Ollie: “Shut up and get this mess cleaned up. Do you know that my wife will be home at noon?”

Stan: “Say, what do you think I am, Cinderella? If I had any sense I’d walk out on you.”

Ollie: “Well, it’s a good thing you haven’t any sense.”

Stan: “It certainly is.”

As John Connolly magnificently recounts in his heartbreaking new novel “He”, Stan (above right) never did walk out on Ollie. Many subsequent comic double acts ended in recrimination and alienation (see the sad fate of Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis), but Laurel and Hardy’s artistic and personal partnership endured, lasting three decades until Ollie’s death in 1957. What Connolly’s scrupulously researched and sensitive book has achieved is an explanation of perhaps how it did so. It’s a story of love and loyalty between two very different performers.

The novel opens with Stan reminiscing about his old partner right at the end of his life, when he was living with his fourth wife in a modest apartment on the LA seafront. Crippled by diabetes and a stroke Laurel was no longer making films, all he has left are his “butterfly memories”. It’s a melancholy story written in a sparse and economical style (at times like the title cards in a silent movie), peppered with hilarious scenes of marital discord and financial mismanagement that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Stan’s scripts. Englishman Arthur Stanley Jefferson (Laurel’s real name) is revealed to be a complex and difficult individual, as many comedians are. Unlike in their movies Stan, creatively, is the dominant partner: ambitious, hard-working, loyal to his friends, yet at times selfish and bitter and callous towards his (many) wives. A genius when it comes to creating comedy, yet apparently as naïve and idiotically optimistic as his cinematic character when it came to women and money. American “Babe” Hardy, as Ollie was known to his pals, wasn’t much luckier in love. Two ex-wives were suing him for alimony by the late 1930s. Yet in the face of these troubled private lives they made over 100 movies between 1926 and 1951, entertained millions and stayed true to each other, respecting  and relying on each others’ strengths. Stan knows Babe is the better actor, Babe knows Stan is the one with the vision, the driving force. The only driving that concerns Babe is on the golf-course.

The women who loved them, notably Lucille Hardy and Ida Laurel, the wives who saw them through their declining years, maybe get a bit of a bum deal in these pages, and there are only fleeting (if tantalizing) details about the making of their movies but it’s not trying to be a biography, for that turn to the excellent “Stan and Ollie: the Roots of Comedy” by Simon Louvish. This is fiction, a nostalgic speculation about what was going on in the head of an inscrutable and modest genius. And it’s an engrossing piece of storytelling. The real heroes of the novel however are a lesser-known double act, two professionals who enabled that genius to work and survive: the producer Hal Roach and the lawyer Ben Shipman. Roach, by all accounts a pretty unpleasant guy, at least brings Hardy and Laurel together, and provides a film studio for them to grow as a team. He doesn’t stop complaining about money and they eventually fall out. Shipman though remained loyal to the end with the patience of Job. His office is depicted as the eye of Stan and Babe’s financial and marital storm and the poor man ends up in tears. If you’re a Laurel and Hardy fan you will too. If you’re not, you may well become one by the end of this lovely book.