Andrew York, George V. Higgins, Brian Garfield and Charles McCarry in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

When I established Existential Ennui's new permanent page, British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s, at the end of last week, I did so partly with the purpose in mind that it would afford me the opportunity to blog about some of the many secondhand books I've collected but haven't yet found the time to read (and probably won't for a while), thus at least allowing me to clear them from my groaning 'to blog about' shelves and instead move them to boxes in the loft – my reasoning being that though they may be out of (direct) sight, I can always refer to their posts on Existential Ennui when I'm pondering what to read next. Of course, what will probably happen is I'll forget all about this and instead do what I usually do when pondering what to read next, which is to stand before my bookcases (often in my pants) and study the books therein; but that's the idea, anyway. Cases in point are the books below, all of them by authors already represented in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. And they are:

The Dominator by Andrew York – an alias of author Christopher Nicole – published in hardback by Hutchinson in 1969, jacket photograph by George Coral. This is the fifth novel in York's nine-book series starring Jonas Wilde, a.k.a. the Eliminator, and not only is it now in the British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s gallery, I've also added it to this Jonas Wilde cover gallery, where a number of other George Coral wrappers can be found (Coral's work can also be found on the jacket of the 1968 Jonathan Cape edition of Kingsley Amis's I Want it Now). Strictly speaking, as it was published in 1969 it really falls outside the purview of the former, but stylistically I'd say it's very much a child of the '70s rather than the '60s, so I'm bunging it in anyway, alongside the 1984 Severn House edition of York's non-Wilde novel The Combination, which sports a jacket photograph (of a mosque in Isfahan, Iran) by Michael Lancaster, and which I picked up on holiday in Suffolk.

The Digger's Game by George V. Higgins, published in hardback by Secker & Warburg in 1973, jacket design by Tom Simmonds. Higgins has made a few prior appearances on Existential Ennui, the last time being in 2011; The Digger's Game was his second novel, following 1970s's classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I blogged about in its 1972 Secker edition back in 2010, and which also boasts a Tom Simmonds dust jacket, beneath which The Digger's Game now resides in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. And very fetching they both look too.

The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry, published by Hutchinson in 1975, jacket illustration by Ian Robertson (who also illustrated the wrappers of the Collins editions of Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare). This is the spy novel sequel to McCarry's debut, The Miernik Dossier, which I wrote about in its 1974 Hutchinson edition in 2011 in relation to how plagiarist Quentin Rowan had nicked chunks of McCarry's – and other authors' – novels for his debut novel Assassin of Secrets – The Tears of Autumn being, I believe, one of the McCarry books Rowan lifted passages from. Rowan later turned his experiences as a plagiarist into, you guessed it, a book, which was published last year to little acclaim.

Death Sentence by Brian Garfield, published by Macmillan in 1976, jacket photograph by Steve Puplett. Another sequel here, this time to Garfield's 1972 classic Death Wish, which I wrote about last year in its 1973 Hodder & Stoughton edition. The wrapper of this one intrigues me, as in its styling and setting it seems to be playing on the Michael Winner-directed Charles Bronson-starring 1974 film adaptation of Death Wish. A natural thing for a publisher wishing to shift books to do, I suppose, even though Garfield's Death Wish is a far superior best to its movie offspring: challenging, nuanced and thought-provoking as opposed to undemanding, bludgeoning and ham-fisted. And by the sounds of this Pulp Serenade review, Death Sentence is just as good, "a desolate but distinguished suspense novel".

There'll be further additions to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s over the coming days and weeks, including a couple of covers from books by the subject of my next post: Ross Macdonald.

The Secondhand Bookshops of Suffolk: Woodbridge, Framlingham and Orford, Guest-Starring Gavin Black, William Haggard, Michael Gilbert, Andrew York, Brian Garfield, Desmond Lowden, Doctor Who and Some Chickens

I suppose it says something about the prolix nature of this blog that this series of posts on the recent Jones-Day family holiday to Suffolk – chiefly the secondhand bookshops visited and the books bought in them – has lasted longer than the holiday itself now. Still, mustn't let unnecessary navel-gazing distract us from the task in hand, namely:

Yet more photographs of me and little Edie in picturesque Suffolk locales (photo courtesy, like most of the ones littering these posts, of the lovely and talented Rachel). That there is the view out to Orford Ness, a fascinating shingle spit near the River Alde estuary, close to the small town of Orford. I'll get to why it's so fascinating in a moment, but before we made it that far, Edie, Rachel and I spent some time in nearby Woodbridge, a decent-sized town I dragged the girls to in the mistaken belief that there were two secondhand bookshops there. In fact there was only one: a highly disappointing branch of Oxfam Books; the other secondhand bookshop, the one I really wanted to visit, turned out to be in the smaller and indeed more attractive town of Framlingham, about eight miles north of Woodbridge:

V. S. Bell, situated on the main square. Consisting of one smallish room, the shop is nevertheless crammed with books, notably a sizeable holding of crime fiction, in amongst which I spotted novels by Existential Ennui favourites Donald E. Westlake and P. M. Hubbard. Sadly I already owned the books in question, but I didn't own these ones:

First editions of Gavin Black's A Big Wind for Summer (Collins, 1975), William Haggard's The Scorpion's Tail (Cassell, 1975), Michael Gilbert's Death of a Favourite Girl (Hodder, 1980) and Andrew York's The Combination (Severn House, 1984). Haggard, Gilbert and York I've blogged about before (Gilbert only very recently), but Gavin Black is a new name to Existential Ennui. The pseudonym of Oswald Wynd, Black published fifteen thrillers from 1960 to 1991, thirteen of them, including A Big Wind for Summer, featuring businessman and adventurer Paul Harris. They were well-regarded in their day, so I'm looking forward to trying one.

But I didn't just buy those four books in V. S. Bell; I also came away with these:

Target paperback first printings of Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen (1974), Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders and Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon (both 1975). I find it hard to resist early Target Doctor Who novelisations whenever I see them, especially first printings and those written by Terrance Dicks (which two of those books were); earlier this year I picked up another bunch in Brighton, including:

first printings of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks (1974), Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977) and Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen (1976). Also in that lot was the first Target Who novelisation, Doctor Who and the Daleks, which I blogged about back in May (and of course there's this post from 2011, about what the Target novelisations mean to me).

So, that was Framlingham. From there we headed to Orford, for once not because there was a secondhand bookshop there – as far as I knew there wasn't – but because it had been recommended to me as a lovely place to visit. Which it was, especially the quayside, where we got talking to an elderly local gentleman who told us about his wartime exploits in Africa and Italy and how he'd finally been posted to Auschwitz at the end of World War II, in total spending seven years in Europe. He also explained how Orford Ness had been used for all sorts of military shenanigans in the decades since WWII, including as an airstrip, a Cold War listening station, and for nuclear testing; you can still see the structures known as the "pagodas" from the quayside, and apparently there are miles of tunnels beneath what is now a nature reserve.

There's a great view back towards the town and Orford Castle:

A view which Edie rather rudely decided to photobomb:

But there's also, not far from the big car park on the way to the quay, this:

The Born to Read Bookshop. Yes, even when I don't go looking for a secondhand bookshop I still manage to find one, although it's only a shop in the loosest sense: if you follow the signs through the pleasant garden, within the confines of which chickens and their chicks roam about:

you eventually come to a conservatory, in which are crates of musty old books and a tin for whatever donation you feel suitable for whichever books you find:

I came away with a couple of first editions:

Brian Garfield's Recoil (Macmillan, 1977) and Desmond Lowden's Bellman & True (Eyre Methuen, 1975). Garfield I've covered previously, when I reviewed his best-known novel, Death Wish (1973), but Desmond Lowden is another new name to Existential Ennui; I picked up Bellman & True because I dimly recalled the 1980s TV adaptation, but the novel has a following too – there's a Friday's Forgotten Books review here.

That, then, was Orford – and indeed that was our last full day of gadding about around Suffolk. But wait! There was still the journey back home to come, which, as luck would have it, coincided with the Long Melford Book Fair...

Death Wish by Brian Garfield (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973); the Original Novel, Basis for the 1974 Movie

NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.

The two movies I've spotlighted thus far in this series of posts on books which begat perhaps more famous films – Where Eagles Dare and Jaws – are at least the equal of their source texts, and arguably better. But of course, that's not always the case with book-to-film adaptations – rarely the case, even – as this next novel amply demonstrates:

This is the British first edition of Brian Garfield's Death Wish, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1973 – the year after the US David McKay edition – with a dust jacket designed by Jefferson Godwin. I nabbed this copy at last year's London Paperback & Pulp Bookfair, for the princely sum of nine quid – which, considering the cheapest Hodder first on AbeBooks at present is twenty quid, with the remaining five copies ranging from £95 to well over £200, was quite the bargain. 

Death Wish wasn't Brian Garfield's first novel – he'd had over a dozen published prior to Death Wish, a mixture of crime works and westerns (a number of them pseudonymous) – but it was the first of his books to be filmed. That film, directed by Michael Winner and starring Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey (Paul Benjamin in the book), was released in 1974, and would become notorious for its perceived glorification of vigilantism, with a quartet of sequels appearing in its wake. It's a long time since I've seen the movie, but I don't remember it being terribly good, and I certainly don't recall it possessing any of the depth of the original novel, which is a powerful, pacy meditation on loss, bereavement and revenge.

Unlike the comparatively toned and svelte Bronson of the film, the Paul Benjamin of the book is a middle-aged, overweight New York accountant (Bronson is an architect in the movie), and where Winner visualizes the opening assault on Paul's wife and daughter – throwing in a rape for good measure – in the book the attack happens "off-page". The first Paul hears of it is via a phone call from his son-in-law, and when he eventually learns of his wife's death at the hospital, he plunges into a spiral of rage and depression, frustrated at the police's inability to find the attackers, reduced to drifting about his apartment or aimlessly walking the streets of Manhattan.

It's not until halfway through the book that he starts to actively seek out trouble, fending off a knife-wielding kid using a kosh made of coins and then, in the closing stages of the novel – and having acquired a gun during a business trip to Arizona – embarking on a murderous spree. But there's no sensationalizing here: Garfield doesn't shy away from depicting these shootings as the squalid, sordid affairs they are, and leaves us in no doubt as to how damaged and increasingly unhinged Paul has become. Though there are glimpses of approval from the press, the public and the police, Paul's taking the law into his own hands is self-evidently a symptom of his grief and madness, thrown into stark relief by Garfield's extensive detailing of Paul's ordinary, humdrum day job.

Garfield went on to pen a further twenty-five or so novels after Death Wish, including Gangway! (1973), a collaboration with his friend and poker buddy, Donald E. Westlake – hence why I'm cross-posting this review on The Violent World of Parker blog (although Death Wish will be of interest to VWoP regulars in its own right) – and the Edgar Award-winning Hopscotch (1975). He also wrote a sequel to Death Wish, Death Sentence (1975, itself adapted for the screen – even more loosely than Death Wish, although more to Garfield's liking – in 2007), in which Paul continues his one-man war on crime in Chicago – where, oddly enough, Charles Bronson winds up at the end of the movie Death Wish. I haven't read the sequel yet, but this Pulp Serenade review got me interested enough to order a copy, so I'll be reviewing it myself at some point. And while we're on the subject of other folks' reviews, Olman turned his beady eye on Death Wish (the novel) earlier this year, noting Garfield's vivid and unnerving portrayal of 1970s New York, so go read his review for an alternative take on the book.

As for the Charles Bronson movie sequels to Death Wish, well, probably the less said about them the better – and who the hell knows what the mooted Joe "The Grey" Carnahan remake – set to star either Sylvester Stallone or Liam Neeson, depending on who you believe – will be like. But Bronson did star in a number of other interesting movies in the 1970s, including one in the same year as Death Wish – and it's to that film, and its attendant novel, that I'll be turning next...