2017: Science Fiction Odyssey Three

I suppose really this post should be titled '2017: Science Fiction Odyssey Six' or something, given that besides two prior similarly-titled posts on my continuing science fiction book collecting odyssey, '2017: A Science Fiction Odyssey' and '2017: Odyssey to... Bookshops in Worthing, Leigh-on-Sea and Tunbridge Wells', I've done SF-book-collecting-odyssey posts centring on the Isle of Wight, Brighton and the Lewes Book Fair. But Arthur C. Clarke only wrote four books in his series – I've been riffing on the titles of Clarke's 'Space Odyssey' novels, you see – and I'd already ballsed up the numbering by not making the Isle of Wight post the second part of the odyssey, so '2017: Science Fiction Odyssey Three' it is.

And the odyssey this time takes in Littlehampton, Worthing (again), Brighton (again), Tonbridge and Sydenham, all of which I've trekked to in search of secondhand SF over the past month or so. A warning: anyone expecting picturesque (unlikely in the cases of Worthing and Sydenham I know, but anyway) shots of those far-flung locales is likely to be sorely disappointed; as in previous odyssey posts, this one will largely consist of photographs of my hand holding books outside – and mostly obscuring, helpfully – secondhand bookshops, so depending on your mileage for partially obscured secondhand bookshops/books/hands, you may want to stop reading now.

My first stop on this leg of the odyssey was the coastal town of Littlehampton, about an hour from Lewes (where I live) by car or indeed by train, which was how I travelled on this occasion. I ventured there drawn by the Fireside Bookshop, which relocated to Littlehampton from the Lake District a couple of years ago and which I'd been meaning to visit ever since I learned of that relocation. Situated in a small arcade at the far end of the high street from the train station, it's an attractive shop with a diverse stock arranged around one large and one smaller room, but though its (largely paperback) fiction section in the main room stretches the length of its front windows, when I visited there wasn't much in the way of science fiction on offer. However, the owner had just bought in an SF collection, and although he hadn't yet catalogued it all, he did have a few bits behind the counter. After a look through the two small proffered piles I selected this:

A pristine first edition of Greg Bear's alien invasion/end of the world epic The Forge of God, published in hardback by Gollancz in 1987, dust jacket illustration by John Harris. That'll do nicely.

Heading back towards Lewes I stopped off at Worthing in order to have another look for SF in Badger's Books. The box of SF paperbacks I found before was still there, and this time I plucked from it three paperback firsts of early novels by Ian Watson – The Martian Inca (Granada/Panther, 1978, cover illustration by Peter Gudynas), Alien Embassy (Granada/Panther, 1979) and Miracle Visitors (Granada/Panther, 1980) – and two paperback firsts of novels by Bob Shaw: Ground Zero Man (Corgi, 1976) and The Ceres Solution (Granada, 1983). However, as I was paying for those, I spied in the shelf of signed books running high up along one wall in the first room a Peter F. Hamilton book, which on closer inspection turned out to be this:

A copy of the signed, limited, numbered, slipcased edition of The Temporal Void, published by Macmillan in 2008, dust jacket and box illustration by Jim Burns. The second in Hamilton's Void Trilogy, it's the sequel to 2007's The Dreaming Void, a first edition of which I'd found in the Lewes Book Centre not long before. Splendid.

Living in Lewes as I do, it's not unusual for me to buy books in nearby Brighton; but it is unusual for me to take a picture of whichever books I've bought outside whichever bookshop I've bought them in – which is precisely what I did one sunny Saturday early in September (when I was ostensibly in Brighton for my friend – and Brit comics/dinosaur art superstar – Steve White's stag do) at Colin Page Antiquarian Books (which, sadly, will be closing down quite soon, passing trade apparently not being enough to justify the cost of keeping a shop in the centre of Brighton) after buying some SF paperbacks from the table outside the shop, so I figured I might as well include that picture in this post. On the top is a 1982 New English Library first paperback edition of Search for the Sun!, the first novel in Colin Kapp's Cageworld series, cover illustration by Gerald Grace; then a 1979 Hamlyn paperback first of Healer, the debut novel by F. Paul Wilson (who recently wrote the foreword to a book I project edited, The Art of the Pulps); and a 1969 Coronet paperback first of SF anthology Seven Trips Through Time and Space, edited by Groff Conklin and featuring stories by among others Larry Niven and Cordwainer Smith.

While Brighton is for me a frequent destination, Tonbridge, in Kent, about an hour's drive north from Lewes, isn't (I've probably been there a handful of times, one of which I only have a dim recollection of as it involved drunken boating on the Medway with my friend Mike). But on a whim I motored there in order to have a mooch around the excellently-named Mr. Books, which I'd been meaning to check out for a while, and especially so since it reopened under new management in August. A bijou one-room split-level affair, the shop's hardback fiction section up the back didn't hold anything of interest for me, but the paperback fiction section down the front, with its shelf of film tie-ins, was another matter entirely:

On the top there is a first edition/first printing of Michael Crichton's original Westworld screenplay, published straight to paperback by Bantam in 1974. Quite a rare book – especially so in the UK – it includes 32 pages of stills and behind-the-scenes shots and an enlightening essay by Crichton about the tribulations of making the film, worth the price of admission alone – which in my case was three quid, significantly less than first printings usually go for.

Underneath that is a 1947 first Penguin paperback edition of Graham Greene's travelogue The Lawless Roads (I do still buy non-SF books, y'know); a 1978 Paradise Press paperback first of Bob Balaban's making-of memoir Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary – another rare book, later reissued by Titan as Spielberg, Truffaut and Me (which is the edition I read it in when I worked at Titan); a 1950 Cherry Tree Books paperback first of Edward Woodward's Dead Man's Plaything – an incredibly rare book (there's not a single copy for sale online) which I bought because I wondered whether the author might be the Edward Woodward, who would have been 20 when it was published; a 1970 Pan first paperback edition of Kingsley 'Robert Markham' Amis' Bond novel Colonel Sun; a 2004 Gollancz first paperback printing of Alastair Reynolds' Absolution Gap, the final part of his central Revelation Space universe trilogy and, weirdly, the one book I was hoping I might find when I decided to make the journey to Tonbridge (and lo and behold, serendipitously, there it was, hidden behind some other SF paperbacks, almost as if it was waiting for me...); and a 1993 HarperCollins first paperback printing of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.

Not a bad haul. But Tonbridge wasn't done with me yet, because on the way back to the car I had a look in the local Oxfam Books and emerged with a 1980 Orbit/Futura paperback first of Larry Niven's short story collection Convergent Series, cover illustration by Peter Jones; a 2008 Gollancz paperback of Greg Egan's Diaspora; and a 2002 US Baen hardback first edition/fist printing of Andre Norton's Warlock, which collects the three Forerunner novels Storm over Warlock (1960), Ordeal in Otherwhere (1964) and Forerunner Foray (1973).

Lastly on this leg of the odyssey, Sydenham, and the Kirkdale Bookshop, which I swung by one Sunday when I was up at my folks' for the weekend (they live in nearby Beckenham). A browse through the first edition bookcases and (mostly paperback) SF section in the secondhand basement produced a 1962 Corgi paperback first of Planet of the Dreamers (alias Wine of the Dreamers), the first SF novel by crime writer John D. MacDonald, cover art by Josh Kirby; a 1976 Orbit paperback of Larry Niven's Protector; a 1981 Orbit paperback of Jerry Pournelle's Future History; and a 1967 Hodder hardback first of Edmund Cooper's A Far Sunset – a scarce edition that one, especially so in its jacket.

The odyssey, inevitably, continues...

NB: Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Infinite Stars, Space Opera, Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space: Night Passage, and Cordwainer Smith's The Rediscovery of Man

I seldom request advance review copies of books – I get offered them quite a lot but my blogging is so intermittent these days and I've such a backlog of old books (and comics) to blog about that the thought of having to do a timely post on a new book as well is almost too much to bear – but when Titan Books (where – full disclosure – long ago I ran the graphic novels department) sent out an email about this:

Infinite Stars, an anthology of space opera and military science fiction to be published on 24 October (jacket illustration by Luca Oleastri), I couldn't resist nabbing a copy. Put together by writer and editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt, the near-700-page hardback collects short – and not-so-short – SF stories both new and vintage by authors both neophyte and veteran, among the latter Robert Silverberg, Anne McCaffrey, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Silverberg also provides a fantastically entertaining introduction explicating the origins of space opera – the phrase and the form – concentrating especially on the exuberance of its early–mid twentieth century pulp-magazine incarnation; stories in the words of one critic of "incredible heroes, unbelievable weapons, insurmountable obstacles, inconceivable science, omnipotent villains, and unimaginable cataclysms" – or as Wilson Tucker, who in 1941 coined the term space opera as a pejorative, put it: "the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn".

All of which might by itself have been enough, given my recently rediscovered fervour for SF, for me to want a copy. However, my real reason for getting the anthology was that it contains a brand new Revelation Space universe story by Alastair Reynolds. Titled "Night Passage", it's set 200 years before the events of Revelation Space (2000) and details humanity's first encounter with a mysterious region of altered spacetime – which will become known as a Shroud – and a potentially cataclysmic rupturing of trust between the command crew of an interstellar spaceship, the Equinoctial, and a contingent of their Conjoiner (a hive-minded human faction) passengers. It's a fine tale, told in the first person by the ship's captain, Rauma Bernsdottir, and exploring notions of shame and forgiveness and how false assumptions can lead to catastrophe.

Of the twenty-three other stories in the anthology I've only read a handful thus far, but of those, one I really liked was a beautifully written vintage story by Cordwainer Smith, "The Game of Rat and Dragon". First published in 1955 (in Galaxy Science Fiction), it's a far-future tale of the conflict between a force piloted by telepathic "pinlighters" and their feline partners – the cats' lightning-swift instincts having been found to complement the humans' intellects – and ferocious alien Dragons, and forms part of Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind series. I was drawn to it in particular because a couple of months ago in Leigh Gallery Books in Essex I picked up this:

A 1988 Gollancz first edition of The Rediscovery of Man (jacket illustration by John Avon). Originally published in the States in 1975 as The Best of Cordwainer Smith, it includes "The Game of Rat and Dragon" alongside eleven other stories from Smith's Instrumentality universe – led off by the first story set in that future history, 1950's "Scanners Live in Vain" – and an insightful introduction by John J. Pierce (who also provides brief intros to each of the tales). The portrait that Pierce paints of Smith, alias Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, is an intriguing one. Godson of Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, the Milwaukee-born Smith was a colonel in US Army Intelligence, advisor to the British forces in Malaya and the US Eighth Army in Korea, Professor of Asiatic politics at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Psychological Warfare, "still regarded as the most authoritative text in the field".

But as fascinating as all this is, it's Smith's fiction that's arguably the most extraordinary thing about him, especially those stories set in his Instrumentality universe. "In Cordwainer Smith's epic of the future," writes Pierce, "the Instrumentality of Mankind has the hallmarks of both a political elite and a priesthood. Its hegemony is that, not of the galactic empire so typical of less imaginative SF, but of something far more subtle and pervasive – at once political and spiritual. Its lords see themselves not as mere governors or bureaucrats or politicians, but as instruments of human destiny itself." Highlighting "the spontaneity of his work", the "elusive... allusions in his stories" and "the strong sense of vocation expressed by the scanners, sailors, pinlighters, Go-captains and the lords themselves", Pierce notes that "Smith was a mythmaker in science fiction", stating in closing: "The work of Cordwainer Smith will always retain its enigmas. But that is part of its appeal. In reading his stories, we are caught up in experiences as real as life itself – and just as mysterious."

Diamond Dogs and the Revelation Space Novellas and Stories of Alastair Reynolds

I've got a lot of time for novellas. Or rather, I only have a certain amount of time available to me for reading prose fiction, and novellas afford something approaching the substance of a novel with the practical brevity of a short story. This has been pertinent as I've been making my way through Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe, a hard-science-fiction-future-history which has become something of an obsession of mine over the past six months – a mild, manageable one, but still a persistent strain in the broader science fiction fever which has infected me. Five novels form the backbone of the series – Revelation Space (2000) and its two sequels, Redemption Ark (2002) and Absolution Gap (2003), plus Chasm City (2001) and The Prefect (2007; that last one will gain a sequel – Elysium Fire – and a new title, Aurora Rising, next year) – but around those are arranged five short stories and seven novellas, and these have played a not insignificant role in the development of my mild, manageable obsession. For while the Revelation Space universe novels for me represent a major investment of time – they're all around 500 to 600 pages long, which translates as probably a couple of months' worth of reading apiece – the short stories and novellas are quicker, less daunting reads.

They're also really, really good in their own right – stylistically and tonally varied, hard SF stories which sketch in some of the background to the Revelation Space universe – "Great Wall of Mars" and "Glacial" are particularly significant here – and/or afford glimpses into some of its murkier, more obscure corners. Most of the stories are collected in the 2006 collection Galactic North, but a handful aren't, notably two novellas which were published separately as limited editions in 2001 and 2002 by small press publishers and then brought together by Gollancz in 2003: Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days. I found a first of the Gollancz edition for £2.50 in Camilla's Bookshop in Eastbourne in April and read it on holiday in June, and Diamond Dogs in particular really got its hooks into me: a queasily gripping, unsettling, gothic tale of obsession that for the most part takes place inside an alien artefact – the Blood Spire – on a planet, Golgotha, far from human-colonised space. It brought to my mind the 1997 film Cube – which is obliquely referenced in the story, along with Raiders of the Lost Ark (that film's opening sequence especially) and Algys Budrys' Rogue Moon, all of which should give some idea of the direction of travel – and, more obscurely, P. M. Hubbard's A Hive of Glass, at least in terms of its theme of the bloody extremes that people will go to to get what they desire, if not its scything body horror.

In fact, so affecting did I find the thing that I wound up buying a copy of the original 2001 standalone first, which was issued by PS Publishing in an edition of 500 numbered paperbacks and 400 numbered hardbacks, all signed by Alastair Reynolds. Taken with the evocative David A. Hardy cover art – and the fact that it was signed – I'd been idly looking at listings for the hardback on eBay, considering stumping up £30–£50 for a copy, when I spotted one on Amazon Marketplace for a fiver. I snapped it up, and discovered when it arrived that not only was it brand new and unread, but it had been signed by both Reynolds and fellow SF author Stephen Baxter, who wrote the illuminating introduction. A nice addition, then, to my growing Revelation Space universe collection.

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 22/9/17.

Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space Universe

If I ever get the chance to meet Alastair Reynolds, I've a lot to thank him for. Not only have his books helped fuel the science fiction reading and collecting odyssey I embarked on six months ago, but his afterword in his 2006 short story collection Galactic North – a first edition of which I picked up in Oxfam Books in Brighton for a couple of quid – has informed and shaped it too: acting as a guide through the kind of modern hard/operatic SF in which I've become interested, introducing me to SF authors of whom I was previously unaware – John Varley, Gregory Benford, Paul McAuley, others besides – and opening my eyes to a handful I was, such as Larry Niven, Samuel R. Delany, M. John Harrison, Stephen Baxter, Bruce Sterling and Iain M. Banks.

Perhaps the biggest revelation – if you'll excuse the pun – has been Reynolds' own Revelation Space universe, a future history comprising five novels and twelve novellas and short stories (to date; there's another novel due next year) – Galactic North being a collection of most of the latter. Sprawling yet tightly choreographed – at least it seems so to me; Reynolds himself has confessed that he's unconcerned with inconsistencies from book to book – the stories span tens of thousands of years (although the bulk concentrate on the 25th–27th centuries), depicting a technologically advanced but plausible future of sub-light interstellar travel (with its attendant – and to me fascinating – suspended animation – "reefersleep" to use the vernacular – and time dilation), planetary colonisation, warfare and plague, populated by a splintered humanity comprising various conflicting factions (hive-minded Conjoiners, cybernetic spacefaring Ultranauts, etc.) and haunted by long-dead but still influential alien races (arguably the least plausible aspect of the stories, but hey – who's to say?). To date I've only really skimmed the surface – I've read the first-published novel, 2000's Revelation Space, plus a good number of the short stories and novellas, and I'm partway through the second-published novel, 2001's Chasm City – but even so I've become mildly obsessed.

Accordingly, I've been picking up here and there Gollancz first editions of Revelation Space universe books, with their distinctive Richard Carr-designed/Chris Moore-illustrated dust jackets and covers (and in most cases distinctive dimensions: a whopping 10" x 6.5" – roughly royal octavo – rather than the standard 9" x 6", or octavo). Partly out of necessity (I am, as I've noted previously, a man of slender means), partly as a challenge, I've restricted myself to relatively cheap copies. Aside from the aforementioned Galactic North, in Camilla's Bookshop in Eastbourne I dug out from the teetering piles of SF a 2002 first trade paperback printing of Redemption Ark (the third-published Revelation Space universe novel, and a direct sequel to Revelation Space), priced at £3.50, and a 2003 hardback first of the two-novella collection Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, priced at £2.50. But my best scores have been made online, notably a hardback first edition of Revelation Space itself, which, according to some sources, only had a print run of around a thousand copies – it was, after all, a debut novel by a relatively unknown writer – and which as a consequence has become quite scarce and pricey; I managed to secure a nice copy for a tenner.

Naturally, me being me, I've acquired some signed books as well: a 2000 first trade paperback printing of Revelation Space, bought for the princely sum of one pence (plus postage); a 2001 first paperback printing of the same novel, bought for £7.25 (if you're wondering at this point what on earth possessed me to buy another two copies – albeit signed ones – of a novel I already owned in hardback first, you evidently haven't read Existential Ennui before); a pristine 2001 hardback first edition of Chasm City – at £20 my most expensive Revelation Space universe purchase, but still, I reckon, something of a bargain.

Although maybe not as much of a bargain as my most recent Revelation Space universe acquisition – a 2001 PS Publishing hardback first of the novella Diamond Dogs, dust jacket by David A. Hardy: limited to just 400 copies (in hardback; there were also 500 paperbacks) and signed by both Reynolds and Stephen Baxter – who provides an introduction – it set me back a fiver. Though I've a good many Revelation Space universe stories still to read (and a number of first editions still to collect), I suspect Diamond Dogs – a brilliant and disturbing tale of obsession that really got its hooks into me – will remain a firm – if not overall – favourite, for reasons I'll expand on in a subsequent post.

NB: Linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books round-up.

The Terrorists, alias Double, Double: a Calder and Behrens Story by Michael Gilbert

Among the 185 short stories that British crime and mystery author Michael Gilbert wrote over the course of his 50-year career are 24 spy stories starring Daniel Calder and Samuel Behrens, malevolent late middle-aged operatives of the External Branch of the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee. Originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the US and Argosy in the UK, almost all of the Calder and Behrens stories were collected in two Gilbert anthologies – the sublime Game Without Rules (1967) and the almost as brilliant Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (1982). (Gilbert also wrote 16 radio plays featuring his ageing secret agents, which I discussed last month.) But there is one Calder and Behrens story which doesn't feature in either of those books. It first appeared in 1967 under the title "The Terrorists" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and "Double, Double" in Argosy, before being collected in this anthology:

Ellery Queen's Mystery Parade, published by Gollancz in 1969 under one of that publisher's iconic yellow typographic dust jackets. Being a UK edition of a US collection – the book was originally published by New American Library in the States in 1968 – the title of "The Terrorists" was retained; it wasn't until 2007 that the story was published in book form under its British title of "Double, Double", when it was included in the posthumous Michael Gilbert collection Even Murderers Take Holidays.

I'm not sure why it wasn't collected in the 1982 Calder and Behrens anthology (it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Argosy too late to have been included in Game Without Rules) but I can hazard a guess or two. In Argosy, it was published under the overarching series title of "Agents in Action" in the April 1967 issue. Part one of that series, "Upon the King", was published in the March issue and collected in Game Without Rules, while part three, "Twilight of the Gods", was published in the May issue and collected in Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens, so perhaps "The Terrorists" fell between two stools. Or it could be that it was simply overlooked; on first inspection, Calder and Behrens barely seem to feature at all in the story, merely getting a couple of mentions towards the end.

In fact for the unsuspecting Calder/Behrens enthusiast only a passing reference to Fortescue – Calder and Behrens' boss – at the start of the tale gives the game (without rules) away that "The Terrorists" is a part of their canon. The pair do appear throughout, but under assumed names and identities, both of them operating undercover as a means of unpicking a plot by a middle-eastern terrorist cell to set off a bomb in London (there's a nice, explicitly acknowledged, bit of misdirection as to which of the terrorists Calder and/or Behrens is). It's a good story, well worth the effort, I would say – at least for those aforementioned Calder/Behrens enthusiasts – of tracking it down – something that shouldn't prove too difficult for anyone so inclined; while the Gollancz edition is pretty scarce and the New American Library edition not much more common, there are at least half a dozen copies of the 1969 Signet paperback edition available online as I type, and fairly cheaply too.

For my part, having now collected and read "The Terrorists", Game Without Rules and Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (and the two published radio plays in The Murder of Diana Devon), I'm left in the sorry situation of having no more Calder and Behrens stories to track down. At least, that I'm aware of...

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 10/4/17.

War Game by Anthony Price (Gollancz, 1976; David Audley Series #7): Book Review

NB: One of this Friday's Forgotten Books.

'Formulaic' is a word oft applied to genre fiction, and in many cases rightly so: think of contemporary crime fiction, with its interminable parade of interchangeable detective-inspectors and mutilated female corpses. But though formulaic may be a derogatory term, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with developing or adhering to a formula. Some of the best and most influential crime and spy series ever published – Richard Stark's Parker novels and Ian Fleming's Bond ones spring to (my) mind – were written to formulas, and yet individual books within those series still stand as distinctive works of fiction in their own right. The key is to mix things up a bit – to, as Mike Love of the Beach Boys memorably put it, "fuck with the formula" (Love was actually advising Brian Wilson against doing that, but Wilson ignored him, with spectacular results) – and this is what Anthony Price does with his David Audley series of spy novels.

Since I first encountered the series in 2011 I've read seven of Price's nineteen Audley thrillers – most recently War Game, published by Victor Gollancz in 1976 – and though the elements – the formula – that comprise the novels have become familiar – a preoccupation with the past and, often, archaeology, one which feeds into a (then) present day mystery concerning state security; a reliance on dialogue rather than description as a means of unravelling that mystery – Price always finds a way to fuck with that formula.

His chief method of doing so is by changing the principal viewpoint character, beginning with the clever and prickly Audley himself in The Labyrinth Makers (1970), then moving through a variety of other operatives of the Research and Development Section of British Intelligence – plus the odd stray Italian and American – as the novels progress, and arriving, Magic Faraway Tree-style, back at Audley as of War Game. This is an older and more seasoned Audley, however – in Price's stories time marches on at roughly the same pace as the books were originally published, so a good six or seven years have elapsed since the events of The Labyrinth Makers – one who gazes upon subordinates Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon and, despite being respectively irritated and beguiled by them, sees a pair of stars destined to rise further in the Intelligence firmament than he ever has or will.

But it's still Audley who for the most part makes the intellectual running here, doing his damndest to work out how leftie firebrand Charlie Ratcliffe has managed to unearth £2 million in 17th century gold – with which he intends to fund his radical workers' newspaper – and have his brother bumped off during a Civil War reenactment into the bargain, thus securing the fortune for himself. As before in the series, there's more – or perhaps less – going on than meets the eye, and so even though Price's own politics show through on occasion – the moral matter of whether a government minister should really be turning an apparatus of state to the undoing of a left-wing irritant is never fully addressed – there is a genuine threat to national security at play, one which must be countered. The identity of that threat may not come as a huge surprise, but the rug-pulling reveal of its method demonstrates there's plenty of fun to be had with Price's formula yet.

Our Man in Camelot (Gollancz, 1975 / Doubleday, 1976) by Anthony Price: David Audley Spy Novel #6; Book Review

NB: Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Back in July 2011 I had the pleasure of interviewing spy novelist and journalist Anthony Price at his (then) Oxfordshire home (the interview can be found in two parts here and here). After an hour-long recorded conversation in his study ranging across his life, his book reviewing, his politics and of course his David Audley spy novel series, we retired to the conservatory, where Price kindly signed and inscribed two books I'd brought along (Gollancz firsts of the first two David Audley novels, The Labyrinth Makers and The Alamut Ambush).

As we chatted, Price began telling me about an American Air Force pilot who had at one time lived just up the road. Mid-sentence the author upped and disappeared off to his study, returning with a 1976 US Doubleday first edition of his sixth novel, Our Man in Camelot (originally 1975). He explained that the book had been inspired by that pilot – that one day he had informed his near-neighbour, "I'm going to write a book about you lot." To which the pilot had replied, rather surprisingly, "I thought you wrote about King Arthur." So Price decided to combine the two strands in one novel.

Having recounted this tale, Price then inscribed his copy of the book and presented it to me as a parting gift:

That it's taken me over two years to get round to reading the novel only serves to demonstrate what an ungrateful swine I am – or possibly illustrate how many books I have awaiting my attentions; take your pick – but that's by the by: read it I finally have, and a fine piece of brain-tickling spy fiction it is.

Each of the David Audley series novels – those I've read thus far anyway – is related from the perspective of a different character: Audley himself in The Labyrinth Makers (1970); then Hugh Roskill and Major Jack Butler, his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence's Research and Development Section, in, respectively, The Alamut Ambush (1971) and Colonel Butler's Wolf (1972); followed by October Men (1973), which unfurls from the twin viewpoints of Captain Peter Richardson and Pietro Boselli; and Other Paths to Glory (1974), which stars researcher Paul Mitchell. This time the tale is told through the eyes of Captain Mosby Sheldon of the US Air Force, a dentist by profession, stationed in Wiltshire with his wife Shirley and currently sightseeing around the south. At least that's the story he tells Audley and his wife Faith, who are also on holiday in the local area, and whom Mosby assists when their car breaks down.

In fact Mosby and his missus (in name only, it transpires) are deep cover agents of the CIA, tasked with covertly enlisting Audley's aid in unravelling the mystery of why a USAF pilot was trying to locate the lost site of a 6th century Arthurian battle, Badon Hill, and whether that had anything to do with said pilot's death in an unexplained plane crash. As is by now traditional in an Audley novel, the answers are (eventually) forthcoming largely as the result of chapter-long – sometimes multiple-chapter-long – discussions between the various protagonists, who also include a variety of other CIA operatives and a selection of Research and Development stalwarts, notably the returning Hugh Roskill, plus a new character, Frances Fitzgibbon, who is destined to head up her own novel before too long (Tomorrow's Ghost, 1979). And somewhere in all this is the hand of Soviet spymaster and archaeological expert, the manipulative Nikolai Panin.

Six books into the series I've become accustomed to Price's agreeable mix of espionage, archaeology, history and detection – and myth and legend in this instance – but that doesn't make the plot of Our Man in Camelot any less perplexing. I spent a fair amount of the book scratching my head wondering what the hell was going on, and even by the denouement, which finds Mosby heading up what he believes to be Badon Hill in the certain knowledge that it will mean his death, I had to reread earlier parts to make sense of the revelations that dawn on Mosby as he tramps up the slope. It's a bit like being at a dinner party where all the guests (except you) are particularly clever and erudite – not that I've ever been invited to such a thing – or many dinner parties at all for that matter – but in any case that's precisely how Mosby himself feels at one stage of the story when he's caught between the piercing intellects of Audley, Audley's archaeologist friend Dr. Anthony Handforth-Jones and their old don Sir Thomas Gracey, Master-designate of the King's College at Oxford.

That said, it's a pleasurable sort of perplexity to have to endure, and especially in such beguiling company. For me that Mosby/Audley/Handforth-Jones/Gracey tête-à-tête (à-tête-à-tête) is one of the highlights of the book, although there are other memorable, and less-talky, scenes too, notably a violent encounter in a church graveyard between opposing intelligence agents, the unexpected aftermath of which packs a real emotional punch.

For reasons too tiresome to go into (short version: I'm unhinged) I actually own two editions of Our Man in Camelot – the aforementioned Doubleday edition, with its John Sposato-designed dust jacket, and the 1975 Gollancz edition too, with its iconic yellow wrapper. Intriguingly, the two books carry different dedications. The US edition, the one Anthony Price inscribed to me, is dedicated to a Judy and Bob Holstein:

But the British edition is dedicated to a John Grassi:

I wasn't recording the conversation at that point, but I believe that's the name of the American airman who lived up the road from Price, and who inspired the writing of the novel. If memory serves, anyway; I've kept up an intermittent correspondence with Mr. Price ever since I interviewed him, sending him print-outs of some of my blog posts (he's not online, and no longer owns a computer either), so I shall have to ask him if and when I send him this one.

Next: the Existential Ennui Review of the Year, 2013 edition.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré: a Review (Gollancz, 1963)

Having recently read and reviewed John le Carré's first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) – it seemed only right and proper that I should tackle his third one too: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. For one thing, it's arguably le Carré's most famous book (although in recent years it's perhaps been surpassed by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as a result of that later novel's 2011 film adaptation); for another, it's widely regarded as his best (although, as brilliant as it is, for my money Tinker is the better novel); and finally, it's actually a sequel of sorts to Call for the Dead – so with that novel still fresh in my mind, what better time to pluck my 1963 first edition (second impression) of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold from the shelves and give it a go.

As it turns out, it's quite a different novel to its two predecessors. Both Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality have an element of the murder mystery to them – much more so in the latter, but that strand of DNA is certainly present in the (largely espionage) genetic makeup of Call. In any case, both are very much reactive novels – British Intelligence operative George Smiley investigating the death of a civil servant and an attendant East German plot in the former, and the rather more down-to-earth death of the wife of a schoolmaster in the latter – whereas The Spy Who Came in from the Cold could be characterized as proactive. Here, the plot is propelled by the machinations of the Circus (MI6) and its head, Control, who hatches a plan to take revenge on Mundt, the East German agent-cum-assassin-turned-Abteilung bigwig who murdered two people in Call (and almost did for Smiley as well).

Furthermore, Smiley isn't the star of Spy. Instead, the man tasked with carrying out Control's fiendish scheme is Alec Leamas, a washed-up operative whose chief East German agent is killed at the beginning of the book. Leamas's assignment is to make himself into a candidate for recruitment by East German Intelligence, a goal which entails him hitting the bottle, getting kicked out of the Circus and even being sent to prison for assault. The one chink of light in this dark descent is Liz, a young librarian who becomes his lover, and who will prove instrumental both to his mission, and in his eventual undoing. (Interestingly, not the first time, nor indeed the last, that a woman will be the downfall of a man in a le Carré novel.)

But although Smiley, supposedly still retired after the events of Call for the Dead, doesn't feature much in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he's a spectral presence throughout. Control enlists his (reluctant) aid in concocting the plan, and he haunts the novel like a portly ghost: glimpsed by Leamas in a greasy spoon and at an airport kiosk; paying Liz a visit with Peter Guillam. He also pops up in the final scene, which brings the action full circle to the East/West Berlin border, but the true climax of the book comes just prior to that, and takes the unexpected shape of a courtroom drama – never my favourite form of fiction, but deployed effectively here by le Carré to lay bare the machinations of Control and the Circus and deliver a final twist which throws a new and awful light on those endeavours.

In the end, le Carré leaves us questioning not only whether the ends justify the means, but whether the ends are desirable either – questions which have as much resonance – as much relevance – today as they did fifty years ago.

A Murder of Quality (1962) from The John le Carré Omnibus (Gollancz, 1964)

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

Having vowed never again to enslave myself to Existential Ennui by embarking on too many series of posts, I find myself, just three posts on from making that vow, in the midst of, you guessed it, another series of posts. But at least, to horribly paraphrase Eric Burdon, my intentions were good, in that the reason I've ended up reading, and then blogging about, two John le Carré novels in fairly quick succession (we'll skip over this interlude post – there's really no excuse for it) is because they both reside in the book I decided I most wanted to read (rather than most wanted to blog about), i.e. The le Carré Omnibus. Published in 1964 to capitalise on the success of le Carré's third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), it contains the author's first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961), and this:

A Murder of Quality (1962) – which, although it stars Call for the Dead's lead, squat spy George Smiley, isn't, unlike most of le Carré's work, an espionage novel. Instead it's a murder mystery, set in and around the fictional rural public school of Carne, where Smiley, having retired from The Circus (MI6) in Call for the Dead (the first of many retirements from the service), is sent by an old intelligence colleague to find out who killed the wife of one of the schoolmasters. Once there, he quickly discovers what a poisonous place Carne is, populated for the most part by supercilious schoolboys and masters and their equally dreadful wives (the masters' wives, that is, not the boys'; they're a bit young for marriage) and fuelled by gossip and backbiting, a toxic social stew typified by a party Smiley attends where one harridan takes great delight in reminding him of the failure of his marriage.

Indeed, Smiley's distaste for Carne – fear of the place, even – has its roots in his rocky relationship with the wayward Ann: his wife spent her childhood there. Still, George is a square peg in a round hole in most situations; early in the novel a commentator bestows upon him the memorable description "Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I'd give my eyes for" – and Smiley certainly puts that brain to good use getting to the bottom of this whodunnit-cum-tragedy. Although in the final analysis, it could be argued that it's the archaic, enervating institution of Carne itself that stands revealed as the true villain of the piece.

To a degree, A Murder of Quality reminded me of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and not merely because its school setting is echoed in the later novel's title. Like Schoolboy – like Smiley himself, in fact – A Murder of Quality is an odd fish, at least in comparison to the wider le Carré canon. Both books are slightly overlooked works sandwiched between spy fiction classics – A Murder of Quality bookended by Call for the Dead and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; The Honourable Schoolboy by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People – and yet nevertheless are rewarding novels in their own right, possessed of a genuine depth of feeling; in the case of A Murder of Quality, it seems evident le Carré was working through some quite personal issues to do with his time at Sherborne public school in the writing of the book. Furthermore, both, in their own ways, interrupt the longer narrative of their particular segments of the George Smiley series; because as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora points out in the comments on my Call for the Dead post, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is essentially a sequel to le Carré's debut.

In light of which information, it stands to reason that since I'm already immersed in le Carré's world, I might as well stay undercover and plunge ever deeper into his murky milieu, with the aforementioned The Spy Who Came in from the Cold....

John le Carré's Debut Novel, Call for the Dead (1961), in The le Carré Omnibus (Gollancz, 1964)

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

If you've read the previous post, you'll know that I chose this next book not because I wanted to blog about it – although, clearly, that is what I'm about to do here – but because I wanted to read it (and if you're baffled as to what exactly the distinction is there, go read that post).

It's a first printing of The le Carré Omnibus, published by Victor Gollancz in 1964 (and published as The Incongruous Spy in the US the same year). Now, if you've been following Existential Ennui for a few years – unlikely, I know, but there might be one or two of you – you might recall my having blogged about this one before, when I bought it back in 2010; it's a collection of John le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), both of which star the author's signature lead, British Intelligence operative George Smiley. That it's taken me well over two years to get round to reading the bloody thing is a terrifically apposite example of how blogging about books can sometimes keep you from reading them, or at least those books you'd probably otherwise have read sooner; I made my way through – and adored – le Carré's later Karla Trilogy – which also, of course, features Smiley – in 2010 and 2011, and yet despite subsequently plucking The le Carré Omnibus from my shelves on more than one occasion, there always seemed to be some other book demanding my attention ahead of it.

Until, that is, I decided to mend my ways a couple of weeks ago and simply choose from the many unread books on my shelves the ones I most wanted to read, rather than the ones I thought would make for a good blog post. And this was the one I kept coming back to – and while neither of the novels within is of the same stature or on the same scale – literary or geographically – as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its two sequels (the third of which, like Tinker, is slowly edging towards the big screen), they are both elegantly written, quietly compelling pieces of, respectively, spy fiction and crime fiction.

In fact, that's one of the interesting things about having the two novels together in this volume: they're quite different in nature – at least, on the surface. Call for the Dead – not only le Carré's debut but Smiley's as well, not to mention that of his occasional sidekick, Peter Guillam – sees Smiley and Inspector Mendel of Scotland Yard investigating the apparent suicide of a civil servant whom Smiley had recently interviewed about his communist background (and who had left a note blaming Smiley for his death), and involves East German agents, multiple killings and even an attempt on Smiley's life. A Murder of Quality, on the other hand, is essentially a murder mystery, a whodunnit, and finds Smiley decamping to a rustic public school at the behest of an old intelligence colleague to ascertain who killed the wife of one of the schoolmasters.

On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that Call for the Dead is a kind of whodunnit too, although I guess that's true of a lot of spy thrillers: you often find there's a mysterious death involved. It also features the first of Smiley's many retirements from The Circus (the colloquial name for MI6), starts with a wonderful precis of his early life, wartime exploits and doomed marriage – to the wayward Ann, who would become so pivotal in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – and boasts a brilliant opening line, which sets the tenor not only for this novel but for later books as well, at least as regards Smiley's emotional travails: 

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary.

Mind you, A Murder of Quality can boast for its part one of the best descriptions of Smiley I've come across, courtesy of Mendel's boss at Scotland Yard, Ben Sparrow... but I think I'll save that for the next post.