In the novel, the man falsely convicted of the murders is named Blamey, not Blaney, and nicknamed "Blameworthy". Most significantly, while Hitchcock set his film in the 1970s, the original novel takes place shortly after the Second World War. Richard Blamey was a Royal Air Force veteran who had participated in the Dresden fire-bombing as "chief candle dropper": He dropped the incendiary flares that enabled the bombers to find their targets. In the novel, he feels guilty for this. Blamey is drunk and confused when the police first interrogate him about the necktie murders, and he claims to have committed previous murders in Dresden. When a police officer asks him how many people he killed in Dresden, Blamey replies "thousands". This drunken confession is a factor in his eventual false conviction for the necktie murders.