Tuesday 7 June 2011

Anthony Price's David Audley Spy Novel Series: A First (and Later) Edition Collector's Guide

This week on Existential Ennui I'm blogging about British author Anthony Price and his fine series of nineteen espionage novels, which star British Intelligence operatives David Audley, Hugh Roskill, Jack Butler and their colleagues. On Sunday I posted an overview of the series and a bibliography, and later in the week I'll be reviewing each of the first three novels. Today, however, I want to concentrate on an aspect of Price's books that almost certainly won't have been touched upon elsewhere on the internet (partly because few people are as dangerously obsessive as I am), a subject that is, in many ways, the driving force behind this 'ere blog: the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting said books. And I'd just like to apologise in advance for the length of this missive; it's been a while since I've attempted one of these in-depth book collecting posts, so it kind of ran on a bit. I'll entirely understand if you decide to skip it and wait for those promised reviews. Honestly, I really wouldn't blame you.


So then. Unlike many of the authors I blog about, Anthony Price isn't completely out of print. Three of his novels – The Labyrinth Makers (1970; Audley series #1), Other Paths to Glory (1974, #5) and The Old Vengeful (1982, #12) – are currently available as both paperbacks and eBooks from Orion, which means that those of you who can't bear to read anything other than a brand spanking new book – or indeed a brand spanking new electronic book – will find it easy enough to dive straight in. But as longtime readers of Existential Ennui will attest, brand spanking new books aren't, in general, or in essence, what this blog is all about. First editions are what set pluses racing round these here parts, or if not first editions then at least intriguing later editions. And on that score, Mr. Price has a lot to offer.

Here in the UK, all of Price's novels, from 1970's The Labyrinth Makers to 1989's The Memory Trap, were published by Victor Gollancz, and while first editions of the later books in the series are relatively easy to come by, the early novels are another matter entirely. The most valuable is his debut, the aforementioned The Labyrinth Makers; at present AbeBooks has only four copies of the first edition for sale, ranging from £150 to £350. But each of the books up to and including Soldier No More (1981) – and even beyond that – presents its own unique challenges, not merely in terms of such prosaic matters as availability and affordability, but also more aesthetic concerns to do with dustjacket design and the desirability of later reprint editions and even American editions.

I mention jacket design because, in common with other Gollancz books of the era, the first editions of Price's novels up to 1977's War Game all sport those iconic yellow (or sometimes red) wrappers that so defined the look of Gollancz hardbacks for decades. For me, that's something of an issue, because while first editions are usually preferable, and the Gollancz jackets are certainly distinctive, taken together those seven books can tend toward the uniform. On top of that, these first editions aren't cheap. Unless you're prepared to put up with ex-library copies, prices range from around £30 at the low end to well over a hundred pounds for really nice copies. In other words, and to paraphrase Morrissey, largely beyond my slender means.

There is, however, another option – or more accurately, options. Many of Price's novels were published by Gollancz in hardback not once, but twice. Indeed, the earlier novels made it through three Gollancz hardback editions – and all three of them are rather hard to find. Let's take the second novel, 1971's The Alamut Ambush, as an example.


From left to right we have the 1971 Gollancz first edition hardback; the 1983 Gollancz second edition hardback; and the 1991 Gollancz third edition hardback. The first edition is pretty self-explanatory, but that '83 second edition bears further elucidation. The design of the jacket, by Brian Nicholls, ties in with the look of the Anthony Price novels that were newly published in hardback by Gollancz around this early- mid-80s period – Gunner Kelly (1983), Sion Crossing (1984) and Here Be Monsters (1985). But the reason The Alamut Ambush, and The Labyrinth Makers and the third novel, Colonel Butler's Wolf, were all reissued in hardback in 1983 was because that was the year ITV in the UK broadcast the six-episode television series Chessgame, an adaptation of the first three novels (sadly unavailable on DVD).

However, even though these and others of Price's early books have been through three Gollancz hardback editions, many of them are still hard to find in decent condition. To give you some idea of their scarcity, AbeBooks currently has only ten copies of The Alamut Ambush listed in any of these Gollancz editions. By far the most common is the 1971 first, with seven copies available, ranging from £15 to £200. But of those, four are ex-library, and the remaining three are the most expensive copies. As for the other three Gollancz hardbacks on AbeBooks, those are all the 1983 reissue. Of the further 1991 reissue, there is not a trace (my copy is an ex-library cheapo eBay win).

You might, at this point (if you're even still reading), be wondering why on earth I bought multiple copies of The Alamut Ambush – in total two copies of the 1983 edition and one of the 1991 reprint (the 1971 cover you can see above was "borrowed" off the internet). In truth, it was more by accident than design – and therein lies a small tale of woe.

See, I wasn't keen to pay though the nose for the book, so I bought that cheap ex-library copy of the '91 edition first, believing it to be the '83 edition. Once it arrived and I discovered it wasn't, I bought an equally cheap, similarly ex-library copy of the '83 printing to rectify the mistake. But then I read the novel and realised that the story has a particular association with the area of south east England in which I live and work, specifically the East Sussex South Downs. (I'll explore exactly what that association is in more depth in my review of the novel later this week.) So of course, inveterate collector that I am, I had to get myself a non-ex-library copy. And since first editions are somewhat out of my price range, I elected to procure another copy of the more reasonably priced '83 edition, the cover of which I prefer to the yellow first edition jacket anyway.

But there's more. Because once that second copy of the 1983 edition arrived, I noticed that, while on the surface the two books are indistinguishable –


same jacket design, same case – internally there are definite differences between the two. If we take a look at the dustjacket flaps of the ex-library copy:


You'll see they bear a price on the front flap and a Post-a-Book logo and ISBN on the back one. But if we take a look at the flaps on the other copy:


No price, no logo and no ISBN. Meanwhile, inside the book, there are differences between the two copyright pages as well. The ex-library copyright page looks like this:


with the previous 1971 edition listed as "First published", and the new edition underneath it (ignore the penned "F" and library numbers). But the copyright page on the other copy looks like this:


No mention of a previous edition – not even a mention of this edition. So while it's not ex-library, it's also evidently not precisely the same edition. Based on past evidence on Existential Ennui, previously at this point I'd have identified it as a book club edition and thrown my hands up in despair. But I don't think it is. I think it is, in fact, an export edition, intended for the American market, where, by 1983, the 1972 Doubleday hardback would have been long out of print and the next US edition, a Mysterious Press paperback, wouldn't arrive until 1986, leaving the American market open for British imports. Indeed, given its scarcity, it's not unreasonable to conjecture that almost all of the '83 Gollancz editions went to public lending libraries in the UK, and those that didn't were shipped off to the States (or not, as the case apparently is here).

Whatever the truth of the matter, there are so few copies of the '83 printing available, any copy is to be cherished – especially as The Alamut Ambush has that aforementioned South Downs significance.

All of which goes to illustrate the potential minefield – albeit an oddly enticing minefield; perhaps one where books spring unexpectedly out of the ground, rather than the more traditional kind where, y'know, you get your arms and legs blown off – awaiting those intent on collecting Mr. Price's books, which I offer up in the hope that prospective Price collectors can learn by my mistakes. And that's without even discussing the later Gollancz novels, where book club editions litter the market (and muddy the waters), or American editions (over half of which were published by Doubleday), many of which boast rather splendid dustjacket designs of their own:


Those are all matters for future posts, however. As it is I think I've tried the patience of anyone foolish enough to have made it this far quite enough already. So let's move right along to the reviews, starting with Price's brilliant 1970 debut, The Labyrinth Makers. 

(NB: a two-part interview I conducted with Anthony Price can be found here and here.)

Sunday 5 June 2011

Author Anthony Price: The David Audley Series of Spy Novels, and a Bibliography

This week, as promised, Existential Ennui will be devoted exclusively to a British author whose clever, thoughtful, thrilling espionage novels have proved something of a revelation for me this year.

Anthony Price – full name Alan Anthony Price – wrote twenty books from 1970 to 1990. Nineteen of those were spy novels (the twentieth, The Eyes of the Fleet: A Popular History of Frigates and Frigate Captains, a non-fiction title published in 1990, was his final work – at least, to date; Price is still with us), which, together, form one of the best espionage series ever penned by a single author, a brilliantly sustained, wonderfully interconnected, richly historical fictional – yet entirely plausible – universe starring operatives of a branch of Britain's Intelligence Services (later identified as the Research and Development Section).

Though written in the third person, each story is told from the perspective of one of a rotating cast of intelligence types. The series begins with 1970's The Labyrinth Makers and Dr. David Audley, a socially awkward, prematurely middle-aged Middle East expert with a fascination for archaeology and history – subjects that remain abiding concerns throughout the subsequent eighteen novels. We also meet Audley's fellow operatives, sensitive, dedicated Squadron Leader Hugh Roskill and hard-headed, carrot-topped military man Major – soon to become Colonel – Jack Butler, each of whom will take their turn in the limelight in later books.

The plot that draws these three together concerns a Dakota plane which went missing shortly after the end of World War II – presumed lost at sea but now rediscovered at the bottom of a recently drained lake – and why the Russians are inordinately interested in this aircraft. What follows is a suitably labyrinthine guessing game, but what's exceptional about this and others of Price's novels is the way he both unfurls the plot through his characters' thoughts – or, perhaps more accurately, their words – and simultaneously colours in his cast with those same thought processes. Price builds his characters not so much through description of their physical appearance – although one can't help but see Price himself in the figure of Audley – nor through their deeds, but through their conversations. Time and again he presents us with long stretches of dialogue, as Audley, Roskill, Butler and others work through problems and intuit solutions, and as a consequence grant insight into their psyches.

Price's closest contemporary is probably John le Carré, but Price was well into his series by the time Le Carré's masterwork, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, arrived in 1974. And while there are similarities between the two writers in the way they have their characters examine evidence in order to arrive at conclusions, Price has little time for Le Carré's methodical digging through of old files; much of that sort of thing takes place off-page, leaving more room for the subsequent ruminations and discussions. The late H. R. F. Keating put it most appositely (and pithily) in a blurb reproduced on the back covers of some of the later editions of Price's books: "If think's your thing, here's richness in plot, dialogue, implications."

A Crime Writers' Association Silver and Gold Dagger Award winner, Price is rather overlooked these days, which is remarkable when you consider how terrific his stories are. There's scant information about him online; he has a Wikipedia entry – although the dates in the bibliography are inaccurate, possibly because they take the American publication dates rather than the original British ones; see below for a more accurate bibliography – and there are one or two good articles on the themes and chronology of his spy series (which ranges from 1944 to 1988); this one by Jo Walton and this one by David Dyer-Bennet (with its attendant booknotes) are the best of the bunch. But the odd individual review aside, that's about it.

So, I'll be attempting to redress that balance here on Existential Ennui. For the rest of the week I'll be reviewing each of Price's first three novels – The Labyrinth Makers, The Alamut Ambush (which I particularly loved, for reasons I'll elucidate down the line) and Colonel Butler's Wolf – as well as providing a guide to the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting the many editions of his books. And I'll have much more on Mr. Price in the future, don't you worry.

One last note before we move on to the bibliography (and then that collector's guide): I've scoured the internet for interviews with Price – who's now in his early eighties – to no avail; if any interviews exist with him (which they surely must somewhere), I'm pretty sure they're not on the web. But I did manage to find a quote from him in my copy of Donald McCormick and Katy Fletcher's Spy Fiction: A Connoisseur's Guide – although after Jeremy Duns's exposure of McCormick as something of a fantasist, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. But assuming it's genuine, it's the longest quote from Price I've come across, and it's on the subject of the impetus for his novels, so I'm presenting it in full:

"I enjoyed reading spy stories more than murder stories. Nothing I could imagine would be more outrageous than what actually happens. Ours is the second Great Age of Treason (the first was in the late 16th century) ... I think I once wrote 'the past lies in wait to ambush the present', and that I suppose is my favourite theme: the excavation of an event in the fairly recent past to establish the truth about a present mystery or problem, the action often being set against some more distant historical event."

(UPDATE 4/8/11: Just over a month after this post was written I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Price myself. You can read the results here and here.)

Anthony Price Bibliography

Unless otherwise stated all titles published by Victor Gollancz, UK.

The Labyrinth Makers (1970) (CWA Silver Dagger)
The Alamut Ambush (1971)
Colonel Butler's Wolf (1972)
October Men (1973)
Other Paths to Glory (1974) (CWA Gold Dagger)
Our Man in Camelot (1975)
War Game (1976)
The '44 Vintage (1978)
Tomorrow's Ghost (1979)
The Hour of the Donkey (1980)
Soldier No More (1981)
The Old Vengeful (1982)
Gunner Kelly (1983)
Sion Crossing (1984)
Here Be Monsters (1985)
For the Good of the State (1986)
A New Kind of War (1987)
A Prospect of Vengeance (1988)
The Memory Trap (1989)
The Eyes of the Fleet: A Popular History of Frigates and Frigate Captains (Hutchinson, 1990)

Friday 3 June 2011

The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb: the British First Edition (Hamish Hamilton, 1954) and the Film (Charles Laughton, 1955)

Final post in this short series on books which begat famous films. And today's book is the other title I picked up in that odd little secondhand bookshop in Newhaven I mentioned yesterday:


This is the UK first edition of The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1954 – originally published in the US by Harper & Brothers in 1953. Anyone who knows their film history should be aware of the movie this one inspired: the 1955 Charles Laughton adaptation, starring Robert Mitchum. Although a box office failure on its original release – a consequence of which being that Laughton never got the chance to direct another movie – it's since been recognised as one of the most important motion pictures of the twentieth century, and has become something of a cult – which is why we included it in 500 Essential Cult Movies, the excellent film title I oversaw in my Ilex Press managing editor role last year. Indeed, in a frankly alarming example of inter-blog synergism, I'm blogging about that very tome and Night of the Hunter over on the Ilex blog today. It's almost like I planned this, isn't it...?

You can read about Night of the Hunter from a movie perspective – including some of the other films it inspired – in that Ilex post, so let's confine ourselves here to the novel. Set during the Depression – not, as Wikipedia once claimed (it's since been corrected), in the aftermath of the American Civil War – it concerns ex-con Harry Powell's efforts to determine where his cell-mate, Ben Harper, has hidden the loot from a bank robbery. Misrepresenting himself as the prison chaplain, Powell inveigles himself into the poverty-stricken lives of Powell's wife, Willa, and her children, John and Pearl, who sense that there's something terrible about this "Preacher" with "L-O-V-E" tattooed on the fingers of his right hand and "H-A-T-E" on the fingers of his left. That memorable image is just one of many in a story that is unrelentingly sinister and oppressive, a Southern Gothic nightmare based on the true story of Harry F. Powers, who murdered two women and three children and was hanged in 1932.

There's a first rate recent review of both the novel and Laughton's adaptation on the James River Film Journal blog – and quite by chance, one of the images illustrating that post is the cover of the British first edition, captioned with the question, "Don't ask me where to find this creepy copy". The answer to which is, right here in the UK. Because while the American first edition sports a dustjacket designed by Susan Foster (which you can see on the right there), the jacket of the UK first was illustrated by Roy Sanford, about whom I've been able to discover little other than he also illustrated covers for the 1952 Hamilton first edition of Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie and, especially notably from my point of view, the 1951 Hart-Davis first of Ray Bradbury's The Silver Locusts, a.k.a. The Martian Chronicles, a collection of stories that remain among the best things I've ever read.


There are currently only sixteen copies of the Hamilton edition of The Night of the Hunter for sale on AbeBooks worldwide, ranging from £20 to £80 (there are a couple of signed copies going for more than that). At least half of those are later printings, however, whereas my one's a first impression. It's got heavy foxing on the page edges, but considering I paid a fiver for it, I can't really complain; plus that wonderfully ghoulish and apposite dustjacket is in excellent condition.


There was a curious piece of paraphernalia hiding in my copy as well:


A couple of letters, from a "Mon" to an unnamed lover, describing how much she misses him and how she's looking forward to his return from... wherever he is. They're rather sweet – if a little incongruous considering the dark, disturbing nature of the novel. Funny the things you find in books sometimes...

And that's it for the movie/novel posts, although do please pop along to the Ilex blog to read my Night of the Hunter piece over there as well, if you'd be so kind. (Apart from anything else it'll look good if I'm generating traffic from Existential Ennui.) Next up here though, I've got two weeks of themed posts planned. The second of those weeks will be on a longtime favourite of mine, suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith, but the first will be on a rather newer discovery: spy fiction author Anthony Price and his series of brilliant, brainy espionage novels. Coming right up...

Thursday 2 June 2011

Meyer Levin, Compulsion, Rope and Leopold and Loeb: the Films, the First Edition (Frederick Muller, 1957) and the Big Book Look

Next in this short run of posts on books which begat well-known films, a British first edition of a novel I picked up in the seaside town of Newhaven, just down the river Ouse from Lewes (the East Sussex town where I live and work, lest we forget). Newhaven's town centre has, unfortunately, seen better days, with lots of boarded-up, empty shops. But there is a funny little junk shop-cum-bookshop on the parade, which I popped into on a recent speculative jaunt to the town, and emerged clutching two first editions – both of which, coincidentally, inspired famous films. Let's have a look at this one first:


Meyer Levin's Compulsion was published in hardback by Frederick Muller in the UK in 1957 (originally published in the States in 1956 by Simon & Schuster). It's a fictionalised account of the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case, whereby Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, motivated by a desire to commit the perfect crime. Levin's novel is split into two halves: Book One is titled "The Crime of the Century", and Book Two is titled "The Trial of the Century" (the case was one of the first to be dubbed thus in the US). In his Foreword, Levin states that he wrote the novel "not... for the sake of sensation", but "in the hope of applying to [the case] the increase of understanding of such crimes that has come, during these years, and in the hope of drawing from it some further increase in our comprehension of human behaviour."

Compulsion was turned into a film by director Richard Fleischer in 1959, starring Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman... but it was preceded by a perhaps more famous movie – based on the same case – in 1948: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Which just happens to be one of my favourite Hitchcock films. Indeed, it's one of the flicks we included in the book 500 Essential Cult Movies, which I oversaw in my Ilex managing editor role, and which, all being well, I'll be writing about on the Ilex blog later this week.


Anyway, the dustjacket on this copy of Compulsion is, as you can see, a little tatty, but even so, UK first editions of the novel – and first printings, which this one is – aren't terribly common; AbeBooks has only five listed from UK sellers and fourteen in total, most of which are either later printingss or missing their jackets. The jacket design isn't credited on the flaps:


But, quite by chance, I do happen to know who created it, having blogged about this person before. It was designed by Paul Bacon, who's particularly famed for his jazz album sleeve designs, and who I covered fairly extensively in this post and this post. Bacon, you might recall, was the designer credited with originating the "big book look", whereby type is featured very large on a cover and any images quite small – and Compulsion is widely regarded as the first example of this design style. So the novel is notable in ways beyond just its movie ties and the Leopold/Loeb case.

So, just one more post to come in this short run – and the next book I'll be looking at – in a British first edition, with a very rarely seen dustjacket – is a powerful piece of fiction which inspired two equally powerful movies...

Wednesday 1 June 2011

Philip K. Dick: Total Recall and We Can Remember it for You Wholesale – the Movie vs. the Original Short Story (in The Preserving Machine and Other Stories)

Kicking off a short run of posts on novels and stories that begat very well-known movie adaptations, we have this:


The 1972 Science Fiction Book Book Club edition of Philip K. Dick's The Preserving Machine and Other Stories, published by Redwood Press. It's an anthology of short stories, all of which originally appeared in science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s and '60s, and which were then collected for a Gollancz hardback in 1969, which was then reissued three years later in this SFBC edition. (Still with me at the back?) I bought this copy in Much Ado Books in Alfriston, East Sussex on my birthday day out wayyyy back in March – and I still haven't blogged about all the books I bought that day, which'll give you some idea of how far behind I am on book-blogging. Still, the beauty of writing about old books is, there are no pressing deadlines on the buggers: they're already old, so it hardly matters when I get round to blogging about 'em.

Anyway, the reason this copy of The Preserving Machine and Other Stories caught my eye wasn't because it's terribly scarce or valuable in this edition – there are a few copies of the SFBC printing for sale on AbeBooks for around a tenner, although the original Gollancz edition goes for more like upwards of eighty quid – but because of one of the stories in it:


"We Can Remember it for You Wholesale", on page 129 there. Y'see, that story was the basis for one of the greatest (I'll brook no argument here) sci-fi action flicks ever made: Paul Verhoeven/Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall (1990). Now, Dick's stories have, of course, provided the inspiration for many films – Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, to name but three – although not having read any of the stories that led to those films I can't offer any insights into how faithful any of them are to Dick's originals. But if the case of "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" and Total Recall is anything to go by, they might not be as removed from their source material as I've been led to believe.

What's surprising about "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" is how close it is to Total Recall – at least, up to a point. Both the story and the movie follow Douglas Quaid, an everyday guy in a loveless marriage who is inexplicably drawn to Mars. Realising that he'll never be able to go to the planet in person, Quaid visits the offices of Rekal, Incorporated (travelling there and back in a taxi driven by a robot – as in the film), where he elects to undergo a process that will insert the memories of a trip to Mars into his brain – a trip where he adopts the role of a secret agent. Trouble is, before the process can even begin, Rekal's technicians discover that those memories already exist in Quaid's mind: he is a secret agent, and he did go to Mars. Having now remembered his other life, Quaid finds himself pursued by shadowy security forces intent on killing him.

Where the short story and the movie part ways is directly after this point. In the film, Quaid/Arnie heads off to Mars and gets involved in a Martian revolution. All of that was bolted on to Dick's story by Verhoeven and his writers, Dan O'Bannon et al; Dick's tale ends with Quaid returning to Rekal voluntarily to avoid being killed, there to have another, more outlandish memory implanted to override the secret agent/Mars one – leading to a nice twist that's even more insane than what's gone before. But although the story and the movie diverge here, prior to this juncture they run along remarkably similar lines – right down to those robot taxis.

I always believed there was more depth to Total Recall than many people gave it credit for, and as it turns out, that's because it hews so closely to Dick's original tale, which is thought-provoking and just a little bit mental. Much like the film, in fact.

Next up, I have a book which inspired one film and has close ties with another – and the novel itself was inspired by a notorious real life murder case...