Monday 16 September 2013

Crime and Spy Author Andrew MacKenzie's Debut Novel, The House at the Estuary (Ward, 1948; a Westleton, Suffolk Score), plus Bibliography

Let's begin the second week (!) of posts about my (and, of course, Rachel and little Edie's) recent summer holiday with the third book I bought in Chapel Books in the small Suffolk village of Westleton – a book which to my mind deserves a post all of its own (kind of):


The House at the Estuary by Andrew MacKenzie, first published in hardback by Ward Lock & Co. in 1948. MacKenzie's debut novel, it's a murder mystery narrated by one Bob Arlen, a wartime intelligence officer tasked with investigating the mysterious suicides of a number of London society folk.


Which, you have to admit, sounds quite intriguing, and having dipped into it it seems to be a lively enough affair, plus it's a scarce book, with just a couple of copies of it currently on AbeBooks, only one of those with a dust jacket – but even so, you'd be forgiven at this point for wondering why on earth I decided to purchase (for eight quid), and then dedicate a post to, such a tatty old tome. I mean, as you can see, the jacket's in a dreadful state – and uncredited too, not that you can see much of the design anyway – while it's a fairly safe bet you've never heard of the author.


Well, two reasons. Firstly, although evidently little-remembered these days, MacKenzie is a writer whose work I'd become interested in prior to finding this book, as a result of these:


A Man from the Past (1958) and The Missile (1959), the final two of the seven books he wrote for British publisher T. V. Boardman in the 1950s. The Bloodhound Mysteries, with their splendid dust jackets designed by Boardman's art director, Denis McLoughlin (who nevertheless managed to misspell MacKenzie's name on The Missile), have been a preoccupation of mine for some time, initially the handful of early Donald E. Westlake novels issued by the publisher, latterly the more espionage-inclined titles (Bryan Peters's The Big H, Christopher Adams's Amateur Agent, etc.). A number of MacKenzie's novels for Boardman, which star sleuth Nicholas Cornish, fall into the espionage camp, which is why I nabbed these two books online last year – the only ones of his Boardman novels I could find with their wrappers. (Both have now joined the other McLoughlin covers in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery.)


As to the other reason I decided to buy this particular copy of The House at the Estuary:


It's signed and inscribed by MacKenzie, to his "cousin Jim, Gertrude, & all friends at the Halfway House, Rickmansworth with whom I have spent many happy hours".


MacKenzie may be virtually forgotten these days – there's very little information about him online – but he was fairly well-reviewed in his time; the jacket flaps of A Man from the Past and The Missile carry positive notices for his previous books from The Sunday Times and The Star, as well as regionals like the Yorkshire Evening Post and the Sheffield Telegraph:


There's also a backlist in each book, which, along with some other sources, has enabled me, apropos of nothing other than hitherto one hasn't been readily available, to assemble a bibliography – see below – albeit with some information missing; updates to this would be more than welcome.

MacKenzie's final novel was, I believe, Voice from the Cell, published by Robert Hale in 1961, but in 1966 an Andrew MacKenzie published a non-fiction work, The Unexplained: Some Strange Cases of Psychical Research (Arthur Barker), and thereafter published a succession of similarly themed books, including Frontiers of the Unknown (Barker, 1968), The Unexplained (Abelard-Schuman, 1970), Apparitions and Ghosts (Barker, 1971), Riddle of the Future: A Modern Study of Precognition (Barker, 1974), Dracula Country: Travels and Folk Beliefs in Romania (Barker, 1977), Hauntings and Apparitions (Heinemann, 1982) and so forth. Whether this is the same Andrew MacKenzie I don't know, but he continued publishing into the 1990s, his final book being, I believe, Adventures in Time: Encounters with the Past (Continuum/Athlone, 1997). Again, if there's anyone who can confirm or deny they're the same man, I welcome your comments.

Anyway: onwards. And next we're heading to an historic market town and then, once more, to the coast.


Andrew MacKenzie Bibliography


The House at the Estuary (Ward Lock & Co., 1948)
Search in the Dark (Ward, 1948)
Shadows on the River (Ward, 1949)
Splash of Red (Ward, 1949)
Whisper if You Dare! (Ward, 1950)
Point of a Gun (Ward/year unknown)
The Man Who Wanted to Die (Ward, 1951)
Always Fight Back (T. V. Boardman, 1955)
Three Hours to Hang (Boardman, 1955)
A Grave is Waiting (Boardman, 1957)
The Reaching Hand (Boardman, 1957)
Shadow of a Spy (Boardman, 1958)
A Man from the Past (Boardman, 1958)
The Missile (Boardman, 1959)
Voice from the Cell (Robert Hale, 1961)

8 comments:

  1. That you chose to purchase is perfectly understandable. A very fine find.

    I know I'm not alone in seeing something attractive in a book that shows every sign of having been passed from hand to hand. A pristine copy that is not to be read is such a sad sight.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I knew as soon as I saw the condition that there had to be something special about it. Neat find. The fact that it belonged to a family member makes it extra nifty.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "There's also a backlist in each book, which, along with some other sources, has enabled me, apropos of nothing other than hitherto one hasn't been readily available, to assemble a bibliography – see below – albeit with some information missing; updates to this would be more than welcome."

    The BL lists him as Andrew Carr Mackenzie, author of twenty books, the last Apparitions and ghosts: a modern study in 1974. There's another Andrew MacKenzie listed, though, who also wrote on supernatural topics- especially Romanian ones- and the BL didn't distinguish too carefully between different writers with the same or similar names, so don't rely too much on this source.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for that, Roger. I won't update the bibliography just yet then; seems like a bit too much of a coincidence for two Andrew MacKenzies to be writing about supernatural subjects at around the same time.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The Andrew Mackenzie who wrote the spy thrillers is indeed the same Andrew Mackenzie who wrote the books on supernatural research, etc. He was a long time member of the Society for Psychical Research and died in 2001/2 in Brighton.
    I know it is the same man because I read several of his thrillers and his books on the
    supernatural as they were lent to me by his daughters, Annaliisa and Helena Mackenzie with whom I was at school in Ealing.
    You can confirm this by contacting his daughters: Annaliisa Mackenzie lives in Hove, Brighton and used to work for Brighton Council as a solicitor. Helena Mackenzie lives in Southsea, Portsmouth and is a retired teacher.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Anonymous, the school you mentioned must have been Walpole Grammar school. I am the admin for the Walpole Grammar school memories group on Facebook. Why not come and join the group?. We have 594 members so far.
      Regards
      John Hardy

      Delete
  6. Thank you for that, Anonymous. Glad to hear I was on the right track!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I can confirm they are the very same person. Andrew is my great grandfather, sadly he passed away at home in 2001 when I was a child so sadly I have no memories of him, however I do have some photographs of us together. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never actually read any of his books but I do plan to when I next visit my grandmother (Andrew’s daughter) who has a bookcase with a few copies of his old books in their original plastic covering keeping them preserved even till this day. However I’ll make sure to read an already opened book, don’t you worry. :)

    ReplyDelete