Wednesday 7 September 2011

Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas: Signed US First Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1978)

On to the antepenultimate signed edition, and this next book was an eBay win (bought from an American seller), one I couldn't resist bidding on (and, er, winning, evidently) despite already owning a British first edition of the same novel, for reasons I'll return to shortly:


It's a US first edition and first impression of Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas, published by Simon and Schuster in 1978. Now, reasonably longtime readers of Existential Ennui will be well aware of my appreciation of Thomas, who I've been feverishly collecting and reading since Book Glutton tipped me off about him last year. The majority of the posts I've written on Thomas can be found in the three weeks I've dedicated to him – Week I, Week II, Week III – although there are one or two other extraneous missives dotted about here and there (click on his tag at the bottom of this post to find 'em all).

Suffice it to say I've come to believe that Ross Thomas was one of the finest crime/espionage writers of the twentieth century. And of his novels that I've thus far read, Chinaman's Chance is my favourite (although 1970's The Fools in Town are On Our Side runs it a close second). It's the first in his short series starring grifters Artie Wu and Quincy Durant (the sequels being 1987's Out on the Rim and 1992's Voodoo, Ltd.), and I posted a glowing review of the novel – in its British first edition, with attendant Beverley le Barrow dustjacket – right here.

So you can see why I was tickled pink to acquire this particular copy of the book, which bears this on the half-title page:


Curiously, Thomas's signature is done in red pencil – possibly crayon – but having checked it against other examples of his John Hancock, I'm as certain as I can be that it's genuine. And while Thomas did sign plenty of books in his lifetime – AbeBooks has well over 300 signed Thomas novels listed for sale – signed copies of Chinaman's Chance in any edition are thin on the ground: there's only one other signed copy of the novel currently listed on AbeBooks, and that's a second printing of the Simon and Schuster hardback, going for nearly forty quid. Crucially, my copy is the genuine first printing – not a book club edition – and bears no red remainder mark on the page edges, something that afflicts a good number of the other copies on sale. (How's that for finickity book-collecting geekery?)

The author photo on the back cover is by Michael Lindsay, but the design on the front of the dustjacket is by Lawrence Ratzkin, who's cropped up a number of times on Existential Ennui in relation to Ross Thomas; he also designed the jackets for The Singapore Wink (1969), The Backup Men (1971) and Protocol for a Kidnapping (also 1971), written as Oliver Bleeck.

I'll actually be returning to Chinaman's Chance down the line, with yet another edition of the book – along with an edition of 1979's The Eighth Dwarf – both of which feature intriguing forewords. But let's move on to the penultimate signed edition post, which will be on a novel by a spy fiction author who I dedicated a series of posts to in July. And this one really is quite special...

Tuesday 6 September 2011

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter: Signed First Edition (Harper Collins, 1995), Plus a Bit of Doctor Who Business

As I mentioned in this post (er, and this post), I've been saving the best books in my series on signed editions till last; each of the final four books I'll be showcasing this week really is quite special, either in terms of scarcity, value, personal value, or a combination of all three. And let's begin with this:


This is the UK hardback first edition/first impression of The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, published by Harper Collins in 1995, with a dustjacket illustration – and a number of interior illos – by Les Edwards. The Time Ships is Baxter's authorized sequel to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine – published to coincide with the centenary of Wells's visionary original – and as such is a novel I've always wanted to read. So I was thrilled when I chanced upon this first edition – on sale for just a quid – in the Haynes Lane indoor market in Crystal Palace, on a brief visit back to my old "manor". And I was even more excited when I opened the book up and discovered this inside it:


A signed dedication by the author. Now, I don't have a smart phone, so for me secondhand book collecting is still largely a case of guesswork and the occasional piece of good fortune. But when I found this copy of The Time Ships, I had an inkling that first editions/first printings were valuable, and that therefore a signed first/first would be even more so. What I didn't know was quite how valuable: AbeBooks currently lists eight signed UK firsts (plus one signed proof) ranging in price from £120 up to nearly £300. Which makes it not a bad purchase at all for a pound, and a piece of good fortune indeed.

Incidentally, after being rumoured for a while, it was officially announced in July that Baxter will be writing an original Doctor Who novel, Wheel of Ice, starring the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton), to be published next year. This is part of a concerted effort by BBC Books to attract big-name SF authors to the Doctor Who fiction lines, an initiative which began with Michael Moorcock's The Coming of the Terraphiles in 2010 (Alastair Reynolds is also slated to to pen one). I'm uncertain whether Baxter's book will be published in the same 8vo/Octavo cloth-boards-plus-dustjacket format as Moorcock's novel, as opposed to the smaller self-cover hardbacks that the majority of the Beeb's Doctor Who line is published in these days, but I certainly hope so. And while we're on the subject of Doctor Who, Baxter also provided a foreword to the recently reissued classic Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, which features... the Second Doctor. No prizes for guessing which Doctor is Baxter's Doctor, then.

Moving on, and while by some estimates the next signed first edition perhaps isn't as valuable as The Time Ships – although signed copies of it are much scarcer – it's one that I particularly treasure, because it's a novel that's among the best I've read in the past few years, written by an American crime/spy fiction author who's become a firm favourite here on Existential Ennui...

Monday 5 September 2011

Donald E. Westlake's Science Fiction Stories: "Look Before You Leap", Analog Vol. XVIII, No. 9, September 1962

(NB: a version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)


On we go with Donald E. Westlake's science fiction magazine stories; and like the last SF story I wrote about, "They Also Serve", this one also appeared in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, and has similarly never been reprinted since (and it's not even available via Project Gutenberg). But there the parallels end, because while "They Also Serve" clocked in at just four pages, this one stretches over thirty – it's called a "novelette" in the table of contents – and is a much stronger work all round.


"Look Before You Leap" appeared in the May 1962 issue of Analog (cover art by the late, great John Schoenherr), although once again the edition seen here is the British one from a few months later. This time the story is credited to "Don Westlake", and is only trumped in the table of contents by the first part of Darrell T. Langart's "Anything You Can Do" (which is around the same length as Westlake's tale). Told in the third person, our protagonist is twenty-year-old Jeremy Masters, a trainee in the US Air Force on his third day of bivouac. Crawling through a "pitch-black dry drainage pipe", with Tactical Instructors dropping tear gas bombs at either end, Jeremy becomes so terrified that he suddenly finds himself hundreds of miles away, still on his hands and knees, on his bed back home at his mom's place in Pennsylvania. No sooner has he registered his new surroundings, however, than he's back in the pitch-black pipe again.

Jeremy, we learn from a certain Colonel Brice and his associates Ed Clark and Paul Swanson, who have been studying the bivouac, has unlocked an innate but previously dormant ability to teleport. Only now Jeremy refuses to believe he teleported, and Colonel Brice and co. can only hope that Jeremy rediscovers his ability before he ends up as a section eight. As to why Brice and co. want Jeremy to teleport again, and why they're so willing to believe he can, all is revealed at the end of the story.


Certainly "Look Before You Leap" is a more sustained effort than "They Also Serve", perhaps because here Westlake has rather more room to properly explore his ideas. At one point he does something quite interesting with the notion of teleportation: he ties it to almost folkloric tales of people who report instances of their loved ones suddenly appearing before them at the exact moment that those loved ones are dying many miles away. Jeremy recalls his Aunt Sara and Uncle Fred; eight years ago Fred was killed in an airplane accident in the Rockies, and Sara insisted that at the exact moment Fred "was dying against that mountainside, she swore she saw him standing in the kitchen, right next to the refrigerator".

Developing this theory, Jeremy reasons: 

Say Uncle Fred was a latent teleport. He's sitting in the airplane, probably in a seat toward the rear of the plane, and suddenly the plane bucks and dips and dives straight for the mountain—he can look out the window and see that the right-hand wing has sheard off—and for the first time in his life he's in a situation desperate enough to reach all the way down to the teleporting ability, and he wishes frantically he were home in his own kitchen, raiding the refrigerator, and all of a sudden he's home. Which for shock value is about equivalent to kissing a girl who suddenly and instantaneously turns into a crocodile. So he teleports right back, while he still has his sanity. And the plane plunges into the mountain.

It's an intriguing idea, and actually the best part of the story; there are no real twists to the tale after this one, largely because Westlake presents a decidedly benign version of the US military. The ending in particular is notably upbeat; where another writer might have highlighted the potentially sinister implications of what Colonel Brice is up to, Westlake instead opts for a feelgood finish. Then again, maybe Westlake wanted his audience to read between the lines and draw their own conclusions. Or perhaps he just wrote the damn thing, sent it off, and cashed the cheque: one has to be reasonably circumspect in ascribing too much in the way of intent or motivation with these early SF stories, largely because back then Westlake was writing for whichever publications would have him in whichever genre they required.

In any case, "Look Before You Leap" is a solid entry in Westlake's select science fiction canon, certainly worth a read, although you'd have to track down a copy of the issue of Analog in which it appears in order to do so. Luckily, the next Westlake SF short I'll be reviewing is more readily available, as it was later reprinted in the 1989 collection Tomorrow's Crimes. But before we get to that, there's the final offering of signed editions I promised, comprising four books that are all very hard to come by in signed first, and consequently very valuable indeed. And the first of those is, appropriately enough, a science fiction novel...

Friday 2 September 2011

Gavin Lyall, Author... and Cover Artist (The Wrong Side of the Sky, Hodder & Stoughton, 1961)

Veering away from the signed editions momentarily, I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post on a signed edition of Gavin Lyall's Blame the Dead that, during the course of what I laughingly call my research into Lyall's inscription inside the book, I turned up a nugget of info about an earlier Lyall novel, which answered a question that had been bothering me for a while. (Let's not get into why such things prey on my mind; that way lies madness.)

To recap: the dedication in that copy of Blame the Dead is to a "Frank", who, I reasoned, might well be Frank Hardman, with whom Lyall and an old schoolfriend named Martin Davison worked on the story for a 1969 Hammer film titled Moon Zero Two. Intrigued by Lyall's involvement with the movie, I dug a little deeper and turned up this interview with Martin Davison on David Sisson's sci-fi model website. In the interview Davison reveals all manner of titbits about the making of Moon Zero Two in general and Lyall's role in particular, as well as one or two extraneous bits of Lyall info, such as the fact that he was a keen model-maker (as was Davison). But the quote that really caught my eye concerned this book:


The Wrong Side of the Sky was Gavin Lyall's debut, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1961. It's an excellent thriller, starring Jack Clay, the first of a series of pilot protagonists in Lyall's novels (Lyall was an RAF pilot himself, as evidenced by the back cover photo), who embarks on a quest for lost treasure around the islands of the Middle East, which entails, as you'd expect, a number of gripping flying sequences. P. G. Wodehouse said of the book, "Terrific! When better novels of suspense than this are written, lead me to them." (Hopefully someone led Mr. Wodehouse to Lyall's later novels, some of which are indeed better than The Wrong Side of the Sky.)

Ever since I bought this first edition of The Wrong Side of the Sky, at the – now sadly defunct – Rye Book Fair back in 2009, I've been wondering who the artist responsible for the painting on the front of the dustjacket was. There's no credit on either jacket flap, and no signature on the painting itself. So imagine my delight (go on: just imagine it) when David Sisson's interview with Martin Davison finally provided the answer. Here's the relevant quote: 

"[Lyall] was a very successful thriller writer and continued as such for many years... I attach a scan of an extremely beaten up book cover of his first thriller The Wrong Side of the Sky from 1961. The artwork on the cover was actually done by Gavin himself, because he thought the cover provided by Hodder and Stoughton was inadequate for the job."

There you have it. The cover artist on the first edition of The Wrong Side of the Sky by Gavin Lyall was... Gavin Lyall. And a creditable job he did, too. Mystery solved!

Anyway, next week I'll be rounding off my series on signed editions with a final handful of books; I've been saving the best to last and there are some real doozies in this lot, among them novels by authors who are favourites both old and new on Existential Ennui. I'm keen to get through them by the end of next week because the week after that I'll be dedicating Existential Ennui to a spy fiction author who's also made a fair few appearances on this blog, to mark the occasion of the release of a new film based on one of his most famous books: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That's John le Carré Week – or, perhaps more accurately, George Smiley Week – in just over seven days' time.

Next up, though, as promised, I'll likely have another Donald E. Westlake science fiction story...

Thursday 1 September 2011

Book Review: Signed Association First Edition of Blame the Dead by Gavin Lyall (Hodder & Stoughton, 1972)

After a brief intermission in the form of a Donald E. Westlake science fiction post (also available on The Violent World of Parker), it's back to British thriller writer Gavin Lyall, with the second of two signed association copies of his novels. And this one is from earlier in his career, actually towards the end of its first phase, when, you'll doubtless recall, Lyall was penning first-person adventures largely starring grizzled aviators. Except, this particular novel doesn't feature a pilot; instead, its protagonist is a freelance security consultant and occasional bodyguard who gets mixed up in a convoluted plot involving Lloyds insurance of ships.


Blame the Dead was first published in hardback in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1972 (not 1973, as Wikipedia states), under an intriguing dustjacket designed by Colin Andrews (I'll reveal what that jacket's all about in a moment). Now, I have to hold my hand up here and admit that I already own a copy of this first edition, bought at Camilla's in Eastbourne in May of last year; but when I spotted the one seen above on eBay recently and realised it had been signed and dedicated by Gavin Lyall himself – which, as I outlined in the previous Lyall post, is a real rarity – I couldn't resist nabbing it.

I'll return to Lyall's inscription shortly, but first, the book. Blame the Dead was Lyall's sixth novel, and the penultimate one to be written in the first person. Our narrator is ex-British Army intelligence man James Card, who, whilst acting as bodyguard for Lloyd's underwriter Martin Fenwick on a murky mission to Arras in northern France, comes under fire from unknown assailants. Cue one dead underwriter and the beginnings of a Byzantine mystery, as, experiencing guilt at his inability to protect Fenwick, Card takes it upon himself to find out why the Lloyd's man was killed, and why the hell he was taking what appears to be a copy of the Bertie Bear Colouring Book to France. (Now you see the significance of the dustjacket.)

The best thing about Blame the Dead is Card himself. He's what you might call a rough diamond: possessed of jagged edges that both his friends and adversaries find occasionally piercing, but essentially decent. Lyall's characterization of Card is surefooted throughout: his narration is wry and blokey, befitting his military background, and while in some respects he's quite the hard man – he exhibits a particular fondness for guns, for example – he's also pragmatic, loyal and warm (his relationship with Fenwick's son, David, who ends up hiring Card to find out why his dad was killed, is rather touching). But Card is no invincible hero, and he's certainly not much of a detective (something that more than one character remarks upon); he's slow on the uptake, never ahead of the game, and it's only his pig-headed refusal to quit that sees him through to the finish.

Lyall's also good on the intricacies of shipping insurance, which topic underpins the plot. The novel is actually quite instructive on how a big insurer like Lloyd's works; in a way these aspects are more interesting than the occasional bursts of action, which range across London and back and forth to Norway, as Card goes on the run from the authorities and the villains. And though Card is a largely agreeable creation, he's also something of a neanderthal in his attitude towards both women – at one point he muses, "Do you want to know why women will never rule the world? Because they can't be bothered to read a newspaper to find out if they've taken over the world" – and homosexuals. That latter flaw makes for some uncomfortable reading towards the end of the novel; a sign of the times, perhaps, but still a little quease-inducing.

Blame the Dead probably doesn't rank among the best in Lyall's canon, but it's a solid effort, well worth spending a few hours with. But of course, while the book might not be the most special of beasts, the copy I now own most certainly is, because of this:


That "skol" is a reference to the novel's partly Norwegian setting, but unlike the other Lyall-inscribed edition I showcased on Monday, in this instance I have an inkling of who the book might have been dedicated to. In 1966 Lyall came up with the idea for a movie, which was eventually produced by Hammer and released in 1969 as Moon Zero Two. Lyall approached two old friends of his, Martin Davison and Frank Hardman, to help out on the writing of the storyline, and it's the latter of these that I suspect was the recipient of this copy of Blame the Dead. Obviously this is little more than conjecture on my part, but so far as I'm aware, Lyall only really signed copies of his books for friends – note that, as with that copy of Spy's Honour, he uses just his first name – so I reckon the "Frank" in the inscription has as good a chance of being Mr. Hardman as not.

Whatever the truth of the matter, in the course of researching the inscription I turned up a fascinating little nugget of information about a much earlier Lyall novel, an insight courtesy of Martin Davison which answered a question about the cover of the first edition of that novel I'd been pondering for some time. So before I move on to a signed edition from a different author, I should have a Gavin Lyall bonus post for you next – although, as is swiftly becoming the norm, there may well be a Donald E. Westlake post before we get to that...