J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Other eBay Delights

I've got a bunch of new eBay auctions up and running, including something quite special:

Volume 4 No. 24 of Science Fiction Adventures, published in January 1962. What's so darn special about it? Well it features the first appearance of J.G. Ballard's dystopian classic The Drowned World, which debuted in this issue of Science Fiction Adventures months before it was published in hardback by Gollancz – making this effectively the true first edition. (See this post for more.) It's a pretty scarce publication, with lovely Brian Lewis cover art illustrating Ballard's tale, and it's got a low starting price, so someone could potentially nab a bargain.


All of my latest eBay offerings can be found here:

Existential Ennui on eBay

Or by clicking on each picture for the individual auctions...

Among them a 1964 first edition (later printing) of The Man Who Sold Death by James Munro (alias Callan creator James Mitchell)...

....a 1989 first edition of Quiller KGB by Adam Hall...

and a 2016 omnibus of Avengers: Time Runs Out, which collects the climax to Jonathan Hickman's brilliant Avengers run. Quite a mix of books, then, plus there are some others I've offered before  – some of them signed – but which now have lower starting prices. Have at it.

Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark, James Mitchell, Victor Canning, Anthony Price, Cornell Woolrich and Harry Carmichael on eBay

What do Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark, James Mitchell, Victor Canning, Anthony Price, Cornell Woolrich and Harry Carmichael all have in common? Aside from the fact that they're all blokes... and all crime/thriller writers of one sort or another... and indeed all wrote spy fiction at one time or another... and doubtless there are other commonalities besides, but the one that concerns us here is that presently I have eBay auctions running for books by all six of them (Westlake and Stark of course being the same person).

There are auctions for ten books in total, all of which finish on Sunday, and only one of which, as I type, has a bid in. The books are a mix of British and American first editions, mostly hardbacks (and one paperback), some quite scarce, all plucked from my personal collection (most having appeared previously on this very blog), all listed with relatively low starting prices. They are as follows:

A 1974 American first edition of Donald E. Westlake's Jimmy the Kid, the Dortmunder novel that features  excerpts from the 'missing' Parker novel Child Heist.

A 1974 American first edition of Richard Stark's Butcher's Moon, the sixteenth Parker novel and the explosive finale to the original run of Parkers.

A 1977 American first edition of Donald E. Westlake's Nobody's Perfect, the fourth Dortmunder novel.

A 1971 British first edition of Donald E. Westlake's Adios Scheherazade, his fictionalised account of his time as a sleaze paperback writer.

A 1966 British first edition of Donald E. Westlake's The Fugitive Pigeon, his first 'nephew' caper, featuring a fab Denis McLoughlin dust jacket.

A 1974 British first edition of James Mitchell's Death and Bright Water, the third Callan spy novel.

A 1972 British first edition of Victor Canning's The Rainbird Pattern, second novel in the 'Birdcage' spy series and believed by many to be the author's best book.

A 1974 British first edition of Anthony Price's Other Paths to Glory, the fifth novel in his David Audley spy series.

A 1958 British first edition of Harry Carmichael's A Question of Time, with a great William Randell dust jacket.

And a 1946 first American paperback edition of Cornell Woolrich's classic noir thriller The Black Path of Fear.

Existential Ennui on eBay: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Point Blank and Pity Him Afterwards

At long last I've finally gone and done something I've been promising to do for bloody ages: I've listed some books for sale on eBay. All three books have featured on Existential Ennui at various points, and two of them have even featured on The Violent World of Parker too – not that either of those facts are especially salient or will make a blind bit of difference as regards determining whether or not the books sell or, if they do sell, how much they sell for, I'm sure – I mean, why should whether a book has made an appearance on a little-read blog collecting blog – and a better-read crime fiction website – and indeed sat on the shelves of the proprietor of the little-read book collecting blog for, ooh, a good few years, in any way impact its relative desirability? – but I just thought I'd mention it. Er, at length.

The books are as follows:

A first edition/impression of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1974, as seen on Existential Ennui here, here and here (among other posts), eBay auction here;

A British hardback first edition/impression of Richard Stark's Point Blank, alias The Hunter, published by Allison & Busby in 1984, as seen on Existential Ennui – and, no doubt, The Violent World of Parker – all over the bloody place (I can't be fagged to find all the posts) but certainly on the British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page, eBay auction here;

An American first edition/impression of Donald E. Westlake's Pity Him Afterwards, published in hardback by Random House in 1964, as seen on Existential Ennui here and here and The Violent World of Parker here, eBay auction here.

I suppose they're all quite obvious books in a way: better known titles (although less so in the case of Pity Him Afterwards) by authors who are firm favourites on Existential Ennui. But they're all collectable first editions of a sort, and they all have low starting prices – £4.99 in each case – so they're a good way for me to test the waters, to see if it's going to be worth my while to persist with selling on eBay. If they do well, I have other, more obscure delights waiting to be listed (not least some more Westlake books).

All three auctions finish on Sunday 8 November around 7pm, and all three are UK only affairs, I'm afraid; I may offer international shipping on future auctions (if there are future auctions), but for these initial ones I wanted to keep it simple. There's information about the condition of each book in each respective listing, but anyone looking for more details can either ask me questions on eBay itself, or post a comment below, or drop me a line on the usual Existential Ennui email address (see the contact details in the sidebar on the right) and I'll respond as swiftly as I'm able.

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.

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.

God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake (Michael Joseph, 1968): a Westlake Score

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 28/8/15.

Well, I reckon it's about bleedin' time I pulled me bleedin' finger out and posted something at The Violent World of Parker, yeah? I mean, it's not like I've exactly been prolific on Existential Ennui of late, but at VWoP I haven't posted anything since October of last year. (I suppose I do have the excuse of a work-related upheaval at the tail end of 2014 and into 2015, but that's only going to get me so far as a defence.) I have, however, still been (sporadically) collecting Donald E. Westlake books, with the consequence that I've built up a bit of a backlog of Westlake Scores. Case in point:

God Save the Mark, first published in hardback in the UK by Michael Joseph in 1968 (the year after the US Random House edition). The fourth of Westlake's comical 'capers' (the preceding three being 1965's The Fugitive Pigeon, 1966's The Busy Body and 1966's The Spy in the Ointment), God Save the Mark is a curious entry in Westlake's British publishing backlist in that it was the only one of his books to be published in the UK by Michael Joseph. Up to this point his principal British publisher had been T. V. Boardman (who issued all eight of the prior novels penned under his own name in hardback in the UK); after this point his principal British publisher would be Hodder & Stoughton (heralded by Hodder's paperback imprint, Coronet, picking up the rights to the Richard Stark-written Parker novels in 1967 with Point Blank). But for one book, Westlake's principal British publisher was Michael Joseph, making Westlake a very brief stablemate of, among others, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, Ira Levin, John Wyndham, Adam Diment and Len Deighton (whose Only When I Larf is advertised on the back cover of God Save the Mark).

Why Joseph only published the one Westlake I couldn't say, but the transitory partnership did at least produce rather a nice dust jacket – not as striking perhaps as Denis McLoughlin's ones for Westlake's Boardman-published books, but certainly better than anything Hodder would come up with. The jacket design is credited to Carol Smith, about whom I can establish virtually nothing other than she possibly designed the cover for the 1965 Viking Press edition of Michael Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle (originally published in 1861), bizarrely enough; but I've added her simple, stylishly typographical God Save the Mark wrapper to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s nonetheless.

I've yet to read the novel itself, so I'm afraid I can't offer a review, but anyone wishing to read such a thing can always head over to The Westlake Review, which continues to do a sterling job in reviewing Westlake's oeuvre at length (sometimes extreme length). But I have read, and so can review, the next Westlake Score I'll be unveiling: the only one of those aforementioned Boardman-published Westlake novels that's heretofore been missing from my collection.

The Day After

A Big Long List of the Books I Read in 2014: Novels, Graphic Novels and Short Story Collections

NB: Linked in Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books roundup, 19/12/14. Thanks Patti!

Well that threw a spanner in the works. I had every intention of posting one last book review – of Victor Canning's third "Birdcage" novel, The Mask of Memory (1974) – before embarking on my traditional, widely reviled, even more widely ignored, still more widely unregistered, end-of-year review of the year; but then the illustrated books publisher I work for, Ilex, got bought by a bigger publishing company, Octopus, and my life was thrown into disarray (short version: in the space of less than two weeks I went from living and working in Lewes, with a walk to work of fifteen minutes, to living in Lewes and working in London, with a journey to work of at least two hours) and blogging had to take a back seat while I wrestled – continue to wrestle – with a long commute and new offices and new work colleagues and new systems and so forth. The upshot of all of which is that not only will the book review have to wait, so will the widely reviled/ignored/unregistered review of the year – possibly until this time next year; as things stand it's unlikely I'll have either the time or energy to properly unpack the year's events chez Louis XIV before 2014 draws to a close.

Instead, because it's a comparatively less taxing task, I thought I'd assemble my similarly traditional big long list of the books I read, with its equally traditional links to whatever I've written about each book (if anything) and ensuing attendant half-hearted, half-arsed analysis. And this year's list, arranged in roughly the order in which I read the books, looks like this:

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (Hodder, 2013)
Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground by Darwyn Cooke (IDW, 2013)
Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (Knockabout, 2013)
Nobody's Perfect by Donald Westlake (Hodder, 1978)
Firebreak by Richard Stark (Robert Hale, 2002; originally 2001)
Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert (Hodder, 1982)
To Catch a Spy, selected by Eric Ambler (The Bodley Head, 1964)
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice by Mike Carey, Peter Gross et al (DC/Vertigo, 2013)
Batman: Detective No. 27 by Michael Uslan, Peter Snejberg et al (DC, 2003)
High-Rise by J. G. Ballard (Jonathan Cape, 1975)
Ashenden, or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (Heinemann, 1928/1934)
Point Blank by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby, 1984; originally 1962) (reread)
The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby, 1984; originally 1963) (reread)
The Outfit by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby, 1984; originally 1963) (reread)
Russian Roulette by James Mitchell (Hamish Hamilton, 1973)
The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard (Dell, 1970; originally 1969)
The Whisper in the Glen by P. M. Hubbard (Atheneum, 1972)
The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (Collins, 1965)
High Tide by P. M. Hubbard (Macmillan, 1971)
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Michael Joseph, 1954)
Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1977)
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1987)
The Black House by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1981)
A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1965)
Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1967)
Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1974) (reread)
Unsung Road by Simon Harvester (Jarrolds, 1960)
Firecrest by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1971)
The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1972)
Breakout by Richard Stark (Robert Hale, 2003; originally 2002)
Her by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014)
Danger in the Dark by Patricia Carlon (Ward Lock, 1962)
City Primeval by Elmore Leonard (W. H. Allen, 1981; originally 1980)
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (Hutchinson, 1968) (reread)
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (Gerald Duckworth, 1978)
Split Images by Elmore Leonard (W. H. Allen, 1983; originally 1981)
Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1986; originally 1982)
The Hospital Suite by John Porcellino (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)
Killshot by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1989)
The Finger of Saturn by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1973)
The Mask of Memory by Victor Canning (Heinemann, 1974)
Ant Colony by Michael DeForge (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)
Safari Honeymoon by Jesse Jacobs (Koyama Press, 2014)
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Collins, 1981)
The Mammoth Book of Cult Comics, edited by Ilya (Robinson, 2014)

Including Gorky Park and The Mammoth Book of Cult Comics, both of which I'm still reading but both of which I'm reasonably confident I'll finish before the end of the year (there's something to be said for commuting by train at least: I get to read more now), I make that forty-five books, which is five more than I managed to get through in 2013 – something of a surprise, I must admit: what with work and Edie and everything I had thought I was going to be down on last year's total. And of those forty-five books: all were fiction; thirty-one were novels; five were short story collections; one – Ashenden, or, The British Agent – was both a novel and a short story collection; seven were graphic novels; and one was a graphic novel short story collection.

Nine of the books were recently published, i.e. in the last year or two; three were first published in the 2000s; eight were first published in the 1980s; twelve were first published in the 1970s; eleven were first published in the 1960s; one was first published in the 1950s; and one was first published in the 1920s. The vast majority were new to me, however; there were just five that I'd read before – and one of those, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, I'd read at least a couple of times before. (I was inspired to do so again this year as a result of acquring a scarce 1989 Heinemann reissue of the novel and watching Wim Wenders's film adaptation of the novel, The American Friend – and rewatching Liliana Cavani's later adaptation Ripley's Game.)

Speaking of Highsmith, she ties with Donald E. Westlake for most-read – and reread – author this year: six books in each case (that's if you exclude Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel adaptation of Westlake/Richard Stark's Slayground, which I do). Elmore Leonard was their closest rival with five books, then Victor Canning – this year's major discovery for me – with four, and P. M. Hubbard with two. Everyone else was one book apiece. Twenty-three of the books were what one might class as crime fiction; ten were spy fiction; and the rest were a mixture of science fiction, horror, fantasy and literary works. All of which, glancing back at my lists for 2013 and 2012, suggests that the makeup and breadth of my reading was not dissimilar to that of previous years.

And as in previous years, for my next post I'll be picking my ten favourites from the books I read over the past twelve months – although whether that post will appear before 2014 breathes its last is anyone's guess.