Eastbourne Book Buys: Victor Canning's Birds of a Feather (Heinemann, 1985) and the Last of Tome

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 12 June 2015.

We had a family outing to Eastbourne a couple of weeks ago, the highlight of which was undoubtedly Edie's first proper experience of paddling in the sea:

Which, after a cautious start – she was initially reluctant to put her feet down on the wet squelchy sand at the water's edge – entailed much squealing and dashing back and forth into the lapping waves. But as much fun as that was, almost as thrilling in its own way, at least for me (although rather less so, I imagine, for Edie and Rachel), was the acquisition of this:

A 1985 Heinemann first edition of Victor Canning's Birds a Feather, which I bought in Eastbourne secondhand bookshop institution Camilla's, priced £4.50. The final novel in Canning's Birdcage espionage series, it was the only one I was missing in first (non-ex-library copies are quite hard to come by), so when I spied it on the shelves in the basement of Camilla's – luckily it was on one of the higher shelves, otherwise it would've been obscured by the piles of books that sit on the floor in front of the lower third of the bookcases in the basement – I was delighted. Naturally I've added it to the Existential Ennui Victor Canning Birdcage First Edition Book Cover Gallery and to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s.

But while Camilla's marches on in much the same fashion as it ever has – well, in my experience, in the half-dozen years I've been going there – another, more recent Eastbourne secondhand bookshop is breathing its last. Tome, which opened its doors on Terminus Road (an apt location in retrospect) near the seafront a few years ago, is closing – indeed may already have closed by the time I publish this post. I was alerted to this sorry state of affairs by Existential Ennui reader Gerald, so the trip to Eastbourne was motivated at least in part by a desire to have a last look at Tome's wares. Books were being packed in boxes on the day we were there, but there were still lots on display, all priced at 50p rather than the usual £2 (I do wonder whether that pricing policy was a factor in the closure), and though there wasn't anything I desperately wanted – I've raided Tome's shelves too thoroughly on a number of prior occasions – I still managed to find a few things of interest:

On the bottom row, a 1965 Hodder & Stoughon first edition of The Third Side of the Coin, Francis Clifford's tenth novel – quite uncommon in first that one – and a 1968 Jonathan Cape first edition of The Killing Season, the debut novel by John Redgate, alias actor Adam Kennedy; and on the top row, a 1981 Cape first edition of Once a Spy, Rennie Airth's second novel – also uncommon, not to mention pricey, in first (at least sixty quid on AbeBooks) – and a 1991 Picador first edition of The Mexican Tree Duck, James Crumley's fifth novel. A good illustration of the kinds of unexpected delights Tome invariably offered up, and why the place will be sorely missed. And as further illustration, here's a pile of books I bought in Tome last year – including a signed 2006 No Exit Press first of James Sallis's Drive – as photographed on Eastbourne beach shortly after (and posted on Twitter, but not, heretofore, on Existential Ennui):

And here's Edie – who at two years old has lived her entire life with Tome in it, to the extent that on one occasion she even ate her lunch in the place (and on another occasion, did a poo there) – photobombing:

Cheerio then, Tome. And thanks for all the books.

Francis Clifford's Honour the Shrine (Cape, 1953) & Helen MacInnes's Pray for a Brave Heart (Collins, 1955) Join Beautiful British Book Jackets

Let's take a look at the two latest additions to the still-expanding (these covers will take it up to 104 entries) Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – the first one of which I could do with some assistance identifying the jacket designer:

Namely Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford, published by Jonathan Cape in 1953. There's no credit on either flap and no signature that I can see; I did wonder if it might be by Val Biro, but I put it in front of Val at a Lewes Book Fair last year and he thought not. Mind you, when I asked Val to sign the jacket of Desmond Cory's Secret Ministry at an earlier Midhurst Book Fair, he told me that wasn't one of his wrappers either – until his agent, David Schutte, pointed out Val's signature in the bottom left corner (Val did, after all, design an estimated 3,000 dust jackets). Plus, Val was doing a little work for Cape around this period (as was Hans Tisdall, who also comes to mind as a possible culprit) – he designed the wrapper for the 1953 Cape first of Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope for one – so he could have misremembered. In any case, until confirmation is forthcoming, the cover is consigned to the "Designer Unknown" group at the bottom of Beautiful British Book Jacket Design.

No such confusion surrounds the book itself, however, at least not round these parts, because I've blogged about it before, in its 1957 Corgi paperback incarnation. Clifford's debut, and quite uncommon these days (there are barely a dozen copies in any edition on AbeBooks at present, none of those the Cape first), it's one of a number of the author's novels I've spotlighted – see also Time Is an Ambush (1962), The Green Fields of Eden (1963), The Hunting-Ground (1964) and The Naked Runner (1966) – the jackets from the first editions of all four of which are also featured in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design.

And there's little doubt as to who was responsible for the dust jacket design of the second new addition to the gallery, despite there once again being no credit on the flaps:

This is the British first edition of Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen Macinnes, published by Collins in 1955 and bought by me just the other week for two quid in the excellent Tome in Eastbourne. MacInnes's ninth novel, it's one of fourteen MacInnes spy thrillers that Titan Books have brought back into print since last year. The wrapper isn't, as I say, credited, but it does bear a signature: "Petty". That's almost certainly the Australian political cartoonist Bruce Petty, who evidently had a nice sideline designing jackets in the 1950s; other examples of his jacket work include a further three wrappers for Collins in 1955 – Jon Cleary's Justin Bayard, Laselle Gilman's The Dragon's Mouth and Kem Bennett's Dangerous Knowledge – along with Edward Maxwell's Quest for Pajaro (Heinemann, 1957), Tom Girtin's Not Entirely Serious (Hutchinson, 1958) and Robin Maugham's The Man with Two Shadows (Longmans, Green, 1958).

So, two further splendid duotone dust jackets for Beautiful British Book Jacket Design. And I'm not done with the gallery just yet...

Peter Probyn Dust Jackets for Francis Clifford's Time is an Ambush, The Green Fields of Eden and The Hunting-Ground (Hodder, 1962/3/4)

The symbiotic relationship between authors and cover artists is something I touched on last week when I was writing about the dust jackets that William Randell designed for Harry Carmichael crime novels in the 1950s and '60s. Sometimes the relationship between a writer and a cover artist is lengthy and celebrated – the covers that Tom Adams designed for the Fontana paperbacks of Agatha Christie's novels spring to mind. Other times it's a fleeting encounter, often brought about by happenstance – an author is published by a particular publisher, for whom a cover artist happens to be working at the same time.

Such is almost certainly the case with thriller writer Francis Clifford and artist and cartoonist Peter Probyn. By 1960 Clifford had had six novels published, first by Jonathan Cape (Honour the Shrine, 1953), then by Hamish Hamilton; as of his seventh novel, 1962's Time is an Ambush, he moved over to Hodder & Stoughton, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Probyn had been a cartoonist for Punch in the 1930s and '40s and a schoolteacher (one of his pupils was the painter Howard Hodgkin, who remembered Probyn fondly in this 2006 Guardian interview), and in the '50s wrote and drew the comic strip Grandpa for the Eagle (home of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future). He began illustrating books and designing dust jackets in the late-1950s, for Lutterworth Press, Chapman and Hall, and then, in the early 1960s, Hodder.

As the 1970s approached, and in common with other thriller writers, the dust jacket designs for Clifford's novels would become largely photographic in nature, but the initial three books published by Hodder all boasted illustrative wrappers, and were all designed by Peter Probyn. I posted one of them, The Hunting-Ground (1964), yesterday, as part of my ongoing series of posts on signed editions, and I blogged about the first of Probyn's Clifford jackets, Time is an Ambush (1962), last year. But I've also come into possession of the other Probyn/Clifford wrapper, The Green Fields of Eden (1963), courtesy of book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, so I'm now able to present all three of the extraordinary dust jackets Peter Probyn designed for Francis Clifford's novels in the 1960s. (Needless to say, The Green Fields of Eden has also now joined Probyn's other designs on the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page.) I'll be returning to Clifford soon enough, but for now, enjoy.

Time is an Ambush by Francis Clifford (Hodder & Stoughton, 1962); wrapper designed by Peter Probyn

The Green Fields of Eden by Francis Clifford (Hodder & Stoughton, 1963); wrapper designed by Peter Probyn

The Hunting-Ground by Francis Clifford (Hodder & Stoughton, 1964); wrapper designed by Peter Probyn

The Hunting-Ground by Francis Clifford (Hodder & Stoughton, 1964): Signed and Dedicated First Edition, Peter Probyn Cover

Returning to the signed editions following a review of Donald E. Westlake's Killing Time, here's a book I picked up for a song off a table outside one of Cecil Court's secondhand bookshops:

Francis Clifford's The Hunting-Ground, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1964. Clifford's ninth novel, it's the story of an Irish photographer who witnesses a plane crash in the Caribbean, and who consequently becomes "suddenly and dangerously the subject of governmental interest, suspicion and attention". Not having read The Hunting-Ground yet I can't say for certain how suddenly or indeed dangerously events progress from there, but this pithy Kirkus review suggests it's a solid entry in Clifford's canon, and for my part I have read perhaps Clifford's best-known novel, The Naked Runner, and that was clammily exciting, plus I know that crime writer and critic Mike Ripley is a fan of the under-appreciated Clifford's work – via his Top Notch Thrillers imprint Mike brought back into print two of Clifford's novels, Time is an Ambush and The Grosvenor Square Goodbye – so there's all of that too.

However, for the purposes of this particular post, we are gathered here not to debate the relative merits of the novel, but to gaze upon this:

Francis Clifford's signature and dedication on the front free endpaper, along with a loosely-inserted little note which suggests that the book was a birthday present, possibly to the lucky Eileen, whoever she was. But there's also this:

Clifford's signature again, this time on the title page. Weirdly enough, I do know of another signed copy of the Hodder first of The Hunting-Ground, this one with a letter from Clifford enclosed (I'm not saying where it is, but it's not online). Given that my copy only cost me a quid, I may still buy the other one, if only to show that letter. On the other hand, sanity may prevail, and you'll just have to live without it.

The dust jacket of The Hunting-Ground was designed by Peter Probyn, an artist I wrote about in this post on the aforementioned Time is an Ambush – in its 1962 Hodder edition, with its Probyn-designed wrapper – which I again found outside a Cecil Court bookshop going for a pittance. Both The Hunting-Ground and Time is an Ambush are already in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery, but Probyn designed the jacket for one other Clifford novel besides, and as luck would have it I recently came into possession of that book as well. So in the next post, I'll be showcasing all three of Probyn's splendid wrappers for Clifford's novels...

Cecil Court Score: Time is an Ambush by Francis Clifford; Hodder, 1962, Peter Probyn Cover Art

I'm playing catch-up for the rest of this week on three books wot I bought flippin' ages ago – all decidedly obscure thrillers – but for one reason or another haven't got round to blogging about. And the first of those is a novel I picked up during a visit earlier in the year to London's book-lovers' paradise, Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road:

A UK hardback first edition of British thriller author Francis Clifford's Time is an Ambush, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1962. I spied this copy malingering on a shelf outside one of the Cecil Court bookshops, in amongst the cheap and unloved tomes that a lot of the shops there have in dump bins by their front windows. I think I only paid a couple of quid for it, which, when you consider there are only two copies of this edition on AbeBooks, one in New Zealand and the other a signed copy from a UK seller for fifty quid, was a bit of a bargain.

Time is an Ambush was Clifford's seventh novel; I blogged about his debut, 1953's Honour the Shrine, here (in a 1957 Corgi paperback edition), and I reviewed one of his most famous books, 1966's The Naked Runner, here. Time is an Ambush is about an English novelist, Stephen Tyler, "living in the small Spanish seaside town of Bandaques, near Barcelona," according the the dustjacket flap blurb. It continues: "While there he meets a German tourist Eric Scheele, and his young wife Ilse, and a relationship develops between Ilse and Stephen. The sudden death of the husband, which could have brought Stephen and Ilse closer together, only creates a psychological barrier between them. And when police investigations reveal the facts about Scheele's past, Stephen is faced with an agonising choice. If Ilse ever learns the truth about her husband it will destroy her, yet if he does not tell her he will lose her."

Most of Clifford's novels are long out of print... but not Time is an Ambush. Because at the start of last year Ostara Publishing made it available as one of their print-on-demand Top Notch Thriller titles. Shots Magazine also ran a review of the novel, calling it "beautifully detailed, subtle (yet tense)", while in October last year Mike Ripley picked it as one of his favourite thrillers.

The dustjacket on the Hodder edition was designed by Peter Probyn, and it is a remarkable piece of work. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's one of the best wrappers I've yet come across. With its restricted palette and use of chiaroscuro it reminds me a little of one of Denis McLoughlin's covers, except more symbolic and allusive. Probyn was a cartoonist and illustrator who created a handful of book covers in the 1960s, among them the jacket for the 1964 Hodder first edition of Clifford's The Hunting Ground. He contributed cartoons to Punch, wrote and drew the Grandpa comic strip in Eagle in the 1950s, and also edited a number of instructional drawing manuals, notably The Complete Drawing Book, which went through multiple editions from 1970 on (it's out of print now).

But perhaps his most significant contribution to the field of art came when he was a schoolteacher during, I think, the 1940s. Among his pupils was a young Howard Hodgkin, who would of course go on to become a respected and revered abstract painter. Hodgkin wasn't terribly happy at school, but as this Guardian interview with the artist reveals, one of the few bright spots for him during that time was being taught by Probyn. So while these days Probyn is little-remembered, for Hodgkin, he was an important formative influence.

Right then. On to the next obscure thriller, with which we welcome back our dear old friend, Beverley le Barrow...

Book Review: The Naked Runner (Hodder First Edition), and Some More on its Author, Francis Clifford

A common theme on Existential Ennui – more of a lament, really – is how certain authors seem to drop off the radar, particularly dead ones. Doubtless this was always the case, but the rapid expansion of the internet, which has become most people's main method of finding out information, has meant that, as well as the traditional publishing ignominy of their backlists falling out of print, many middle-ranking writers who died before the internet really got going don't get their due online either. Some supposedly forgotten authors – Gavin Lyall, say – are still in print (just about, anyway: Lyall's 1965 thriller Midnight Plus One was reissued by Orion in 2005 as part of that publisher's Crime Masterworks series) and warrant a fairly decent Wikipedia entry. Others, however, are denied even that.

One such is Francis Clifford. I've blogged about Clifford – real name Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson – before, notably in this post about his 1953 debut, Honour the Shrine. Clifford wrote nineteen crime and espionage novels, and won the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award twice, yet his Wikipedia entry consists of two lines and a bibliography and his un-bought books haunt eBay. I mentioned in that previous post that his 1966 novel The Naked Runner was turned into a 1967 Frank Sinatra-starring movie (his 1959 book, Act of Mercy, also became a film, 1962's Guns of Darkness), but at the time I didn't have a copy of the book. Now, however, I do:

A 1966 UK hardback first edition, published by Hodder & Stoughton, with a dustwrapper designed by Peter Calcott (who also designed the jacket for Hodder's 1967 first edition of Ross Thomas's Spy in the Vodka, a.k.a. The Cold War Swap). And for once, I've actually read it – and it's a little cracker.

The novel follows widower and single father Sam Laker, who on the way to work one day saves a woman and her baby from being run over and consequently comes to the attention of Martin Slattery, shadowy secret service type and former wartime colleague of Sam's. Laker is due to fly to Leipzig in Germany's Russian Zone with his son, to attend a trade fair and then do some sightseeing; Slattery asks him to deliver something hidden in a watch strap. Sam reluctantly agrees – it turns out he'll be delivering it to a woman he last saw during the war and who he believed to be dead – and from that point on falls into a nightmare, as his world is turned upside down and he's forced to become an assassin.

Beginning, as it does, in England, the novel initially comes across as rather dated and jolly hockey-sticks. But before too long there are glimpses of Laker's dark past, notably the savage killing spree he embarked on whilst behind enemy lines during World War II. (Something that a lot of 1950s-1970s thriller and espionage novels share is that the Second World War was still a recent memory. Many authors like Clifford fought in the war, an experience which informed their fiction.) Sam's subdued anger becomes increasingly key as the novel progresses and he becomes more and more paranoid.

There's a cynical seam running through The Naked Runner that makes it feel quite contemporary, despite the Cold War trappings. There's no right or wrong here; all the players (save Sam's son) are complicit somehow in what Sam goes through, including himself. Towards the end of the novel Sam's situation becomes so bleak and hopeless it almost becomes too much; that Clifford does eventually offer a sliver of hope is, in the final analysis, cold comfort.

I mentioned at the start of this post that Clifford doesn't have much of a Wikipedia entry... but he does have a decent entry in the afore-blogged-about Who's Who in Spy Fiction by Donald McCormick, which reveals all sorts of fascinating titbits about him. Prior to becoming a novelist he worked in the rice trade in the Far East before World War II, and then as an industrial journalist for the steel industry; by the time of his death in 1975 his world book sales had topped the five million mark; and the Los Angeles Times described his 1967 novel All Men Are Lonely Now as "the finest espionage novel of the decade". Oh, and writing in the Guardian newspaper, critic Franci Iles said Clifford was "almost unique in combining a deeply felt philosophical truth with the real excitement of the thriller".

So there you go. At least there's a bit more about Clifford online now. (And I now have another post about Clifford here.)

Paperback Week: Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford (Corgi)

This week, all week, Existential Ennui will be celebrating the humble paperback book. Because at a time when e-books look increasingly likely to eventually supplant the paperback, this most humble yet still special, versatile and fantastically successful format can surely do with some celebrating. While hardbacks, with their fancy wraparound dustjackets (and doesn't that 'jacket' just imply aloofness, a cut above, upper class?) and solid, dependable case binding are seen as the respectable face of book collecting and publishing, the poor little paperback, forever getting folded and creased and spine-cracked, stuffed in pockets and handbags and left on trains and in loos, is damned as disposable, discardable, destroyable. In second hand bookshops, hardbacks get to nestle snugly inside in the warm on specially constructed bookcases; meanwhile, outside, the paperbacks sit and shiver in dump bins, browning and warping in the elements. If jacketed hardbacks are the aristocracy of the book world, paperbacks are the lumpen proletariat.

Don't get me wrong – anyone who's read this blog will know that I do love hardbacks. But there is also a place for paperbacks in my collection too. Often their covers and design outshine their supposedly more sophisticated brethren. So this week I'll be singing the praises of the paperback, through a series of posts on recently acquired books, many of which I picked up at the London Paperback and Pulp Fair, which took place at the end of October in a swanky London hotel... or rather, in the basement of a swanky London hotel, in an anonymous, windowless, airless, smallish room – which kind of says it all really. Perversely, however, the first couple of paperbacks I'll be showing you didn't come from the Paperback and Pulp Fair (as you'll see, there'll be connecting threads between the books I show this week other than simply where they came from). They came instead from the good ol' internet. And we'll begin with this:

The UK first Corgi paperback edition of Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford, published in 1957 (originally published in hardback by Cape in 1953). Clifford is the nom de plume of Arthur Leonard Bell Thompson, author of nineteen novels from 1953 to 1979, a mixture of thrillers and crime and espionage works. Like a lot of British – and American – thriller writers from the 20th century, he's increasingly overlooked, and his entire body of work is now out of print, with the exception of 1962's Time is an Ambush, which is available print-on-demand from Ostara Publishing. Ostara also have the best online biography of Clifford, which you can find here.

Honour the Shrine is Clifford's debut novel, a taut, first-person World War II tale centring on a British mission to blow up a bridge in Japanese-occupied Burma; the reason I picked it up (for a pittance, it has to be said) was because of a comment Book Glutton left on this post about Ross Thomas' Spy in the Vodka (a.k.a. The Cold War Swap), the back cover of which has a raft of glowing review quotes for Clifford's 1966 novel The Naked Runner (also published by Hodder, Thomas' UK publisher at the time). Slightly counterintuitively, though, rather than buy The Naked Runner, I bought Cifford's first book instead, mostly because it happened to float past my eyes on eBay. However, The Naked Runner does look like a cracker – certainly better than the supposedly rubbish Frank Sinatra-starring film it was turned into in 1967 – so I'll be returning to it in the not-too-distant future...

The publisher of this edition of Honour the Shrine, Corgi, was a mainstay of the British publishing scene in the second half of the 20th century, pumping out cheap paperback reprints of every type of fiction. Corgis don't seem to be as collectible as say, Pan, but they're still worth nabbing, as their painted covers can be at least the equal of more desirable paperbacks (I own a rather lovely 1952 first UK paperback edition of Patricia Highsmith's debut, Strangers on a Train, for example). The cover artist here is John Richards, and as is often the case, that bastion of decency and good taste Steve Holland has pretty much the only bio on him, right here. Go take a butcher's.