had followed him and had been struck by a car and killed as he was entering the tube station. The End.
It’s all very predictable, bland and soapy. It’s never credible that Julian would have married Paula who is portrayed throughout as a total bitch. Maybe with the right casting (Diana Dors as Paula, Stanley Baker as Julian?) star power might have made something of it but it’s easy to see why Hammer dropped this project when it became obvious that horror was the path to success.
A few shades of Terence Fisher's Stolen Face perhaps?