Peter Rabe's From Here to Maternity (Muller, 1955) Heralds an Existential Ennui Hiatus

NB: Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

If there's been a fin-de-siecle feel to my posting of late – tying up long-running series, completing a particular book collection, drawing a (pencil) line under Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s – there's a very definite reason for that, to do with this book:

From Here to Maternity, by Peter Rabe, published in hardback by Frederick Muller in 1955. Rabe is an author I've written about repeatedly, most recently in this series of posts on what Donald E. Westlake reckoned to Rabe's remarkable cult crime fiction. But before Rabe started penning crime thriller originals for (chiefly) Gold Medal, he wrote – and drew, a skill he reportedly picked up working in advertising – From Here to Maternity, a cute if occasionally opaque (in that curious Rabe manner) account of his first wife's pregnancy which began life as an article in McCall's Magazine (the book, not the pregnancy... although I guess the two may well have gone hand in hand).

As the brighter sparks among you will have guessed, the reason the book is pertinent both to me and to Existential Ennui is that my long-suffering girlfriend, Rachel, is currently very heavily pregnant with our first child – so heavily pregnant, in fact, that the due date is tomorrow. Which, if the kid's anything like me – and it is to be fervently hoped (or possibly feared) that that should be the case, else I'll be having words with the milkman (and we don't even have a milkman) – means that she – for she is a she (we think) – will probably turn up in a fortnight's time. But that's immaterial. In practical terms, it's unlikely – although not completely out of the question – that I'll be able to devote any time to blogging even if Baby Louis(e) XIV, "The Sun Princess" elects to spend another few weeks in her mother's womb.

And even if I do manage to squeeze in a post before her royal arrival, looking further ahead, what all this will mean for Existential Ennui post-birth is anyone's guess. Certainly there'll be a hiatus, of an indeterminate length; probably there'll be a gushing missive comprising photos of Firstborn suitably arranged in some kind of ridiculous books-related fashion; hopefully, at some point, there'll be a resumption of books blogging proper, albeit no doubt necessarily scaled back. Who the hell knows though. It's an unpredictable business, this having kids thing. So wish me luck, chums. I shall, I trust, return.

Flush as May by P. M. Hubbard (Michael Joseph, 1963) Joins Beautiful British Book Jackets

This will be my last addition to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, at least for a little while; I do have some other wrappers I'm still planning to add, but probably not till later in the year. Let's draw a (pencil) line under the page, then, with rather a suitable book given that it's now the month of May:

Flush as May, by P. M. Hubbard. The splendid dust jacket design is by Kenneth Farnhill, an artist already represented in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery by another Hubbard wrapper – for the author's second novel, Picture of Millie (1964) – and by three Agatha Christie wrappers (follow that second link to read a comment by Farnhill's granddaughter, Kate). This is the British first edition, second impression, published by Michael Joseph in April 1963, three months after the first impression. Like many of Hubbard's early novels it's quite uncommon in any kind of first; I won this copy on eBay, beating, I later learned, fellow Hubbard enthusiast John from Pretty Sinister Books by a few pence (sorry John!). It's an ex-library copy, but complete and in very good condition, still sporting the Cambridge Union Society library sign-out sheet:

Hubbard's debut novel, published when he was in his early fifties, Flush as May is set in and around the (fictional) rural community of Lodstone, where the heroine, Margaret Canting, comes across a body whilst out walking one May morning. Reporting her discovery to the village constable, Margaret is alarmed to find when she revisits the scene that the body has vanished, and thereafter recruits the aid of her soon-to-be lover, Jacob Garrod, in getting to the bottom of this case of the disappearing corpse.

It's a conventional murder mystery opening that leads in large part to a conventional murder mystery plot, but there are inklings of the darker Hubbard to come. Early in the book Hubbard writes of the "menace that hung in the fields and streets of Lodstone", and there's a woozy, possibly drug-induced feel to a scene where Garrod gatecrashes a pub get-together on market day, embodied by a magnetic woman who "was like Life-in-Death". The secret that lies at the heart of this curious community is explicitly spelled out late in the novel, and it's here, in the closing stages, as Margaret embarks on an eerie cross-country trek from the churchyard at Lodstone to the Beacon on the downs over neighbouring Ebury, that Hubbard's writing is at its strongest, recalling – or, more accurately, hinting at, given that it precedes those later novels – some of the heightened intensity of A Hive of Glass or A Thirsty Evil.

There's a perceptive review of Flush as May over on the Записки реликтовой рыбы blog, detailing in an admirably clear-eyed fashion why the novel is really only for Hubbard completists. I'm not sure I have much more to add to that, beyond saying that in my limited experience of Hubbard – I've only read six of his eighteen novels thus far – it's perhaps worth noting that the books that seem to work the best, that exert the greatest power, are those that, like the aforementioned A Hive of Glass or A Thirsty Evil, are narrated in the first person; whereas those written in the third person – Flush as May, Picture of Millie – are weaker, suffering from an overabundance of expository dialogue. I'm sure that's a horrible generalisation, however; Hubbard aficionados should feel free to correct me in the comments.

Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (alias Doctor Who and the Daleks) by David Whitaker (Armada, 1965/Target, 1973)

NB: Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books, 3/5/13.

A couple of years ago I posted a rambling essay on the Doctor Who Target novelisations – my memories of them, how they helped drive and shape my formative reading as a child, how they were my first and in some cases only exposure to many Doctor Who stories, and how chancing upon a stack of them in a Lewes secondhand bookshop led in a roundabout fashion to Existential Ennui becoming a (prolix) books blog. Shortly after that the BBC began reissuing some of the earliest Target paperbacks, with new introductions by, among others, Russell T. Davies, Charlie Higson and Target Who stalwart Terrance Dicks. Perhaps the biggest draw, though, was Neil Gaiman's intro for the new edition of this:

The very first Doctor Who novelisation, Doctor Who and the Daleks, by Who screenwriter David Whitaker. The copy seen here is the original Target edition, published in 1973, which I came across the other week in a Brighton junk shop; it's essentially the same as the 2011 BBC edition, with the same Chris Achilleos cover, although obviously minus the Neil Gaiman intro. But as Neil notes in that later intro, the Target paperback wasn't the first edition of the book; it was originally published in 1964 in hardback by Frederick Muller under the title Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, and then again under the same title in 1965 in paperback by Armada, which was the edition that Neil read it in ("old and battered now, from so much reading"). The Muller hardback goes for hundreds of pounds these days, but the Armada paperback can be found for a few quid online if you look hard enough. Which, suitably intrigued having bought the Target edition, I did:

Whereupon I discovered that there are a number of differences between the Armada and Target paperbacks. Self-evidently the covers are different – the Armada edition cover art is by Peter Archer, an artist best known for his Hardy Boys and Malcolm Saville work – but the interiors differ too. The text remains the same in both, but while the interior illustrations in the Armada edition are again by cover artist Archer:

in the Target edition they're not the work of Chris Achilleos but rather one Arnold Schwartzman:

who I wonder if he might be this Arnold Shwartzman, OBE. Answers in the comments, please. (Incidentally, interior illos in the Doctor Who novelisations were restricted only to the initial Muller editions and the first wave of Target editions; thereafter they were dispensed with.)

Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (or Doctor Who and the Daleks if you prefer) is a novelisation of the second Who adventure, The Daleks (1963/4; it also shares its story with the first Doctor Who movie, Doctor Who and the Daleks, 1965, starring Peter Cushing... keep up at the back), but it's actually presented as if it's the first. Whitaker's innovation is to concoct a whole new opening sequence for the novel detailing the first meeting between schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright and the mysterious Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan. This originally took place in the debut Doctor Who episode, An Unearthly Child (1963), but Whitaker pens an alternate, eerie, evocative, notably gruesome opening in which Chesterton stumbles upon a road accident on a foggy night on Barnes Common involving Barbara, Susan and an unfortunate lorry driver, "hurled sideways at the moment of impact, the glass of the window shattering but holding him from being thrown out onto the roadway". "Is he all right?" asks a bloodied Barbara, to which Ian replies bluntly, "He's dead."

The chief innovation of Whitaker's novelisation, however, is that it's written – quite well, as it happens – in the first person. The standard style for all of the ensuing Who novelisations was third person, but this one is narrated by Ian Chesterton, who makes for an agreeably sceptical companion – both for the reader and for the Doctor. Indeed, much as I love many of the later third-person Who novels – Terrance Dicks' in particular (a few more of which I also found in that Brighton junk shop, to be unveiled in a future post) – first person suits the format rather well, affording an intimate perspective on William Hartnell's devious, irascible Doctor.

It's a cut above what one might normally expect of a novelisation, and a nice acquisition – or rather, pair of acquisitions – in this, the year of the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. And hey: maybe one day I'll pass on one or the other of the books – and maybe some of the other Who paperbacks I've accumulated – to a small child, and perhaps engender the same enthusiasm for reading the Who books instilled in me as a kid.

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré (Viking, 2013); Signed Waterstones Exclusive

How time flies. Seems like only the other month I was making my way through John le Carré's first three novels and now here he is with his twenty-third... Actually, come to think of it, it was only the other month: I polished off Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) in quick succession in February of this year.

Of course, I'm being disingenuous in order to begin this post with a feeble joke; part of my reason for reading those novels, having previously read and loved the later Karla Trilogy, was I knew there was a new le Carré on the way, and last week A Delicate Truth duly arrived, published by Penguin/Viking in the UK under a dust jacket designed by Superfantastic and heralded by a clutch of positive notices. Indeed, so adulatory were some of the reviews – Mark Lawson's one in The Guardian ("Le Carré is back at full power") and Robert McCrum's one in The Observer ("a remarkable return to mid-season form") spring to mind – that I was moved to pop to Waterstones in Brighton at the weekend and pick up a first edition. Not just any first edition, mind:

The Waterstones Exclusive, which boasts added content (see also the Waterstones edition of Justin Cronin's The Twelve, which included an additional chapter) in the shape of an introduction by le Carré detailing the background to the novel. And that's not all:

It's signed too. There were a few signed copies secreted in amongst the stock, which I only realised as I was about to exit the shop having bought an unsigned one; needless to say I went straight back to the counter and exchanged it for this copy. And though the novel isn't quite the "return to mid-season form" claimed by Robert McCrum – it's certainly not the equal of, say, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (then again, what is?) – it's still a sterling entry in what my good friend and colleague Roly Allen calls "later le Carré", hewing to around half of the points Roly identified as characterising the majority of the author's works from The Little Drummer Girl (1983) onwards. ("Le Carré gets cross about something he reads in a John Pilger book, or Amnesty newsletter"; "Good end up dead; bad end up dragging the bodies into the back of an unmarked van and driving off", etc.) Plus it's a nice companion to my signed first of le Carré's previous book, Our Kind of Traitor.

Richard Stark's Parker Novels Series: The Allison & Busby Hardback Collection, feat. The Black Ice Score, 1986 (a Westlake Score)

Early in 2010, when my secondhand book collecting – an interest which had only really been kindled the year before – was gathering pace and Existential Ennui was drifting towards its eventual destination as – and stop me if you've heard this one before – an increasingly circumlocutory chronicle of what has since become, let's be frank, a flaming obsession, I decided to finally try The Hunter, the first novel in Richard Stark's twenty-four book series starring taciturn heister Parker. I'd been thinking about it for a while before that, having long been an admirer of John Boorman's 1967 film adaptation of The Hunter, Point Blank; indeed it was in the British Coronet movie tie-in paperback edition – a slightly scruffy copy since replaced with a rather nicer one – that I eventually read The Hunter – retitled, accordingly, as Point Blank.

It was lust at first sight: stripped-back, brutally efficient prose; a cold-hearted protagonist as fascinating in his own way as another fictional career criminal I'd previously fallen for (Tom Ripley, of Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad); and a structure whose seeming simplicity belied the clever tricks played by the narrative. In short order I bought and read a Coronet paperback of the next book in the series, The Man with the Getaway Face (or The Steel Hit as it was titled by Coronet), then a US Berkley paperback of the third Parker, The Outfit, and I was off to the races: like so many before me I had embarked on my own personal Parker odyssey. (Somewhere during that first flurry of books I learned that "Richard Stark" was a pen name, just one of many employed by Donald E. Westlake, thus instigating a larger, parallel odyssey... but that's another story.)

At that stage I wasn't giving much thought to how I was collecting the Parkers; I just knew I wanted to read them, preferably in cheap, vintage paperback editions (which, given that they were mostly out of print in the UK at that point, was how they were largely available). Then I encountered Allison & Busby's hardback editions of the Parkers, issued in the UK in the 1980s. I think I first saw a copy of the 1984 A&B edition of Point Blank, with its black, foil-embossed bullet-holes dust jacket (designed, like the bulk of the A&B Parker jackets, by Mick Keates), on the shelves of the late lamented Nigel Williams Rare Books on London's Cecil Court – priced out of my range, naturally (I rarely ever actually bought anything from Nigel Williams, much as I loved the place).

My book collecting inclinations were increasingly leaning towards modern firsts, and consequently my curiosity was piqued: though the A&B Parkers weren't, strictly speaking, the first editions of the novels – for the sixteen Parkers in the original 1962-1974 run of the series that honour belonged to American publishers Pocket Books and Gold Medal in the '60s and Random House in the '70s – they were the first hardback editions (in most cases; Slayground was published straight to hardback by Random House, and I later discovered that another three of the Parkers A&B published were first issued as hardbacks by Gold Lion in 1973).

Here, then, was an interesting way for me to collect the bulk of the Parker series, one which I readily – perhaps foolhardily, given how pricey some of them were – embraced. I secured a relatively inexpensive copy of Allison & Busby's edition of Point Blank, and over the next six months managed to track down the majority of the remainder of the thirteen Parkers A&B issued in hardback (A&B did publish a fourteenth title, Deadly Edge, but only in paperback), chronicling the quest on Existential Ennui as I did so.

And then my mission stalled: two of the Allison & Busby Parkers proved highly elusive, partly due to scarcity, partly to prohibitive prices. One of those, the 1986 hardback of the sixth Parker, The Jugger, I eventually managed to nab in 2011, leaving me with just one last Allison & Busby hardback to find at an affordable price. Which brings me, in my usual long-winded manner, to the point of this post:

That there is the first (and only) hardback edition of Richard Stark's The Black Ice Score, Parker #11, published by Allison & Busby in 1986 under a Mick Keates-designed dust jacket and won by me on eBay last month. The irony here is that the Parker that took me the longest time to acquire in hardback (I bought an Allison & Busby paperback in 2010 as a stopgap) is the one that I probably like the least – but that's by the by; what matters is what it represents: the last piece of a collection that has taken me over three years to complete.

Which leaves me with an odd mixture of feelings. There's a sense of accomplishment, sure, but also a little sadness (in every meaning of the word, heading any quips off at the pass). Trying to find all of the Allison & Busby hardback Parkers has been a constant in my book collecting, not to mention my blogging about that book collecting – the one feeding the other. My crazed quest to collect all of the A&B editions helped to build Existential Ennui's (admittedly still slender) readership: I know there are some folk who began following the blog as a direct result of that quest. (Some of them have even stuck around, poor buggers.) I guess reaching the end of a journey – to use X Factor parlance – any journey, however minor and inconsequential it may be in the grander scheme of things, can be a bittersweet experience: arriving at a destination only to realise it was the getting there that was the thing.

Mind you, that phase of my Parker collecting might be done, but I expect I'll still be picking up intriguing editions of the Parkers as and when I see them; after all, these days, in a way as a consequence of the Allison & Busby Parker collecting quest, I have to have a ready supply of material for the Violent World of Parker blog as well as for Existential Ennui. And though my hardback Richard Stark shelf is a handsome thing to behold:

There are still a few hardback Parkers I'd like to get my clammy mitts on (and doubtless there are other, non-Parker Westlake Scores still to be had). So I suppose in a wider sense it's not really the end at all. The quest – and the chronicle – continues...