First Editions of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, John Rowland's Calamity in Kent and Henry Kane's Trilogy in Jeopardy

It's perhaps a measure of the neglect Existential Ennui has suffered in recent times – on my part I mean; whatever commensurate neglect there's been on the part of the readership is neither here nor there – that I haven't updated my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page in well over a year. That's partly down to my gravitating more towards science fiction from the 1970s and later in my collecting and reading over the past few years, and as a consequence acquiring fewer books that fit with that 50s/60s theme; but it's not the whole story. As I mentioned last May, the blogging muse, such as it was, rather deserted me in 2018; so while I have still been picking up books here and there, the wrappers of which have been eminently suitable for Beautiful British Book Jacket Design, I haven't been able to summon the impetus or enthusiasm to blog about them.

This year, however, the muse has seemingly made a marginal return. I managed two posts in January – a nascent series called 80s Comics Cavalcade, which I hope to continue – and am keen to maintain that momentum, however faltering it may be. To that end, I thought I'd increase 2019's post tally by showcasing a few finds which I'm adding to the aforementioned Beautiful British Book Jackets page, starting with a small haul from one of Brighton's flea markets last year – small but, I feel, given the piddling prices paid, impressive, especially this book:

A British first edition/first impression of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. Published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton, strictly speaking its issue date of 1949 should disqualify it from inclusion in Beautiful British Book Jackets of the 1950s and 1960s; but I've made exceptions before, and its wrapper, by Cecil Walter Bacon, is too good not to include, especially as it makes a nice companion to the two other CWB jackets on the page.

The fifth of Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, The Little Sister is quite a valuable book in British first (the true first of the book, as it preceded the American first by three months), especially in its original dust jacket, even a somewhat chipped and worn one as here. When I spied this copy on the shelves of the bijou book stall in the flea market, I couldn't quite credit what I was seeing, but on closer inspection I realised it was indeed a British 1st/1st, and with a ludicrously low price pencilled on its front free endpaper. I've come across some real bargains in my time collecting books, but this is by far my biggest find: the closest comparable copy I can see online is listed at £375 –  rather more than the £3 I paid.

The other two books from this haul aren't in quite the same league as the Chandler, but they are both pretty scarce and fairly valuable. Probably scarcest of the two, at least in first edition, is this one:

Calamity in Kent by John Rowland, published by Herbert Jenkins in 1950. One of two Rowland novels reissued by the British Library in 2016 under their Crime Classics imprint (the other being 1938's Murder in the Museum), Calamity in Kent is an entry in Rowland's series of novels featuring Inspector Shelley (and one of the last he published), and is set in the fictional Kentish coastal town of Broadgate, a name which Rowland presumably arrived at by shmooshing Broadstairs into Ramsgate. As a Kent man myself (originally – I suppose I'm more of a Sussex sort these days), I can only commend this act of geographical commingling.

John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books wrote about Rowland back in 2016, so head to that post if you want to learn more about the author. What concerns us here is the dust jacket of the first edition, which was designed by an H. T. Watts... although I've been able to find out very little about him, if indeed he is a him. I do know he also designed the wrappers for the 1950 Jenkins edition of Leonora Starr's Azaleas on the Hill and the 1950 Sampson Low, Marston & Co edition of Paul Townend's The Modern World Book of Wonders, but beyond that, I've drawn a blank. I did wonder if H. T. Watts might have been related to the publisher Charles Albert Watts, for whom I believe John Rowland worked at one time, but that's barely even conjecture on my part.

One note, however, before we move on to the final book in this haul: there was a John Rowland designing dust jackets in the 1950s and 1960s – I wrote about him here, and his work is featured on the Beautiful British Book Jackets page. Were Rowland the author and Rowland the illustrator and designer one and the same? As ever, if anyone can shed any light, do please leave a comment.

At present I can't see any jacketed firsts of Calamity in Kent for sale online, so the £2 I paid for mine, even with its torn wrapper, has to be considered something of a steal. As does the £3 I paid for this book:

A British first edition of Trilogy in Jeopardy by Henry Kane, published by T. V. Boardman in 1955 – #113 in the publisher's American Bloodhound Mystery series. I've written about Boardman, and the designer of most of their dust jackets and book covers, Denis McLoughlin, many times, so I shan't tarry here; follow the links for more on both. This particular book, a collection of three of Kane's Peter Chambers P.I. stories (namely "Slaughter on Sunday", "One Little Bullet" and "Skip a Beat"), is in very short supply online: I can see a couple of jacketed copies in the US priced at around £40, but that's it.

I've added all three of those wrappers to Beautiful British Book Jacket design of the 1950s and 1960s, but blogging about Trilogy in Jeopardy has reminded me that I have some other McLoughlin-wrapped Boardmans to add to the page. I shall endeavour to do that at the earliest opportunity.

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 8/3/19.

Hong Kong Kill by Bryan Peters, Alias Peter George: Signed Inscribed First Edition (T. V. Boardman, 1958)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 9/10/15.

I've been on the hunt for a copy of the 1958 T. V. Boardman edition of Bryan Peters's Hong Kong Kill – the first in the author's very short series (in fact just two books) of Cold War spy thrillers starring British secret agent Anthony Brandon and American CIA operative Jess Lundstrum – ever since I got my hands on a copy of the Boardman edition of the second one, 1961's The Big H, three years ago. It wasn't merely the desire to complete a series which drove me to seek out Hong Kong Kill, nor the fact that like The Big H – and indeed almost all the crime and spy novels published under Boardman's Bloodhound Mystery banner – it boasted a dust jacket designed by Denis McLoughlin (although that was admittedly a major factor in my desire to obtain that particular edition); it was also my abiding interest in the man behind the "Bryan Peters" alias: Peter George.

Best known as the co-writer of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), George published nine novels from 1952 to 1965 (including in 1963 a novelisation of Dr. Strangelove, which was itself based on George's 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom, alias Red Alert), both under his own name and the pen names Bryan Peters and Peter Bryant. It's a fascinating body of work, comprising on the one hand a handful of straightforward crime thrillers, largely published in the 1950s, and on the other a succession of books from 1958 onwards all preoccupied to a greater or lesser degree with nuclear annihilation – an obsession which in 1966 drove George to take his own life. Somewhere in the middle are the two Bryan Peters spy novels – both of which touch on the threat of obliteration by intercontinental nuclear weapons (The Big H more so than Hong Kong Kill); and spy fiction being a particular passion of mine, and having already acquired (and read, and liked) The Big H, I was keen to get hold of Hong Kong Kill too.

In the end I managed not only to find a fairly inexpensive, fairly decent copy of the uncommon Boardman edition – not ex-library and with a dust jacket that, while edge-worn and chipped, is still bright and presentable (now added to the Denis McLoughlin section in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s) – but one which, unusually, is inscribed by George. Signed or inscribed Peter George books really aren't too common; I own an inscribed copy (on an author bookplate) of George's final and perhaps finest novel, Commander-1 (1965), and there are two other signed George books that I can see for sale online at present – one an inscribed copy of his 1958 crime novel Cool Murder priced at £70, the other an inscribed copy of Two Hours to Doom priced at £1,250 – but that's about it.

This copy of Hong Kong Kill is inscribed on the front free endpaper. The simple inscription reads:

Johnny – with best of good wishes – and hopes for a happy new life.

Pete

"Bryan Peters"

As to the novel itself, it's a good but uneven affair – a trifle flat in places, melodramatic in others, with a very dry first third ("The Briefing"; the novel is split into three parts, the other two being "The Kill" and "The Prize") which establishes the background to British Intelligence agent Brandon's mission – to travel to Hong Kong in order to thwart the nefarious activities of the Chinese "Extermination Section" Yellowknife, which is poised to foment trouble and assassinate key individuals – in a little too painstaking detail, and a colonial bias which is a little hard to take nearly sixty years hence. But there are some classic bits of Fleming/Bondesque spy business in the thing: a doomed love affair; a high stakes game of seven-card stud; coded messages conveyed via books (namely, amusingly, Conrad's The Secret Agent and Waugh's Decline and Fall). And it explodes into vivid, evocative life in the final part, as the 1956 Kowloon Riots erupt and Brandon and CIA agent Lundstrum go on the hunt for Yellowknife leader Lily Wang, with some shocking bursts of violence and corpses piling up in the streets around the two leads.

Intriguingly, there's an Author's Note at the start of the book which suggests that there's an element of truth to the novel beyond the (fictionalised) real life riots it features. The note reads:

This story is fiction. Unfortunately, most of the incidents in it are not. Brandon exists, though not under the name I have given him. Lily Wang exists too, though that was not the name under which she operated either. But Brandon still lives. While he does, and all those other nameless people who voluntarily walk in that savage other world, we can feel reasonably content that the other world will not encroach on our carefully balanced, peaceful lives. That was not the reason this story was written, but it is its justification.

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.

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)

A Custom Domain for Existential Ennui, and 100 Beautiful British '50s and '60s (and '40s and '70s) Dust Jackets

Hang up the bunting and balloons, uncork the champagne and let the drunken revelry commence, because with the addition of those Val Biro/Victor Canning wrappers the other day, I'm immensely pleased to announce that nearly seven months on from its inauguration, there are now 100 dust jackets on the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s permanent page. Woo-hoo! All very exciting, I'm sure you'll agree, and I'll be getting into how we got here and where we might be going next in a moment. But first, an announcement: to celebrate this centenary of spectacular cover art, I've gone and done something a bit radical to Existential Ennui – besides widening it and introducing a new subtitle, I mean. If you cast your eyes up to the top of your browser, you should be able to see that the URL of Existential Ennui has changed (if it hasn't, click on the masthead). Hitherto it was:

http://existentialennui.blogspot.com – or ".co.uk", or ".com.au", etc., depending on where you were in the world (Blogger, the platform on which EE resides, having introduced region-specific URLs last year). But henceforth, it shall be:

http://www.existentialennui.com/

That's right: I've registered a custom domain name. It's something I've been considering for a while now, probably ever since Existential Ennui began to find its feet in 2010 as, essentially, a repository of bibliomaniacal esoterica (not to mention baseless conjecture, bad puns and prolix navel-gazing – this post being a case in point), and by the middle of last year I'd pretty much decided I wanted to take the plunge. Unfortunately, when I went to register the domain name I desired – the one I now have, existentialennui.com – I discovered that it wasn't available. Turns out someone had bought it and was evidently looking to make some money out of it: if you keyed in that URL, you'd find a message to the effect that anyone interested in the domain name should contact the then-owners. I thought about inquiring into how much it would cost to buy it off them, whoever they were, but I figured that the very act of contacting them would put me in a weak negotiating position (yeah, check me, all Gordon Gekko) and I'd end up having to pay through the nose for the privilege of using a domain name I'd effectively already established though my own blood, sweat and tears (just Google "existential ennui" to see what I mean). Of course, I could have stuck a dash between "existential" and "ennui", or perhaps plumped for an address ending in ".net", or some variation thereof, but that didn't feel right either. So I elected to leave it and keep an eye on the situation, with a view to revisiting the idea down the line.

Fast forward to earlier this week, and on a whim I decided to check if whoever it was who had their greasy mitts on existentialennui.com had, by some miracle, relinquished their grip. And bugger me with a broom handle, they had: the domain was available through Blogger. So, quick as a flash (actually not that quick: I mulled it over again for another day), I nabbed it.

What this will mean in practical terms is probably – hopefully – very little: all being well, any links via the old URL will eventually redirect to the new one (although you might want to update your bookmarks – that is, if anyone has bookmarked EE – just in case). But to me, somehow, it makes Existential Ennui seem more permanent. Oh, I'm sure that isn't actually the case: websites, and especially blogs, are by their very nature transitory things, and should Blogger ever fall over or vanish, I expect EE will disappear along with it (although the British Library UK Web Archive version of EE should survive). Which I guess means it must be more of a psychological thing – something to do with ".com" feeling more like a proper website than ".blogspot.com". Whatever: as I write, the transition process is well underway. Be aware, however, that there may be some disruption and side effects – current ones being that:

a) it might look, at the moment, as though are two Existential Ennuis (as if one weren't quite enough): a ".com" version and a ".blogspot.com" one as well. Don't ask me why that is; by all accounts it's just a thing that happens when you buy a custom domain, and will, I'm reliably informed, correct itself in time. And:

b) all of the blogs I'd gathered together in my Other Fine Blogs blogroll sidebar disappeared, so I'm having to reconstitute the list; if there are any fellow bloggers reading this who know for a fact they were listed, give me a nudge and I'll reinstate you.

UPDATE: I've since noticed another side effect.

Anyway: to the Beautiful British Book Jackets. And although as a rule I try to resist any emotions as base and vulgar as pride (it goeth before destruction, apparently), I must admit I'm pretty pleased not only to have reached 100 covers, but with the page's reception. Certainly it's proved by far the most popular part of Existential Ennui, racking up seven-and a-half-thousand hits in its own right in under seven months, which ain't too shabby. Clearly the notion of showcasing some of the best examples of dust jacket design from the 1950s and '60s has struck a chord, and the innovation – such as it is – of listing the jackets under their designers rather than authors or book titles has resulted in multiple links from Wikipedia – witness the Wikipedia pages for, among others, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and A Burnt-Out Case, Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra and James Hadley Chase's I Would Rather Stay Poor. Indeed, whoever edited those last two pages even had the temerity to use my covers to illustrate them. Honestly. The cheek of it.

All that said, the page hasn't developed quite how I envisioned. My original intention was to showcase jackets which typified the bold, duo-tone (or restricted palette), chiaroscuro style prevalent in the '50s and '60s, i.e. wrappers by the likes Val Biro, Denis McLoughlin, Donald Green, Peter Probyn and Roy Sanford. Right from the get-go, though, I muddied the waters by including Gavin Lyall's more illustrative jacket for his own The Wrong Side of the Sky (basically because I love it), and then further muddied them by including Peter Calcott's more graphic wrapper for Francis Clifford's The Naked Runner in the second batch. Still, even though these and subsequent additions, like Kenneth Farnhill's very simple designs for Agatha Christie first editions, perhaps diluted the original intent of the page, they're still fine examples of jacket design in their own right, and I don't regret their inclusion.

One thing I came to realise as I added more and more wrappers to the page was that I'd ever-so-slightly shot myself in the foot by restricting the period covered by the gallery to the 1950s and '60s. It dawned on me that there were plenty of examples of excellent illustrated design from the 1940s and 1970s too, which was why I elected to include the odd wrapper from the latter and earlier parts of those two decades, respectively. In retrospect I probably should have called the page "Beautiful Postwar Book Jacket Design" or something (although I maintain that the '50s and '60s boast far more fine examples than the decades either side), but the URL (are we back on those again...?) has already changed once – when I took off the redundant "Existential Ennui" prefix – resulting in broken links, so I was reluctant to change it again.

Tangentially related to that is a minor lament: I haven't yet got round to including any wrappers from novels by one of my favourite authors, Ross Thomas (unlike some of my other favourite authors – stand up Donald E. Westlake and Patricia Highsmith). The two best British Thomas wrappers, to my mind, date from 1970 – Wilson Buchanan's one for The Fools in Town Are on Our Side and Kaye Bellman's one for The Brass Go-Between – both of which I could, I guess, still add to the page – except I don't think I'll be venturing beyond 100 covers. Having that number of images on one page is already, I know, proving problematic for some viewers, and for my part I'm leery of continuing to monkey about with the page behind the scenes, for fear that I could, accidentally, delete the whole bloody thing (you may mock, but I've done that many a time before with draft blog posts).

And therein lies a conundrum: if I'm not going to expand or alter the page – and I reserve the right to change my mind on that one – where next? The obvious answer is, of course, a new page! Or perhaps pages, plural. For example, I've still got wrappers I've yet to unveil by Val Biro and Denis McLoughlin – the two artists represented by the greatest number of jackets on the current page – so it makes sense to dedicate a permanent page each to them, encompassing all of their work in Beautiful British Book Jackets, plus more besides. Alternatively, I could construct a more focused page, just highlighting those restricted-palette wrappers I had in mind for the extant gallery. I could even start a paperback cover page, although given that there are countless blogs and websites devoted to pulpy paperback cover art – which would be the area I'd concentrate on – that seems a little superfluous.

In the short term, I suspect Biro and McLoughlin are the most likely options, but I do have lots of books I've not yet blogged about which also boast lovely jackets by other designers, so there'll probably be at least one other page besides those at some point. As ever, if anyone has any suggestions or preferences, let me know via the comments. For now, though, go feast your eyes on 100 Beautiful British Book Jackets from the 1950s, 1960s – and beyond...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: The Big H by Bryan Peters, alias Peter Bryan George (T. V. Boardman, 1961); Book Review

Time for one last (for now...) Denis McLoughlin dust jacket-sporting T. V. Boardman thriller before I move on to other matters. Although as it turns out, those "other matters" will concern the author of this particular book...

The Big H by Bryan Peters, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1961. This is the second of Peters's two published novels, the first being Hong Kong Kill (T. V. Boardman, 1958), which introduced the stars of The Big H, British agent Anthony Brandon and CIA operative Jess Lundstrom. Or rather, it's the second of Peters's two published novels under that particular moniker – because in fact Bryan Peters is a pen name of Peter Bryan George, a Welsh-born writer best known for his 1958 novel Red Alert, which itself was written under another pseudonym: Peter Bryant. Originally titled Two Hours to Doom when Boardman published it in hardback – complete with a spectacular Denis McLoughlin mushroom cloud illustration on the dust jacket – it's an account of "the first two hours of World War III", and was famously turned into a film in 1964 by Stanley Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the screenplay of which George co-wrote.

Nuclear paranoia characterizes much of George's slim body of work, including The Big H, which is ostensibly about a Russian plot to embarrass America by flooding the country with heroin, and finds agent Brandon tasked with posing as a heroin dealer in order to infiltrate the Los Angeles criminal gang at the centre of the conspiracy. Gaining the trust of mob boss Agostino proves trickier than Brandon expected, however, beginning with a card game which recalls James Bond's battle against Le Chiffre in Casino Royale – difference being, Brandon plays to lose, although the net result is essentially the same, i.e. a spot of light torture.

It's a well-constructed Cold War thriller, closer in tone to Desmond Cory's Johnny Fedora novels maybe, or Edward S. Aarons's Sam Durell series than Ian Fleming's Bond books: tough, downbeat and with a dogged, determinedly unglamorous lead. It also has an unusual structure: long chapters are punctuated by shorter segments detailing the interrogation of a Russian spy by US Air Force officers, the significance of which only becomes clear late in the novel. It's that intermittent scene that Denis McLoughlin has chosen to illustrate in striking fashion on the dust jacket, combining it with – what else – a big red "H", prefiguring McLoughlin's type treatment on the wrapper for the 1962 Boardman edition Donald E. Westlake's 361.

McLoughlin's dust jacket for The Big H has now, of course, joined his other wrappers on the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s permanent page (taking the total number of covers thereon up to a tantalising 95). And if you take a look at the back cover:

You can see that Boardman have picked out four books from the same year as The Big H "by new authors, whom we believe will be the best-sellers of the future". Unfortunately Boardman's prediction didn't quite pan out: Larry Harris, a.k.a. Laurence Janifer, did make a name for himself in science fiction, but Eric Bruton isn't terribly well remembered these days, and Harry Olesker, after publishing three novels, embarked on a career in film and television before being killed in a motorcycle accident in 1969. Donald Westlake, however, did, as we're all doubtless well aware, do rather well for himself, The Mercenaries being one of over a hundred books he published in his lifetime.

As for Peter George, he took his own life in 1966, publishing one final novel before he died. And it looks as if I might have secured a very special copy of that book, so I'll be blogging about that very soon indeed, as well as exploring George's life and career a bit more and assembling a full Peter George bibliography – the first time, I believe, one has appeared online...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: Amateur Agent by Christopher Adams, alias Kenneth Hopkins (T. V. Boardman, 1964); Book Review

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

I've just two further T. V. Boardman thrillers to blog about before moving on to other matters – both of which happen to be spy novels hailing from the early 1960s; both of which were written by British authors under non de plumes; and both of which boast dust jackets designed by Denis McLoughlin which will, of course, be making their way onto the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page. Let's take a look at this one first:

Amateur Agent by Christopher Adams, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1964 (British Bloodhound Mystery #467). "Christopher Adams" was an alias of Kenneth Hopkins (1914–1988), an author who published seven crime novels and mysteries under his own name from 1955 – The Girl Who Died (Macdonald) – to 1963 – Campus Corpse (Macdonald) – plus one pseudonymous spy thriller – Amateur Agent. But Hopkins was also a critic, a man of letters and a poet, as a footnote in the third volume of C. S. Lewis's Collected Letters reveals:

[Hopkins] ...was born in Bournemouth, and after leaving school at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a builder's merchant. In 1938 he set out to sell his poems from door to door. He eventually made his way to London where he came to know the anarchist and publisher Charles Lahr and his circle at Lahr's Red Lion Street bookshop. After serving in the Second World War he worked as the literary director of Everybody's, a magazine concerned with social justice. Later he lectured on English literature and taught creative writing at several North American universities. [Hopkins published a book about one of his visits to the States, A Trip to Texas, in 1962.] His autobiography, The Corruption of a Poet, was published in 1954. His championship of the cause of the Powys brothers... reached its zenith with his biographical appreciation, The Powys Brothers (1967). He was an active member of The Powys Society.

Hopkins's background as a poet can certainly be glimpsed in Amateur Agent. A lively location-hopping tale of mistaken identity, wherein Jim Stone, a British car salesman vacationing in Mexico, gets mixed up in a plot to transport military plans to Cuba, the novel comes across as a more violent version of North by Northwest, but some of the descriptive passages are quite striking, especially those set around Teotihuacan. Indeed, Hopkins paints vivid pictures of all of the novel's various locales, and mixes smart-alec banter with jarring scenes of torture and bloodletting, all of which serve to keep one on one's toes throughout. It's a shame the book, like all of Hopkins's novels, has fallen out of print; the Boardman edition was its only outing and it's consequently become quite scarce (AbeBooks lists just three copies at present, one of those lacking a dust jacket).

Still, at least we all get to gaze upon Denis McLoughlin's evocative wrapper for Amateur Agent – which has taken its rightful place in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery – and as a result of this 'ere post there's now a little more information about both the novel and its author available online. And I'll be providing a similar service with the next post too, as we head back to 1961 for a Cold War espionage tale by a novelist who was obsessed with nuclear annihilation...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: The Siamese Coup Affair by Sidney Weintraub (T. V. Boardman Bloodhound Mystery #447, 1963)

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

In the unlikely event that there's anyone out there eagerly awaiting the next instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while longer yet: for some reason I'm finding the fourth book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, heavy going. Nothing to do with the novel itself – at least, I don't think it is; I suspect I'm just a bit burned out with the intensive reading and note-taking those Ripley posts have ended up requiring. Anyway, the net result is that the next essay probably won't appear until the end of next week at the earliest, so you'll just have to make do with some more Denis McLoughlin-designed T. V. Boardman dust jackets in the meantime.

Speaking of which, let's have a look at the third Boardman Bloodhound I bought off book dealer Jamie Sturgeon:

The Siamese Coup Affair by Sidney Weintraub, published in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1963, #447 in Boardman's American Bloodhound Mystery line. So far as I've been able to establish, this is one of only two novels Weintraub published, the other being Mexican Slay Ride, issued by Abelard-Schuman and Robert Hale the year before in 1962. But though Weintraub seems to have written just the two works of fiction, he has, I believe, and if I've got my facts right – so take the following with a pinch of salt – penned a hell of a lot of non-fiction. Indeed, it's for works like* his 1959 debut Price Theory (*like, but actually not; see comments) and a succession of other books on finance and free trade that he's rather better known, as well as for being a former William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a former member of the US Foreign Service.

Of course, that could be an entirely different Weintraub – except for two things. 1) Weintraub the economist is evidently something of an expert on Mexico, so his having also written a thriller titled Mexican Slay Ride isn't entirely outside the realms of possibility; and 2) the 1964 Catalog of Copyright Entries lists both the novel The Siamese Coup Affair and the non-fiction work Intermediate Price Theory under Weintraub's name.

So, in attempt to discover if Sidney Weintraub the thriller writer and Sidney Weintraub the economist are one and the same, I've taken the fairly radical step of trying to contact Mr. Weintraub. I'm not overly confident that I'll hear anything back, but if I do, I'll be sure to update this post.

UPDATE, 19/3/13: Sidney Weintraub's son, Jeff, kindly emailed me the other day confirming that they are indeed one and the same – and not to be confused with the other Sidney Weintraub. Thanks, Jeff!

Perhaps even more intriguing and curious than all of that, however, is this: while The Siamese Coup Affair was published by T. V. Boardman (apparently its only printing), Weintraub's 1962 (presumed) debut novel, Mexican Slay Ride, was published, as mentioned above, by Abelard-Schuman in the States and Robert Hale in the UK. But in 1961, the year before that, Boardman itself published a novel titled Mexican Slayride (two words rather than three, note), by Boardman mainstay Thomas B. Dewey (actually retitled from its original US Dell appearance as The Golden Hooligan). Moreover, in 1962, the same year as the Weintraub Mexican Slay Ride, Gold Medal in the States published a novel titled – you guessed it – Mexican Slay Ride, this one by Neil MacNeil, alias W. T. Ballard.

Three different novels, all titled Mexican Slay Ride (or Slayride), all appearing in the space of two years: what the hell's that all about? What was the weird fascination with that title? I must admit I'm unfamiliar with either a Mexican slay ride or if it is, as it appears to be, a play on words, a Mexican sleigh ride, although I'm assuming in this context it's nothing to do with any of these practices. Furthermore, whether or not these three novels were an influence on either the American title of this film or the pilot of The A-Team is also beyond my ken, although given that A-Team co-creator and writer Frank Lupo is a keen collector of crime and spy fiction, one never knows. Answers to any of the above on a postcard, please.

Anyway, back to The Siamese Coup Affair. And while Denis McLoughlin's dust jacket for the book isn't one of his more striking efforts, for me it's possessed of a quiet appeal. Certainly it's good enough to join its brethren in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – and I've another couple of McLoughlins waiting to follow in its footsteps. Because while The Siamese Coup Affair is the last of the Boardmans I bought off Jamie Sturgeon, it's not the last of the Boardmans I've acquired of late...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: Epitaph for a Blonde by Ian Mercer (T. V. Boardman Bloodhound Mystery #291, 1960)

On to the second of three T. V. Boardman thrillers I acquired from book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, all of which boast dust jackets designed by the late, great Denis McLoughlin. And this next book is not only one of Boardman's select number of British Bloodhound Mysteries, as opposed to the more common or garden American variety, but it's a spy novel to boot, which again marks it out from Boardman's more traditional crime or suspense fare:

Published in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1960, Epitaph for a Blonde is the third of Ian Mercer's three espionage novels starring James Nathaniel Pettigrew of the British Secret Service, and follows Journey into Darkness and Mission to Majorca (both 1958, and both extremely hard to come by these days). Except, as the dust jacket flap of Epitaph and James Nathaniel Pettigrew's dedicated page on Spy Guys & Gals both point out, by this juncture in the series, Pettigrew is no longer called Pettigrew, but Charles Graham, and is now a retired schoolteacher. Indeed, Spy Guys & Gals even goes so far as to speculate that Epitaph for a Blonde might have originally been "a stand-alone that the publisher forced the author to changing [sic]". Certainly Mercer wrote a number of other standalone spy and crime novels, including The Green Windmill (1945), A Man Gets Into His Tomb (1948) and Curs in Clover (also 1948), as well as, by the looks of it, some travel guides, notably Majorca on £50 (1970; evidently Mercer felt something of an affinity for the Balearic island).

As with B. X. Sanborn's The Doom-Maker, this copy of Epitaph for a Blonde is ex-library, this time hailing from a public library in Newport, Wales which has, I believe, since closed down (the library, not the town or the country; those were definitely still open last I looked). Unfortunately Denis McLoughlin's rather nice dust jacket has suffered the indignity of losing a strip from its top and bottom where the tape affixing it to its library plastic covering has been ripped away. But never mind: it doesn't detract from the lovely artwork too much, and I've duly added it to the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery.

Which is, of course, what I'll also be doing with the next McLoughlin/Boardman book I'll be blogging about – a 1963 political thriller which appears to have been written by a noted economist and former member of the US Foreign Service...