Monday 7 September 2015

Anthony Price on Patricia Highsmith, P. M. Hubbard, Victor Canning, Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas and Donald E. Westlake

When I interviewed spy novelist Anthony Price four years ago one of the areas we covered was Price's parallel career as a book reviewer. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s Price reviewed crime fiction and thrillers for the Oxford Mail – sister paper to The Oxford Times, for which Price worked and of which he eventually became editor – and his reviews were frequently excerpted for dust jacket and back cover blurbs for subsequent books by the writers he reviewed. Since my 2011 interview with Price I've often noticed blurbs by him on the secondhand books I buy (the presence of such contemporaneous reviews on covers and sometimes inner pages is for me part of the attraction of old books) and especially so when they're reviews of authors and novels I admire. It's an opportunity to see what one of my favourite novelists, the writer of the splendid David Audley spy series, thought of some of my other favourite novelists and novels – like, for instance, Patricia Highsmith and Ripley's Game.


I've noted before how Ripley's Game is my favourite novel above all others, so when at the last Lewes Book Fair I clocked that Jamie Sturgeon had a 1976 Penguin paperback of said on his table, I couldn't resist (this despite already owning a 1974 Heinemann first edition and a 1989 Heinemann uniform edition; then again, it has afforded me the opportunity to add the Penguin paperback, cover photograph by Paul Wakefield, to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s). It was only later that I realised the lone review excerpted on the back was by Anthony Price, who praised the novel thus: "Ripley's Game is beautifully written, its attraction lying in the unpretentious simplicity of the Highsmith prose both as it takes us through the seduction of an ordinary decent man and – which is what Ripley admirers will most enjoy – the mental processes of the psychopathic anti-hero who ensnares him."


I think it's safe to assume that Price himself numbered among those "Ripley admirers". Mr Price was similarly effusive in his praise of the prose of another writer I'm enthusiast of and for: P. M. Hubbard. Review excerpts for High Tide (1971) and The Graveyard (1975) appear on the back covers of the Macmillan first editions of respectively A Rooted Sorrow (1973) and The Causeway (1976). Of High Tide, Price wrote, "Admirably described setting – dangerous estuary, all sand one moment, all water the next – but the real attraction is the strong, controlled narrative line and the impeccable English," while of The Graveyard he wrote: "Mr. Hubbard's marvellous atmospheric prose has never been used to better advantage. This is a real beauty of a suspense thriller, restrained in the telling, but with its menace as taut as a bowstring."


The Price review excerpts for Victor Canning novels that I have in my possession are rather briefer, but they do tell a story of an author, Canning, reaching the peak of his powers in the 1970s. The jacket flap of the 1973 Heinemann first edition of The Finger of Saturn carries a snippet of an Oxford Mail review – which though unattributed I think we can assume was by Price – for what is regarded in some quarters as Canning's finest novel, The Rainbird Pattern (1972), of which the review confidently states, "There hasn't been a better thriller this year." And on the back cover of the 1974 Heinemann first of The Mask of Memory, an attributed Price proclaims of the aforementioned The Finger of Saturn that "Mr. Canning has never written better".


The sole excerpt of an Anthony Price review of an Elmore Leonard novel that I can find in my book collection appears on the back of the Secker firsts of both Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) and The Hunted (1978), and is for Fifty-Two Pickup (1974); but in truth it's more descriptive than critical: "Features a self-made auto components factory owner from Detroit whose philandering marks him for blackmail. But you don't run a Detroit factory by turning the other cheek, and the more the blackmailer squeezes (by escalating his blackmail with a murder frame and a kidnapping) the greater his own danger becomes."


Price was more forthcoming on the qualities of Ross Thomas's If You Can't Be Good (Hamish Hamilton, 1974), Price's review of which was excerpted for the back covers of the 1974 Hamilton editions of The Porkchoppers and The Highbinders (the latter published under Ross's Oliver Bleeck alias): "...the digging into the garbage of the past and the digger's growing distaste of his dirty hands are beautifully entwined themes and there are some well-staged shocks and surprises".


He had kind words too for a number of Donald E. Westlake novels. The jacket back flap of the 1965 T. V. Boardman edition of Pity Him Afterwards features an excerpt of a Price review of Killy (Boardman, 1964) declaring that "...for sheer, cold-blooded ingenuity, and for a most stimulating disregard for his readers' feelings, the palm goes to Donald Westlake with Killy", while the jacket flap of the 1966 Boardman edition of The Fugitive Pigeon carries this pithy summation of the merits of Pity Him Afterwards itself: "Nasty but clever." And Price was evidently partial to a spot of Dortmunder as well: the back cover of the 1973 Hodder edition of Cops and Robbers carries a snippet of an Oxford Mail review (again unattributed, but surely by Price) describing the debut Dortmunder outing, The Hot Rock (Hodder, 1971), as "Fast-moving and engagingly whacky." Quite so, sir. Quite so.

Thursday 3 September 2015

Pity Him Afterwards By Donald E. Westlake (T. V. Boardman, 1965, Bloodhound Mystery #499): Westlake Score and Review

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 4/9/15.

It may not have been a banner year thus far for book blogging chez Louis XIV/Existential Ennui – and certainly not at The Violent World of Parker, where, this post included, I've managed just two posts this year; some co-blogger, huh? – but it's been a bloody good year for book collecting. I've had three books at the top of my wants list for the past four years (and more like five or six years in the case of two of them), and one by one, over the past few months, I've managed to cross them all off. First came a 1957 Cresset Press edition of Patricia Highsmith's classic The Talented Mr. Ripley (albeit sans dust jacket, compensated for by the addition of a facsimile jacket); then a 1965 Michael Joseph edition of perhaps P. M. Hubbard's finest novel, A Hive of Glass (albeit an ex-library copy, compensated for the additional acquisition of an uncorrected proof of said); and now this:


Pity Him Afterwards, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1965 (the year after the US Random House edition). The fifth of Donald E. Westlake's novels to be published under his own name, until a fortnight ago (when I won this copy on eBay, for seventeen quid), Pity Him Afterwards was the only one of the eight Westlakes in total published by Boardman that I didn't own. Doubtless that will mean little to most folk, even those with an enthusiasm for Westlake, but book collectors with an interest in crime fiction (or indeed longtime readers of Existential Ennui) will surely understand how collectable – and how uncommon and elusive – the Boardman Bloodhound Mysteries (of which Pity Him Afterwards is no. 499) can be.


A big part of that collectability is their dust jackets, almost all of which were designed by Denis McLoughlin, a body of work which comprises around 550 wrappers. (The Bloodhound wrappers are just one strand of McLoughlin's wider body of work; he designed another two or three hundred covers for Boardman besides and drew countless comics both for that publisher and for IPC and DC Thomson.) And of the seven jackets he designed for Westlake novels (the wrapper design for the final Westlake published by Boardman, The Spy in the Ointment, was taken from the US edition), Pity Him Afterwards is, I think, the best: arresting, dramatic, darkly evocative.


That the novel itself doesn't match up to its terrific cover is bit of a shame, because in truth it's not a patch on the earlier likes of The Mercenaries, Killing Time, Killy and especially 361. Parts of it are quite good – it's set in and around a summer stock theatre (a favourite motif of Westlake's; see also the pseudonymous sleaze novel Backstage Love and its two sequels and the Parker character Alan Grofield, whose background is in summer stock), and the passages dealing with the day-to-day running of said are surprisingly interesting and convincingly done. The problems come in the ludicrous characterisation of "the madman", the murderous escapee from a mental institution who drives the plot and who, preposterously, manages to get a job as an actor at the theatre (and then starts killing his coworkers). He's an utterly unbelievable creation, and the novel suffers whenever he assumes the role of point-of-view character.


Still, there's some decent characterisation elsewhere in the novel, notably in the shape of Eric Sondgard, captain of the Cartier Isle (where the theatre is located) police department during the summer months and humanities professor at a Connecticut college for the remainder of the year – a believably unassuming chap whose self-doubt almost causes him to hand off the case to the state police more than once but who through diligence and dogged determination eventually wins through. And then there's the whodunnit aspect of the book – Westlake deliberately obfuscates which of the actors the madman has assumed the identity of – which despite my general disinterest in such guessing games I must admit did, well, keep me guessing.


More importantly from my perspective, however, this copy of the Boardman edition of Pity Him Afterwards completes my set of Westlake Boardmans, so in that regards it's a thing to be prized. And particularly so in that dust jacket, which, though a little shabby, is presentable enough to take its rightful place in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.