Tuesday 7 December 2010

Book Review: The Naked Runner (Hodder First Edition), and Some More on its Author, Francis Clifford

A common theme on Existential Ennui – more of a lament, really – is how certain authors seem to drop off the radar, particularly dead ones. Doubtless this was always the case, but the rapid expansion of the internet, which has become most people's main method of finding out information, has meant that, as well as the traditional publishing ignominy of their backlists falling out of print, many middle-ranking writers who died before the internet really got going don't get their due online either. Some supposedly forgotten authors – Gavin Lyall, say – are still in print (just about, anyway: Lyall's 1965 thriller Midnight Plus One was reissued by Orion in 2005 as part of that publisher's Crime Masterworks series) and warrant a fairly decent Wikipedia entry. Others, however, are denied even that.

One such is Francis Clifford. I've blogged about Clifford – real name Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson – before, notably in this post about his 1953 debut, Honour the Shrine. Clifford wrote nineteen crime and espionage novels, and won the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award twice, yet his Wikipedia entry consists of two lines and a bibliography and his un-bought books haunt eBay. I mentioned in that previous post that his 1966 novel The Naked Runner was turned into a 1967 Frank Sinatra-starring movie (his 1959 book, Act of Mercy, also became a film, 1962's Guns of Darkness), but at the time I didn't have a copy of the book. Now, however, I do:


A 1966 UK hardback first edition, published by Hodder & Stoughton, with a dustwrapper designed by Peter Calcott (who also designed the jacket for Hodder's 1967 first edition of Ross Thomas's Spy in the Vodka, a.k.a. The Cold War Swap). And for once, I've actually read it – and it's a little cracker.

The novel follows widower and single father Sam Laker, who on the way to work one day saves a woman and her baby from being run over and consequently comes to the attention of Martin Slattery, shadowy secret service type and former wartime colleague of Sam's. Laker is due to fly to Leipzig in Germany's Russian Zone with his son, to attend a trade fair and then do some sightseeing; Slattery asks him to deliver something hidden in a watch strap. Sam reluctantly agrees – it turns out he'll be delivering it to a woman he last saw during the war and who he believed to be dead – and from that point on falls into a nightmare, as his world is turned upside down and he's forced to become an assassin.

Beginning, as it does, in England, the novel initially comes across as rather dated and jolly hockey-sticks. But before too long there are glimpses of Laker's dark past, notably the savage killing spree he embarked on whilst behind enemy lines during World War II. (Something that a lot of 1950s-1970s thriller and espionage novels share is that the Second World War was still a recent memory. Many authors like Clifford fought in the war, an experience which informed their fiction.) Sam's subdued anger becomes increasingly key as the novel progresses and he becomes more and more paranoid.

There's a cynical seam running through The Naked Runner that makes it feel quite contemporary, despite the Cold War trappings. There's no right or wrong here; all the players (save Sam's son) are complicit somehow in what Sam goes through, including himself. Towards the end of the novel Sam's situation becomes so bleak and hopeless it almost becomes too much; that Clifford does eventually offer a sliver of hope is, in the final analysis, cold comfort.

I mentioned at the start of this post that Clifford doesn't have much of a Wikipedia entry... but he does have a decent entry in the afore-blogged-about Who's Who in Spy Fiction by Donald McCormick, which reveals all sorts of fascinating titbits about him. Prior to becoming a novelist he worked in the rice trade in the Far East before World War II, and then as an industrial journalist for the steel industry; by the time of his death in 1975 his world book sales had topped the five million mark; and the Los Angeles Times described his 1967 novel All Men Are Lonely Now as "the finest espionage novel of the decade". Oh, and writing in the Guardian newspaper, critic Franci Iles said Clifford was "almost unique in combining a deeply felt philosophical truth with the real excitement of the thriller".

So there you go. At least there's a bit more about Clifford online now. (And I now have another post about Clifford here.)

Monday 6 December 2010

Ian Fleming James Bond 1970s Triad Panther Paperback Cover Gallery feat. Beverley le Barrow... or is it Beverley Goodway...?

Another relatively random selection of blog posts this week, among them a guide to how the covers for Coronet's UK paperback editions of Richard Stark's Parker novels developed in the late 1960s/early 1970s (featuring a little-seen cover for Point Blank); a look at a proof copy of Dennis Lehane's latest Kenzie-Gennaro novel, Moonlight Mile; and a review of Francis Clifford's The Naked Runner. But first, and continuing the Bond theme from the weekend, we return to a firm favourite of Existential Ennui: 1970s glamour photographer extraordinaire, Beverley le Barrow.

Beverley, you'll recall, has been the subject of a number of previous posts on this blog, chiefly this one and this one. Le Barrow's starkly lit photos, tendency to use models and minor actors, and awesomely literal approach made the photographer a firm favourite with British book publishers like Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph and Panther in the '70s and '80s, who harnessed Beverley's singular talents on covers for Ross Thomas, Dick Francis and others.

Beverley's schtick was photographing models in studios against flat black or white backgrounds – a stylistic quirk that may have owed something to a possible parallel career as a snapper of topless Page 3 girls. Indeed, I'm starting to wonder whether Beverley le Barrow was in fact a pseudonym for famed Sun newspaper Page 3 photographer Beverley Goodway, who is actually a bloke, and not, as I assumed Le Barrow to be, a woman. "Le Barrow" being a pseudonym might also explain the discrepancy between the spellings of that name in various book cover credits: "Beverly" – no third "e" – "Lebarrow" – one word – in the credits for the Hamish Hamilton Ross Thomas covers, "Beverley Le Barrow" elsewhere.

(UPDATE: Further evidence for my theory has emerged since I wrote this post. Francis from the Stanley Morgan Website – Beverley Le Barrow photographed a good many Morgan covers – commented on this earlier post that he'd contacted an American photographer who assisted Le Barrow in the 1970s. That photographer confirmed Le Barrow was a pseudonym... and he also reckoned Beverley's real surname was indeed Goodway... Go read this post for a round-up on all things Le Barrow.)

Anyway, perhaps Le Barrow's crowning achievement were the covers for Triad/Panther's paperback range of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, issued (out of sequence, I believe, i.e. not in their original 1953 Casino Royale to 1966 Octopussy order) from 1977 to 1979. The concept for these was audaciously bald, even by Beverley's standards. Gaze upon their magnificence and you can almost see Le Barrow's mental processes at work; when she (he?) was handed the assignment to create covers for fifteen Bond books, naturally her (his?) inclination would be to round up a bunch of leggy models, dress them – or even underdress them – in the finest '70s clobber... and then... and then... Hmm. What to do to make the covers distinctive? Well, one of the Bond novels is called The Man with the Golden Gun... so... how about draping the leggy models over a great big model golden gun? Brilliant!

To realise this twisted vision, Beverley was assisted by a team of very well known creatives. Jewellery was provided by retailer Hooper Bolton; shoes – where they were worn – were by Terry de Havilland; and make-up was applied by, er, some bird called Bonny. Ahem. The giant gun, meanwhile, was designed and built by David Collins and Floris van den Broecke. Van den Broecke is a furniture designer of some note, but I'm not sure which of the many David Collinses that pop up when you Google his name is the right one. However, years ago, when I was doing an Art Foundation course at Ravensbourne, I attended a lecture by a visiting designer who created massive models of everyday objects to be photographed for advertising billboards. Because back then (1988, I think), the only way to photograph, say, a Polo mint, and blow it up to billboard size, was to create a huge man-sized model of said mint and photograph that instead. I've got a sneaking suspicion that that designer was David Collins. I could, of course, and as is often the case, be completely wrong. But a gigantic golden gun.... what are the odds?

Whatever the truth, the Bond covers photographed by Beverley le Barrow are among the most memorable ever to grace that series. So, gathered together here for the first time anywhere on the internet (at least, at this fairly large size), Existential Ennui proudly presents a complete cover gallery – with back covers where I have them – of the Ian Fleming (and Robert Markham/Kingsley Amis) James Bond novels published by Triad/Panther/Granada. Enjoy.

Saturday 4 December 2010

Why Lucky Jim Was Right: Kingsley Amis, Robert Markham, Colonel Sun, Ian Fleming's James Bond, and What Became of Jane Austen?

Like most blogs, Existential Ennui is at root a repository for baseless supposition, badly thought through argument, shonky reasoning and ill-considered criticism (mine, largely). But every now and then, quite by accident, something I write turns out to be correct – or at least to contain a glimmer of truth.

I picked up a copy of this the other weekend (at the brilliant Much Ado Books, which has moved to an even more lovely building in Alfriston that makes you feel like you're browsing in someone's house):


A UK hardback first edition of Kingsley Amis's What Became of Jane Austen?, published by Jonathan Cape in 1970. It's a collection of Amis's essays and criticism, mostly – although not exclusively – on literary matters. Highlights include a 1957 article where Amis expresses his regret at not making more of an effort with Dylan Thomas in a pub following Thomas's talk at the University College of Swansea in 1951, where Amis was a lecturer; a long piece on fictional policemen; another on horror movies; and various other excursions on Kipling, Roth, and God.

But there are two essays in particular which are pertinent both to the preoccupations of this blog and my wider preoccupations. The first of those is a 1968 piece – and its three addenda – titled "A New James Bond". I'm not sure where it originally appeared, but it was published around the same time as Amis's pseudonymous Bond novel Colonel Sun (written as Robert Markham) and is a spirited defense of both that book and of Ian Fleming and Bond in general. In it, Amis counters the criticism he faced when he agreed to write a Bond novel, dismissing accusations of profiteering ("most people who have done much writing will probably agree on reflection that to write at length just for money... is a uniquely, odiously painful activity; not really worth the money, in fact") and Lefty baiting (although he admits that did become "a major fringe benefit") to state simply that he considered it "an honour to have been selected to follow in the footsteps of Ian Fleming".

Because the thing is – and as I conjectured in this post on Amis – to the exasperation of many, including possibly Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis genuinely admired the work of Fleming and other genre writers, rating some of them as highly as other, more literary types. I suspected that was the caseafter all, Amis wote an entire book's worth of considered criticism on Fleming's creation (The James Bond Dossier, 1965; he also penned a more humorous look at 007, The Book of Bond, published the same year) – but "A New James Bond" confirms it. Here's a passage from the piece to that effect:

"I lament what I take to be a trend against the genres. It might well be agreed that the best of serious fiction, so to call it, is better than anything any genre can offer. But this best is horribly rare, and a clumsy dissection of the heart is so much worse than boring as to be painful, and most contemporary novels are like spy novels with no spies or crime novels with no crimes, and John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?"

Amis also takes to task some of the ill-informed criticism of Fleming and Bond. I touched on this on Friday in a post on John le Carre, where I quoted Le Carre (originally quoted in Donald McCormick's Who's Who in Spy Fiction, 1977) dismissing 007, a character he apparently despises. (In the second addendum of "A New James Bond", Amis is rather kinder to Le Carre than Le Carre is to Fleming, rating him a much better writer than Len Deighton and calling The Spy Who Came in from the Cold "a thrilling and genuinely chilling book".) But I also delved into similar territory in this post on the perceived misogyny of the Bond novels. Turns out Amis had already addressed this very issue decades earlier:

"The 'unpleasantness' of Bond deserves a moment's further notice. The curious momentary suspicion one feels from time to time, that the critics have somehow got hold of a completely different version of the work one has been reading, has never invaded my mind more powerfully than in the case of Ian Fleming and his critics. Bond emerges from their treatment as a frightening snob, a ceaseless fornicator and a brutal scourge of the weak and helpless; these are the principal charges. Although you will probably not believe me when I tell you, none of them has any substance.

"Not once, in the twelve novels and eight stories, does Bond or his creator come anywhere near judging a character by his or her social standing. We hear a good deal about high living and the elegant scene at Blades Club, but that is a different matter; at worst, harmless vulgarity. The practice of fornication in itself is not enough, these days, to brand a man as a monster, but then perhaps Bond goes at it too hard, weaves a compensation-fantasy for author and reader, is on a wish-fulfilment deal and all that. I myself could see no harm in this even if it were true, but it is not. One girl per trip, Bond's average, is not excessive for a personable heterosexual bachelor, and his powers of performance would not rate the briefest of footnotes in Kinsey. It is true that all the girls are pretty and put up little resistance to Bond's advances, and this may help to explain his unpopularity with those critics who find it difficult to seduce even very ugly girls."

(Incidentally, unlike some other authors, who seemingly objected to being labelled as espionage writers and thus asked to be excluded, Kingsley Amis does have an entry in Donald McCormick's Who's Who in Spy Fiction, even though at the time he only had one spy novel – Colonel Sun – to his name. I suspect he would have been rather pleased to have been included.)

In the aforementioned second addendum to "A New James Bond", Amis compares the scorn poured on Fleming's creation with the much warmer critical reception of Le Carre's supposedly more realistic take on the spy, noting that critics were simply "more comfortable with books that confirmed their prejudices about the wickedness of the West, a more wicked sort of wickedness than that of the East... because the West pretends to hypocritical rubbish to do with freedom and so on, while the East makes no bones about its devotion to things like terror." This passage bears a direct relation to the other piece in What Became of Jane Austen? that struck me, "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967), perhaps the most notorious essay Amis ever wrote. This missive is regularly held up as evidence of Amis's betrayal of the Left and embracing of the Right, i.e. Conservatism with a large 'C'. But as ever, one should never put much stock in hearsay. Much as he does in "A New James Bond", Amis speaks an awful lot of sense in "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right". He cites the 1956 Russian invasion of Hungary as the final nail in the coffin of his disillusionment with Communism, then goes on to explain why the Left in general has little to offer beyond dogma and habit.

I certainly don't agree with everything Amis writes in the essay, particularly the passages on education, where he's far too anti-comprehensive schools for my liking. But that's not the point. Throughout, he is utterly, unfailingly reasonable, as he is in all his critical writing. To listen to the received wisdom on Amis, one would conclude that he turned from a fervent Trot into a foaming True Blue Tory, but to read "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" is to confront a more prosaic truth: he'd simply realised that Britain, the country in which he lived, was, despite all its faults, a nicer place to reside than many other countries. "I am not a Tory," he states, "nor pro-Tory... nor Right-wing, nor of the Right, but of the Centre, equally opposed to all forms of authoritarianism."

Indeed, much of what he wrote over forty years ago is pertinent today. It's still common for Lefties – and I do consider myself of the Left, even though I disagree with much of what Lefties spout – to do down the country in which they live whilst happily continuing to live there. Sometimes it seems as though any dreadful regime or fascistic organisation – Iraq under Saddam, Iran, Hamas – can be allowed to continue so long as it stands up to that perennial oppressor and root cause of all evil, the West. Amis may have been writing largely about Communism all those years ago, but the sentiment remains eminently applicable even in this day and age – perhaps moreso. Here he is on why prominent Lefties oppose the British system:

"The system exists, so to hell with the system. Damn you, England! Damn you for not listening to me! But, of course, plenty of people are listening, the rank-and-file Lefties with no rhetorical skills, no individual viewpoint, only a readiness to demonstrate and march against the system, to grasp at that wonderful and unique and paradoxical satisfaction which the Left offers: of swimming with and against the stream at the same time, of being both rebel and conformist, of joining in the massed choir of half a million voices crying in the wilderness. On either or any level, emotion is calling the tune. Some pretty powerful set of emotions, clearly, is at work when, after being revealed as unworthy of even the most cynical kind of support, Nasser and the Arab/Russian cause go on being supported, as vociferously as ever and without even a decent delay, in our correspondence columns."

Substitute "Hamas" or "Castro" or "Chavez" for "Nasser and the Arab/Russian cause" and that could have been written yesterday. As Amis proclaims in "A New James Bond", and bringing us full circle, "It is, of course, true that Bond, like me, is pro-Western, pro-British, even, by and large, pro-American, and this is on first principles anathema to a great many people." Ultimately, though, Amis's closing sentences in "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" are as effective a demonstration of his point of view as anything beforehand, and again strike me as an entirely sensible philosophy, particularly in the face of so much criticism of the Western way of life:

"All you can reasonably work for is keeping things going, plus as much improvement as they will stand: an injustice righted here, an opportunity extended there. This is not a very romantic-sounding programme. In fact it is not a programme at all. I like that."

And so do I.

Friday 3 December 2010

A Lee Child Jack Reacher Omnibus: Killing Floor and Die Trying (BCA, 1998)

What's that in brackets up there in the post title? BCA? BCA? A book club edition?! After everything I've written about book clubs? What in the name of Christ is going on?

Well now...


This here is the 1998 BCA hardback omnibus edition of Lee Child's first two novels, Killing Floor (1997) and Die Trying (1998), and unlike the majority of book club editions, which are seldom of interest to book collectors and litter Amazon Marketplace and AbeBooks like scrounging single mothers apparently litter Britain (at least, according to the Daily Mail and its mean-spirited NIMBY readership), this particular BCA edition is fantastically scarce and consequently rather valuable. There are currently no copies for sale on AbeBooks, one copy for sale on Amazon Marketplace UK for over a hundred quid (UPDATE: er, at least it was a hundred quid; it's now £3.99. Go figure) and one copy for sale on Amazon Marketplace US for nearly $400. (UPDATE: er, make that just over $100. Still, pretty expensive, even so.) Crikey.

Did I pay that much for it? Did I fu-- no, I didn't. I got lucky and scored a cheap copy, from a seller who possibly didn't know how scarce it is. I was originally going to try and find first editions of the individual novels, but first editions of Killing Floor – which was recently selected as one of one million novels to be given away on World Book Night – go for around thirty quid and firsts of Die Trying go for upwards of sixty. Luckily, I spied this omnibus – the only omnibus there's been of Child's Jack Reacher novels, which I wanted to try after hearing good things about them – and killed two birds with one stone.

As to why it's so scarce... I have no idea. Did BCA only print a small quantity? Was the bulk of the run pulped for some reason? Or is there a mountain of copies sitting forgotten in a warehouse somewhere? Inquiring minds need to know...

Lewes and Brighton Book Bargains: The Night Manager and The Constant Gardener by John le Carre, plus Le Carre on James Bond

In a slight change to our regular programming, this latest Lewes Book Bargain post features not only a book bought in a charity shop in Lewes – the obscure and slightly contrary East Sussex town in which I live and work – but also a special guest appearance from a book bought in a charity shop in Brighton – the rather more famous but equally bolshy East Sussex coastal town about eight miles down the road. Let's have a look at that one first:


It's the UK hardback first edition/first printing of John le Carre's The Constant Gardener, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2001. It's the story of a British diplomat in Nairobi whose wife is killed and who subsequently discovers her death may be linked to pharamaceutical big business. Starring, as it does, a "socially awkward comedy Englishman", it falls firmly within the bracket of my friend Roly's eight point assessment of later Le Carre, but it did beget a rather good 2005 movie adaptation, one of the best to spring from a Le Carre novel. And perhaps more importantly from my perspective, it did only cost two pounds from the Brighton branch of Oxfam Books. Wahey.

But that's not all from Le Carre. Oh no. There's this too:


A UK hardback first edition of The Night Manager, also published by Hodder & Stoughton, this time in 1993, and with a truly horrible nineties dustjacket designed by someone who was wise enough to keep their credit off the thing. I bought this in the funny new charity shop across the way from the Lewes branch of Waitrose, the name of which I can't recall but which looks remarkably like a furniture outlet that used to squat on Penge High Street circa 1978. But they do also have books on sale there too (well, obviously, otherwise how would I have bought this one in there?), at the most knock-down prices in all of Lewes: this copy of The Night Manager cost me a quid. As for the story, it seems to be about weapons dealing and stars another socially awkward comedy Englishman. Hey, you want an informative and helpful precis, go to another website. We're all about the veneer round here.

Aha, but hold your horses: I've overlooked something. I forgot that I can, of course, refer to my recently acquired copy of Donald McCormick's Who's Who in Spy Fiction, which might be able to shed further light on both these Le Carre novels... if it hadn't been published in 1977, sixteen years before The Night Manager and twenty-four years before The Constant Gardener. Hurm. Fat lot of good that turned out to be, then. Although I have just spotted a catty quote from Le Carre in it, on the antithesis of Le Carre's realpolitik spies, James Bond, so let's have that instead:

"The really interesting thing about Bond is that he would be what I call the ideal defector. Because if the money was better, the booze freer and women easier over there in Moscow, he'd be off like a shot. Bond, you see, is the ultimate prostitute."

Mee-ow! And also: bollocks. The James Bond I'm most familiar with – i.e. the one from Ian Fleming's novels – would do no such thing. As anyone who's actually read any of the Bond books would know, 007 is motivated by duty; the rest – the (not as numerous as you'd think) women, the fine living – is merely window dressing. If we were to be generous to Le Carre, it could be that he's conflating the movie Bond with the literary Bond, which is something I've blogged about before. But if we were to be less generous, one could accuse him of simply not having read the novels, or perhaps not having read them in a while. I'll be returning to this in a post about that stalwart defender of Fleming, Kingsley Amis, over the weekend, but for now, I'll leave you with a typically elegant and barbed sentence from Amis from a 1968 essay about Bond which could easily apply here:

"The curious momentary suspicion one feels from time to time, that the critics have somehow got hold of a completely different version of the work one has been reading, has never invaded my mind more powerfully than in the case of Ian Fleming and his critics."

Thursday 2 December 2010

Parker Progress Report: A Review of Slayground by Richard Stark

Sometimes, the weight of expectation can be too much for a book to bear.

I don't think it's an accident that the Donald 'Richard Stark' Westlake novels starring career thief Parker I've enjoyed most thus far have been the less celebrated ones. While I've liked The Outfit (Parker #3, 1963), The Score (Parker #5, 1964) and The Sour Lemon Score (Parker #12, 1969) just fine, the standouts for me have been The Man with the Getaway Face (Parker #2, 1963), with its meticulously planned heist and kick-in-the-teeth ending; The Green Eagle Score (Parker #10, 1967), where we meet a parallel younger version of Parker; and perhaps my favourite so far, The Seventh (Parker #7, 1966), with its post-heist frustrations and eventual bloodbath. I think that's partly because everything I'd read about them beforehand suggested they weren't quite up there with the agreed classics of the series – which just goes to show you should never believe everything you read – but it's also their more reflective nature, the way they each show Parker in a different light: as the master planner, as he might have been as a novice, and as a man completely at fate's mercy.

The flipside to that is, of course, that my enjoyment of the likes of The Outfit and The Score may have been soured slightly by expecting too much from them, although I don't know how true that is. I did like 'em, as I say; I just think there's more going on in some of the other books. But I suspect that's almost certainly the case with Slayground. First published in 1971, the fourteenth Parker novel may well be the most venerated of all the Parkers. Something about it obviously chimes with Stark's fans – probably the way it confines Parker, traps him in a snowbound closed-for-the-winter amusement park following a disastrous getaway from a heist, beset on all sides by corrupt cops and gangsters all after his loot. But for me, while I liked it, and there were moments I really dug, on the whole, it lacked something.

Perversely, I think that plot was precisely what my problem with the book was. On first inspection, Parker alone, back to the wall, living on his wits, fighting to escape a closed down funfair sounds brilliant. In practice, I found it a bit too simplistic, and therefore a bit too predictable. Because you know Parker will get out of this. I mean, you know Parker will always get out of whatever situation he's in somehow, as there's always a next book in the series (until you get to 2008's Dirty Money, that is). But usually it's more about how he'll come out the other side with some kind of reward, not whether he'll come out the other side at all. In Slayground, the money quickly becomes a secondary concern. Parker's fighting for his life. And given that, you just know, one way or another, he's going to exit through the gate he entered. That took some of the suspense out of it for me.

Another consequence of the plot is that Parker's on his own for most of the novel, and again, that didn't quite work for me. The whole point of Parker is he's a criminal automaton: there's little to him beyond stealing stuff. So if you spend any great amount of time alone with him in his head – as we do in Slayground – you'll quickly discover it's not a terribly interesting place to be. Despite the fact he can barely be bothered to speak to most people, Parker works best when he's interacting with other characters. I live for those moments where Parker has to deal with a horrific human situation like, y'know, actually having to speak to someone, which he generally handles by not speaking at all, because for him there's nothing to say. How he deals with, say, Alan Grofield, or Handy McKay, or Claire, helps to define him, by contrasting his utter weirdness – that taciturn blankness – with characters that are comparatively normal.

All that said, there is much to enjoy in Slayground. The opening chapter – which Slayground famously shares with the Alan Grofield novel The Blackbird – is blistering. (Here's a thing though: I actually ended up enjoying Grofield's subsequent adventures as a reluctant spy more than Parker's parallel adventure. Now there's a first.) There's some memorable, wonderfully absurd business in Part One, where Parker familiarizes himself with the amusement park, testing out the rides and setting traps; stuff like this:

"Quarter after five. Parker rode a rocket with wooden seats past suns and satellites to the end of the black-light Voyage Through the Galaxy."

Or this:

"Five minutes to six. Parker climbed to the bridge of the pirate ship."

There's a splendid silliness to the idea of a hulking brute like Parker folded into an amusement park ride, or clambering over a pirate ship.

On top of that, we get an appealing Stark Stooge in the shape of level-headed local mobster Caliato, who takes charge of the manhunt for Parker. Unfortunately he doesn't really stick around long enough, but he does provide the book's most surprisingly affecting moment. (As for the Stark Cutaway, that comes in Part Two instead of Part Three – while at only four chapters, Part Three is possibly the shortest 'Part' in all the Parkers.) And there are some great action sequences, not to mention, as Book Glutton pointed out on his blog, some interesting similarities to some other novels I've read this year, in particular J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island.

So there are good things here. But more than anything, what Slayground feels like is a prelude: an opening chapter to some longer work. Which, in a way, is exactly what it is: a curtain opener for the main event, Butcher's Moon (1974), the next Parker but one, and the longest Parker of all. Parker's major nemesis in Slayground, local mob boss Lozini, is left alive at the end of the novel, so it's a pretty safe bet we'll see him again in Butcher's Moon, which details Parker's attempt to retrieve his loot. Before that though, there's Plunder Squad (1972), which is a less-celebrated Parker novel, so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out. And I'll also be reading the Joe Gores novel Dead Skip (1972), which ties into Plunder Squad, and possibly the final Alan Grofield book, Lemons Never Lie (1971), before I get to Butcher's Moon. Verily, my Stark cup runneth over.

(For the previous Parker Progress Report, on Deadly Edge, go here.)

Wednesday 1 December 2010

Notes from the Small Press 6: Ed Pinsent's Illegal Batman and Jeffrey Brown's Wolverine: Dying Time


Thus far in these Notes from the Small Press posts (links to the previous instalments can be found at the end of this one), the comics I've spotlighted have largely been personal and autobiographical works (as in, personal to the creators, not personal to me, although some have been that too). But even though those are generally the kinds of comics that small press and mini-comix cartoonists tend to produce and naturally gravitate towards – self-publishing being such an innately and intensely personal endeavour – you'll often find those very same creators harbour a secret (and not-so-secret) fondness for what are widely regarded as the antithesis of the small press ideal: superhero comics.


Truth is, whatever the kinds of comics we read and create today, most of us grew up immersed in the superhero comics published by either DC Comics or Marvel Comics. So it's perfectly understandable that, though they may have largely sloughed off their influence, some small press creators can't help but pay homage to/take the piss out of superheroes. In the States, one of the best known examples is the 1997 Coober Skeeber Marvel Benefit Issue, which Marvel responded to with a Cease and Desist notice, but since then alternative comics creators have been practically welcomed with open arms by the major comics publishers: witness DC's Bizarro Comics, Marvel's Strange Tales, and Bongo's Kramers Ergot issue of Treehouse of Horror.

In my collection I've got a fair few examples of small press comics creators having a crack at some of the better known superheroes, but in this post I want to concentrate on two artists – one British, one American – and how they each took on an archetypal hero – one DC-owned, one Marvel-owned – and in the process managed to come up with two idiosyncratic comics, separated by a period of fifteen years, both of which effortlessly transcend each character's much more pedestrian official fare.


Ed Pinsent's Illegal Batman appeared in 1989, an A4, 22 single-sheet-page photocopied comic charmingly stapled on the side instead of at the spine (my copy, as you can see from the cover up top there, got covered in coffee at some point). I've touched on Pinsent before in these posts, notably in the first Notes on Fast Fiction, but I've never really discussed his comics, which are mysterious and poetic, tapping into a personal mythology where storytelling, religious symbolism and folk memory magically intertwine. (There are previews of some of his books – including his best known creations, Windy Wilberforce and Primitif – on his website.)

Despite featuring Ed's version – vision, even – of perhaps the most famous and iconic superhero ever, Illegal Batman is as much a Pinsent comic as anything else he's done. There's an elusive, elliptical feel to the thing, as Illegal Batman – or rather an illegal Batman – goes about his business of trying to solve crimes – very, very slowly. The mystery of why he's 'illegal' is never addressed, and indeed is unimportant: he is an illegal Batman, and that is all you need to know. Equally, the fact that he can send himself through the air via a remarkable projection device remains unexplained: it simply is.


As the comic progresses, it takes an increasingly spiritual turn. This illegal Batman is seemingly ineffectual, but at least he's empathetic; he appears incapable of actually finding a mother's missing children, but he can offer her words of woolly wisdom that salve her somehow, because he knows that mother and children will eventually be reunited, one way or another, whether on this plane or another. By the close of the comic, he has evolved, like the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, watching over the world. It's a deeply strange but oddly moving ending to a deeply strange but oddly moving comic. In other words, pure Ed Pinsent.

Jeffrey Brown's 2004 A5 22-page mini-comic Wolverine: Dying Time is, on the face of it, a more prosaic tribute. Brown is best known for his highly personal autobiographical graphic novels, such as Clumsy (2002) and Unlikely (2003). I got Dying Time from Brown himself at the 2004 San Diego Comic Con. He had a stash of them under his table, which he was furtively handing out to the occasional customer. Dedicated to X-Men artists Art Adams, it's a short, sharp tale of a zombie attack that has horrible consequences.


To an extent, Dying Time relies on the reader being familiar with the world of the X-Men, and with Wolverine and Kitty Pryde in particular. Its emotional impact – and for such a slight affair it does pack quite a punch – will depend on how au fait you are with those characters. But even without that familiarity, the comic works because there's a depth to it. The feelings of loss and helplessness it evokes are very real, and all the more surprising for having been prompted by a superhero comic – and a superhero comic featuring zombies at that. I can think of few superhero comics that have had a comparable effect on me, that have presented a character like Wolverine with such a stark, inescapable choice, and that have ultimately left such a bitter taste in the mouth.

Wolverine: Dying Time and Illegal Batman are quite different comics in many ways, but they do share a certain off-kilter sensibility, along with an instinctively emotional approach to their respective archetypal subjects. Marvel and DC may have begun to accept indie comics creators, but they effectively ghettoise them, lumping them together in anthologies neatly labelled as suitably 'alternative'. Truly edgy or new approaches to the companies' sacred cows are thus neutered. Roll on the day when the Big Two publish comics like Illegal Batman and Wolverine: Dying Time as a matter of course; on that day, I'll get a lot more interested in superhero comics again.


Notes from the Small Press 1: Fast Fiction Presents the Elephant of Surprise

Notes from the Small Press 2: Monitor's Human Reward by Chris Reynolds

Notes from the Small Press 3: Small Pets

Notes from the Small Press 4: Anais in Paris by Mardou

Notes from the Small Press 5: The Curiously Parochial Comics of John Bagnall

Notes from the Small Press 7: The Comix Reader #1

Notes from the Small Press 8: A Help! Shark Comics Gallery

Notes from the Small Press 9: Some Gristavision Comics by Merv Grist

Notes from the Small Press 10: Some Sav Sadness Comics by Bob Lynch