Westlake Score: Killtown (alias The Score, Parker #5) by Richard Stark (alias Donald E. Westlake) (Coronet, 1971)

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 11/9/15.

This Westlake Score may not be quite as exciting a proposition, or indeed acquisition, as the T. V. Boardman edition of Pity Him Afterwards I blogged about last week (for me anyway; who knows – perhaps it will be for you), but like that book it does complete a run of novels in my seemingly ever-expanding Donald E. Westlake collection – in this instance the British paperback first editions of the Parkers.

Published by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett in 1971, Killtown is the fifth of Westlake's written-as-Richard-Stark Parker novels, retitled – presumably by Coronet, said new title also utilised by Berkley in the States for their 1973 paperback edition – from the original title of The Score, i.e. the one where Parker and crew take down an entire town. Now, I do, it almost (almost) goes without saying, already own four other editions of the novel – that aforementioned Berkley paperback, a 1984 Avon paperback, an original 1964 Pocket paperback and a 1985 Allison & Busby hardback – but when I spotted this copy of the Coronet edition on eBay I couldn't resist bidding for it (and winning it, for just over four quid). Reason being, it was the only one of the sixteen Parkers published by Coronet that I didn't own. And now I do, which means that I have a complete set of first printings of the British first editions of the initial run of Parkers.

The urge to buy a book when one already owns four other editions of that same book is the kind of madness that is probably only explicable to other book collectors (and even then...), but in my defence I should like to point out that this is quite a scarce edition, certainly in its first printing (which my copy is): I can only see one other copy listed for sale online at present, offered by an American seller at $35. Admittedly there are a half a dozen or so reprints listed on AbeBooks and Amazon and the like, but who in their right mind wants a reprint of anything? (Ahem.)

In common with the bulk of the Coronet Parkers, the cover of Killtown is a double-cover "bullet hole" affair – a design attributed to the late great Raymond Hawkey – with the shiny black paper inner cover beneath the silver card outer cover bearing the legend "Parker is in" followed by the book's title – which shows through the bullet hole – on the front, and on the back a photo of Westlake/Stark and a brief bio. (I say "the bulk of the Coronet Parkers" because some of them were initially issued by Coronet with illustrated and photographic covers.) And like a good half dozen or so of the other bullet hole cover Parkers, on its first page it sports this character sketch:

Not sure that's an entirely accurate description of Parker, but I do like the bit about how "in his mean, dark world he is almost a god". Anyway, should anyone be remotely interested – or even still reading by this point – here is Killtown nestling in amongst my complete collection of first printings (plus a few reprints) of the Coronet editions:

Parker Mega Score Finale: Richard Stark Joins British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s Gallery

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

If you missed the announcement on Friday, some (relatively) exciting news: I've established a brand new Existential Ennui permanent page:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

A companion page to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s – the dark flipside to that gallery, if you will – it gathers together dozens and dozens of covers from '70s and '80s editions of thrillers and crime fiction and spy fiction and the like. Already in the gallery are a bunch of Donald E. Westlake dust jackets – along with contemporaries like Ross Thomas (and his Oliver Bleeck alias), Elmore Leonard, Max Allan Collins and Dan J. Marlowe – and now Westlake's alter ego, Richard Stark, makes his entrance, stalking through the doorway (the door having been kicked down by Parker, naturally) to take his place – in his own right, not under Westlake's name – with seven paperback covers, plus one hardback.

Some of those covers hail from the Parker Mega Score, that haul of Coronet paperback editions of the Parker novels I've been blogging about on and off for over two months – there are a couple more, the 1971 Coronet Printings of The Mourner and The Jugger, randomly illustrating this post – and which after four posts (five if you include this one) I think we've probably all had enough of by now (accordingly, this will be the final post to make mention of it). I've picked four books from the Mega Score to represent Raymond Hawkey's Parker bullet hole double cover design – The Steel Hit (Coronet, 1971, alias The Man with the Getaway Face), Run Lethal (Coronet, 1972, alias The Handle), Deadly Edge (Coronet, 1972, which shows a hand holding a gun on the inner cover, rather than the novel's title) and Slayground (Coronet, 1973, which boasts a gold rather than a silver outer cover) – plus the 1977 Coronet edition of Butcher's Moon, which sports a very '70s photographic cover which may or may not have been by Hawkey's design (I don't know for sure either way).

(Incidentally, I already owned copies of two of those Coronet editions before I came into possession of the Parker Mega Score – Deadly Edge and Butcher's Moon – but the Mega Score copies are in slightly better condition than the others, so I'll be divesting myself of my original copies in due course.)

As well as those, I've included the 1970 Coronet second printings of Point Blank! and The Rare Coin Score, both of which sport entirely apposite photographic covers, and my copy of the very scarce 1973 Gold Lion hardback edition of The Sour Lemon Score. By my reckoning that brings the number of book covers on the page up to 100, although it won't dally at that milestone for long: I'll be adding even more thriller covers as the week wears on, and there'll be yet more Westlake and Stark in there before too long. Needless to say, I'll update both The Violent World of Parker and Existential Ennui when that happens. And that link to the gallery again is:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

Parker Score: Run Lethal by Richard Stark (Coronet, 1972), alias The Handle, and the Parker Retitles

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

I hope to have something up on Tom Clancy – who passed away yesterday – shortly, but ahead of that, and fulfilling my Violent World of Parker contractual cross-posting duties, a return, belatedly, to the Parker Mega Score – that stack of Coronet paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels I acquired over the summer – with this:

Run Lethal, published in the UK by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett under a Raymond Hawkey-designed "bullet hole" double-cover in 1972 – the second wave of those covers I guess you could say, the initial Coronet bullet hole editions – The Steel Hit, The Outfit and so forth – having been published in 1971.

Like The Steel Hit, Run Lethal was retitled from its original appearance. Indeed, of the twenty-four Parker novels, six have been retitled at one time or another, one of them twice. Four of those retitlings were the result of publishers responding to movie adaptations: The Hunter (Parker #1, 1962) became Point Blank in 1967 (Gold Medal edition here, Coronet edition here) and then Payback in 1999; The Seventh (Parker #7, 1966) became The Split in 1968 (Gold Medal edition here, Coronet edition here); and earlier this year Flashfire (Parker #19, 2000) became Parker.

But the other retitlings – The Man with the Getaway Face (Parker #2, 1963), which became The Steel Hit; The Score (Parker #5, 1964), which became Killtown; and The Handle (Parker #8, 1966), which became Run Lethal – appear to be the result of nothing other than publisher preference... and it seems they were all the fault of Coronet. See, for a long time I assumed it was Berkley, the American paperback publisher of the Parkers in the early 1970s, who retitled at least The Score and The Handle (I'm not sure if they ever got round to issuing The Steel Hit, even though it's listed, under that title, under "By the same author" in my Berkley reprint copy of The Outfit). But I own a copy of Berkley's edition of The Score, or rather Killtown:

and it was published in 1973 (November of that year, to be precise); whereas Coronet's edition of Killtown was first published in 1972. And it's the same deal with The Handle/Run Lethal: Berkley's edition of Run Lethal arrived again in 1973, and Coronet's in 1972. Which means that Berkley adopted the new titles from Coronet, not the other way round. Which in turn means that in the cases of at least two retitlings, Parker fans have us Brits to blame.

I'm not quite sure where I'll be going next with the Parker Mega Score; I think I might take a look at a bullet hole edition of a Parker Coronet had already published once, but I may change my mind, mercurial bastard that I am.

Parker Score: The Outfit by Richard Stark (British First Edition, Coronet, 1971)

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

Time to pull another Parker from the pile of eleven pristine Coronet paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's crime novels colloquially known as the Parker Mega Score. And this next one might be of particular interest to Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent, seeing as he doesn't currently have it in his cover gallery:

The Outfit, first published in the UK by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett in 1971 (originally published in the States in 1963). Another Raymond Hawkey-designed "bullet hole" double-cover, the only major difference from the Coronet edition of The Steel Hit (alias Parker #2, The Man with the Getaway Face) I showcased last week, cover copy aside, is the colour scheme; the text on the inner cover is orange rather than pale yellow:

Other than that, the back cover carries the same Anthony Boucher New York Times quote:

And the inner back cover sports the same bio and photo of Westlake:

That uniformity across most – but not all – of the bullet hole Coronets means that they can be an acquired taste. Doubtless some Parker enthusiasts find them a tad boring, but the bullet hole Parkers do have a following, and are fondly remembered by British Parker fans especially, for obvious reasons. Consequently many of the Coronet editions have become quite uncommon – at present there are just five copies of the Coronet The Outfit on AbeBooks, for example – but for collectors there are additional wrinkles besides mere scarcity. For one thing, as commenters on both Existential Ennui and TVWoP (including Trent) have pointed out, they're highly susceptible to damage: that die-cut bullet hole is prone to tearing, and the outer covers have been known to come loose altogether. And then there's the fact that many of the bullet hole Coronets went into second printings: over half of those five copies of The Outfit currently listed on AbeBooks are second impressions (and those that aren't don't look to be in terribly good shape). Tot all that up, and the Parker Mega Score starts to look really quite remarkable.

I think I'm going to jump ahead a year for the next Parker from the Mega Score stack, to 1972, in order to demonstrate how the Parkers were sometimes retitled by us Brits – and those new titles were often subsequently adopted by the Americans...

Parker Score: Richard Stark's The Steel Hit (alias The Man with the Getaway Face) (Coronet, 1971) and Raymond Hawkey's Bullet Hole Cover Design

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

Plucked from atop the Parker Mega Score stack – i.e. that haul of British Coronet/Hodder Fawcett paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker crime novels I recently acquired – comes this:

The Steel Hit, Coronet's title for the second Parker outing, The Man with the Getaway Face (the publisher retitled a number of the Parkers, as we'll see in a later post). Published in paperback by Coronet in the UK in 1971 (originally published in the States in 1963), this was the first time the novel had been issued in Britain, four years after The Hunter – or rather Point Blank, it being a movie tie-in – had made its British debut. In the interim Coronet had published a further five Parkers, but these dated from later in the series (Coronet was loosely following the pub programme of its American sister company, Fawcett/Gold Medal). It wasn't until 1971 that the publisher began filling in the gaps, over the next year or two issuing the Parkers from The Man with the Getaway Face to The Handle (Parker #8). And when they did, it was under highly unusual covers...

Up to this point, the covers of the Coronet paperbacks had sported either film stills (Point Blank, 1967; The Split, 1969), illustrations (The Rare Coin Score, 1968; The Green Eagle Score, 1968; The Black Ice Score, 1969; The Sour Lemon Score, 1969) or posed photos (the 1970 reprints of Point Blank and The Rare Coin Score). But in '71 the publisher introduced a new cover concept: the "bullet hole" design. Created by Raymond Hawkey – the man behind the iconic dust jackets for Len Deighton's novels – the bullet hole covers were in effect a double cover: a metallic-finish card outer cover featuring, on the front, the author's name, the legend "a novel of violence" and a rough-edged "burnt" die-cut hole, through which the novel's title could be seen. Open it up:

and the thinner inner cover is revealed, bearing the text "Parker is in" and then the title. It was an innovative approach to paperback cover design, but actually typical of Hawkey, who already had form both with bullet hole-style designs and die-cuts on paperback covers – witness his cover treatments for the 1963 Pan edition of Ian Fleming's Thunderball and the 1967 Pan edition of Len Deighton's London Dossier.

But for Parker/Stark/Westlake fans, it's the back double-cover that might be of more interest. The outer cover carries the usual sort of stuff: description of the novel, ISBN, price, a blurb from the New York Times about Stark. Flip it open, however:

and there's a photo and short bio of Donald E. Westlake on the inner cover. Now, considering Richard Stark's true identity was still being kept a secret by his American publisher, Random House, even by the time Butcher's Moon was published in the States in 1974, it's notable that in the UK, by 1971 he'd already been "outed" as Westlake by Coronet. Although I don't believe they got there first; legend has it that it was the critic Anthony Boucher who unmasked Westlake as Stark in his New York Times "Criminals at Large" column – which presumably is how Coronet got the idea it was OK to do the same on their (inner) back covers: that New York Times quote on the back of The Steel Hit is taken from a Boucher review.

Copies of The Steel Hit are currently very thin on the ground; there are a couple on AbeBooks going for around £20 a piece, but that's about it – this despite it being reprinted in 1972 (with minor amends to the cover – see above). Indeed, the Coronet Parkers have become quite collectable in some circles – something I'll be exploring in the next Parker Score post.

Parker Mega Score Prelude: Richard Stark British First Editions (Coronet Paperbacks, 1968–1977)

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

Good lord, has it really been nearly four months since I last posted something over at The Violent World of Parker? Tsk, I dunno: anyone would think I'd recently become a father or something. (Let's not get into the fact that I've managed about a dozen Existential Ennui blog posts on Elmore Leonard in the interim. Ahem.) Anyway, obviously my absence represents a dreadful dereliction of duty, for which I shall attempt to make amends by unveiling a shitload of Westlake Scores over the coming weeks. Or rather, Parker Scores; because all of the books I'll be blogging about are Parker novels – British paperback editions to be precise, published by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett in the late 1960s and early '70s. And all of them came from a single source...

See, a couple of months back, quite out of the blue, I received an email from the critic and crime writer Mike Ripley (author of the Angel series of novels). I know Mike a little bit, and Mike knows I'm a Westlake/Stark/Parker nut, and so having, as he put it, "acquired a job lot of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark titles, all paperbacks in remarkably good condition for their age", he figured I might be a likely candidate to take them off his hands, for the price of a small donation to charity. Mike provided a list of the books, fourteen in total; three of them were Coronet paperbacks of Westlake novels I either owned already in hardback or wasn't especially interested in, but the remainder were all Coronet editions of the Parker novels, and even though I already had a number of them (and of course have every Parker novel in one or another edition anyway), well, I couldn't resist:

Turns out they're all, bar one, first impressions – most of the Coronet editions went through two or three printings – which means that they're (almost) all the British first editions (and the one that isn't I have a first printing of anyway, so it's all good) – Coronet being the original publisher of the Parkers in the UK. They're also in near-fine, virtually unread condition, certainly the nicest copies I've ever come across, and are, for the most part, the "bullet hole" editions – i.e. the distinctive metallic finish die-cut double-cover concept designed by Raymond Hawkey and introduced by Coronet in 1971. (Prior to that the six Parker novels Coronet published – out of sequence, mostly following the Fawcett/Gold Medal publishing programme – bore a mixture of movie still, illustrative and photographic covers.)

So, over the next however-many weeks, I'll be taking a look at some of them – ruminating on what they are, what they represent, their place in the wider Parker publishing scheme of things, their collectability, and maybe even reflecting on the novels themselves. Beginning with the book on the top of that pile: The Steel Hit, alias Parker #2, The Man with the Getaway Face...

Edward S. Aarons and the Sam Durell / Assignment Series of Spy Novels (Gold Medal, Coronet, Herbert Jenkins, 1950s/60s/70s)

In 1955, two years after Ian Fleming's James Bond made his debut in Casino Royale, America gained its very own globetrotting secret agent: Sam Durell of the Central Intelligence Agency. Debuting in Assignment to Disaster (Gold Medal, 1955), Durell would go on to star in a further forty-eight adventures over the next twenty-eight years – all bearing the legend "Assignment" in their title, all published by Gold Medal in the States, and all but the final six written by Durell's creator – Edward S. Aarons.

Given that Sam Durell is arguably America's first proper postwar fictional series spy – beating another, rather better remembered US agent, Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm, into print by five years – it's perhaps surprising that he's slipped so comprehensively from the collective memory. In their day, the Durell/Assignment novels were hugely popular, going through multiple printings and selling in the tens of millions. They're characterised by a pacy, urgent style and display a convincing grasp of the exotic locales – researched in person by Aarons himself – that would become a hallmark of the series after the initial domestically set stories. Many of them stand up well even today; those critics that do still recall the books – Doug Bassett et al; Spy Guys and Gals (both those pages boasting bibliographies, the latter annotated) – hold at least some of them – Assignment Suicide (1956), say, or Assignment Tokyo (1971) – in high regard. But the series as a whole fell out of print years ago, and beyond this biography by Sergio Rizzo (scroll down) and the sites already linked, you'd be hard pushed to find much of substance about either Durell or Aarons online.

Born Edward Sidney in Philadelphia in 1916, Aarons attended Columbia University, working as, among other occupations, a reporter, a salesman and a fisherman, and in 1933 winning a collegiate short story contest. In 1938 he published Death in a Lighthouse, the first of around thirty hardboiled mysteries and thrillers written under the pen name Edward Ronns, many starring newspaper editorial cartoonist Jerry Benedict. Aarons's writing career was interrupted when, following Pearl Harbor in 1941, he enlisted in the coast guard; upon returning to civilian life he gained a bachelor's degree in literature and history from Columbia, and resumed penning the Ronns novels, publishing at least one a year, and sometimes two or three, until 1962. He also, from 1948, began publishing novels under his own name, and once the Assignment series commenced in 1955, his already prodigious output increased even further, with the Sam Durell stories also appearing two or three times a year.

All of the Durell novels were published straight to paperback in the States by Fawcett/Gold Medal, under covers illustrated by the likes of Robert McGinnis, Barye Phillips and Charles Binger. In the UK, Frederick Muller issued the earlier Sam Durell adventures in paperback editions virtually identical to the US ones (only the cover price and prelims were changed), before Coronet picked up the softcover rights in 1966, publishing a good chunk of the series under photographic covers over the next ten or so years. But a number of the Assignments also made it into hardback in the UK. I wrote about the ones published by Gold Lion and White Lion in 1973/4 the other day, in particular Assignment Black Viking, but another British publisher beat Gold/White Lion to the punch, issuing half a dozen Durells in hardback in the mid- to late-1960s: Herbert Jenkins.

I speculated in that Black Viking post that Gold Lion had some kind of rolling line-wide deal with Gold Medal, and Jenkins evidently had a similar, earlier arrangement: they published dozens upon dozens of Gold Medal crime and spy fiction paperback originals into hardback around this period. Sometimes the dust jacket designs would take cues from the American covers – see Peter Rabe's My Lovely Executioner or Frank Castle's The Violent Hours – but the jackets for the Jenkins editions of the Assignment novels forged their own direction, ranging from the fully painted, to the design-led, to photographic treatments.

As far I've been able to determine, Jenkins's earliest Durell offering (they'd published a non-Durell novel, The Defenders – a tie-in to the old TV show – in hardback in 1962) was Assignment Suicide, the third Sam Durell mission (originally published by Gold Medal in 1956), which they issued in 1964 under a wrapper designed by Bill Payne. The story sees Sam Durell parachuted into the USSR to deal with an attempt by rogue Russian elements to launch a nuclear strike on the US, a plot that Barye Phillips interpreted rather more literally on the Gold Medal cover:

The only other Jenkins edition I've got my hands on to date – like Assignment Suicide, courtesy of Jamie Sturgeon – is Assignment Zorya, the eleventh Durell adventure, published by Jenkins in 1967 (Originally published by Gold Medal in 1960).

The jacket design is uncredited, but again it's markedly different to Charles Binger's Gold Medal cover art:

Other than those two hardbacks and the Gold Lion edition of Assignment Black Viking, my burgeoning Edward S. Aarons collection consists mainly of various paperback editions, most of which I acquired at this year's and last year's London Paperback and Pulp Bookfair:

And it's to the book on top of that pile that I'll be turning next: the debut Sam Durell thriller, Assignment to Disaster...