LB Score: Hit Man by Lawrence Block; Signed First Edition (Morrow, 1998)

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

Returning to the signed editions after a piece of signed Gavin Lyall paraphernalia, here's a book by a friend and contemporary – not to mention occasional collaborator – of Donald E. Westlake's, collecting – and reworking – a series of short stories starring a self-absorbed assassin...

This is the US first edition/first impression of Lawrence Block's Hit Man, published by William Morrow in 1998, with dust jacket art by Phil Heffernan (actually misspelt "Heffernen" on the jacket flap) and overall jacket design by Bradford Foltz, whose recognizably elegant designs have wrapped novels by the aforementioned Donald Westlake (Watch Your Back!, Mysterious Press, 2005) and Dennis Lehane (the Kenzie and Gennaro novels Darkness, Take My Hand, Sacred, Gone, Baby, Gone and Prayers for Rain), among others.  

Hit Man is the first of four books – soon to be five; there's a new one due next year – featuring John Keller, a hired killer in the throes of an extended existential crisis. The stories in this first collection – some of which originally appeared in Playboy – see Keller carrying out a variety of hits, most of which take him from his base of New York to nothing towns that he fantasizes about moving to and settling down in. Keller's quest to find some purpose in his life also sees him enter therapy (to less-than-satisfactory ends), get a girlfriend (ditto), get a dog (ditto again) and, best of all, in the final story, "Keller in Retirement", take up stamp collecting (as a book and comic collector, I was especially tickled by some of the collecting minutiae Block works in in that last one). The stories are wryly amusing and in places jarringly violent; you get that same sense of a tale being spun by a master storyteller as you do with Westlake (his capers in particular) or Elmore Leonard (another friend and contemporary of Block's). I liked the book a lot, and will definitely be back for more.

Hit Man had been on my radar for a while as one to read, so when I saw this copy squirreled away in the basement of a Cecil Court secondhand bookshop a few months back, and furthermore noted this inside:

I snapped it up. On the way back to Lewes from London I tweeted in a smug fashion that I'd just found a signed Lawrence Block book. Quick as a flash, LB tweeted back with, "It's the unsigned ones that are rare". Given that there are getting on for 3,000 signed Lawrence Block titles currently listed on AbeBooks, I guess he has a point, but even so: I was chuffed to get hold of a signed first edition of Hit Man, and an American first at that.

Next up, it's back to the signed ephemera, although in this case, unlike the Gavin Lyall letter mentioned above, the extraordinary piece of paraphernalia under discussion this time is stapled inside a book. Moreover, it hasn't been signed by the book's author, but by the book's publisher and, believe it or not, by a former prime minister...

Donald E. Westlake Non-Fiction: "Break-Out", in Ed McBain's Mystery Book No. 3, 1961 (Pocket Books)

(NB: a version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

Back in May of this year, I posted a series of reviews on Existential Ennui of some of the short stories Donald E. Westlake wrote for American science fiction magazines in the 1950s and '60s (along with a bibliography of those tales). Some of those stories were later collected in book form – notably in 1989's Tomorrow's Crimes – but many have never been seen since. Now that I'm blogging over on The Violent World of Parker, I'll be returning to Westlake's SF stories in another series of posts starting next week – in amongst the still-ongoing Existential Ennui posts on signed editions, that is – with a handful of further futuristic tales dating from around 1962.

But in the midst of my feverish online quest for old science fiction magazines, I turned up something by Westlake that wasn't science fiction, or crime fiction – or even fiction for that matter: an obscure essay in a short-lived crime story magazine; an essay which, while not an essential piece of the Westlake puzzle, is still interesting for how it represents a little-examined aspect of the great man's writing career.

Westlake didn't write a hell of a lot of non-fiction, at least not compared to the reams of fiction he bashed out over the years. There's his 1972 book-length account of the 1969 British invasion of the Caribbean island of Aguilla, of course (Under an English Heaven), and his earlier pseudonymous biography of Elizabeth Taylor (which Trent blogged about on TVWoP just the other day). Alongside those, the "official" bibliography on his website lists just six other non-fiction articles, two of those being forewords or introductions to books. But in fact, Westlake did pen a number of other non-fiction pieces besides, certainly more than that abbreviated biblio suggests. There was a 1971 feature on Aguilla for The New York Times (perhaps the inspiration for Under an English Heaven); a piece titled "Love Stuff, Cops-and-Robbers Style" that same year in The Los Angeles Times; an article titled "Discovering Belize" in 1984, again for The New York Times (and possibly an earlier one in 1982, comparing the situation in Belize at the time to that of the Falkland Islands); and a handful of other essays as well. Including, in 1961, this:

"Break-Out" appeared in the third and, as it turned out, final issue of Ed McBain's Mystery Book, published by Pocket Books in 1961. A digest-sized newsstand collection of mostly short stories and novelettes, this particular issue featured fiction from, among others, Frederic Brown, Irving Shulman, and an early short by Lawrence Block:

Halfway through the magazine, however, comes "Break-Out". Essentially it's an overview of factual prison escapes, some well-known, others more obscure, from twentieth-century Alcatraz escapee Ted Cole to eighteenth-century English highwayman and repeat prison-buster Jack Sheppard. Jailbreak by jailbreak, Westlake details each escape and then examines how successful each escapee was in staying out of jail. Indeed, it's the aftermath of the breakouts which become the article's focus as it develops. As Westlake observes, few planned for what they'd do once they were free, and consequently swiftly ended up back inside.

But Westlake makes the larger point that there seems to be a correlation between how hard jails make it for inmates to escape, and how determined certain inmates become to meet that challenge. As he writes in the article:

Here is the core of the problem. The tougher the prison officials made their prison—the more they challenged Sheppard and told him that this time he couldn't escape—the more determined and daring and ingenious Sheppard become.

It's a fascinating little piece, and though I don't think one could draw any direct parallels with Westlake's fiction – the later Richard Stark Parker novel Breakout, for example (title and general theme aside) – it's evident that prison breaks were a subject Westlake was genuinely interested in himself, rather than something he wrote about simply for a paycheck. In fact, looking at his relatively small body of non-fiction overall, I reckon you could say the same about all of it: when he chose to wrote factual pieces, it was first and foremost because those subjects interested him. In that way, they perhaps reflect more of the man behind the words than many of his stories do.

Westlake Score: Backstage Love by Alan Marshall (Midwood/Tower Sleaze Paperback, 1959)

Like a lot of writers toiling in the unforgiving fields of pulpy postwar paperbacks, Donald E. Westlake wrote under an array of pseudonyms. The most famous of those is, of course, Richard Stark, under which moniker Westlake created the Parker series of crime novels in the early '60s. But as well known as that particular pen name is today, it's easy to forget that, back then, it was just one of many used by Westlake to churn out umpteen books every year. Richard Stark may have proved to be rather special, but from Westlake's perspective there weren't nothing special 'bout Stark at the time.

Aside from Stark, Westlake wrote books under the names Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Curt Clark. But all of those pseudonyms debuted after Stark's debut, 1962's The Hunter; there are a whole boatload more alter egos who preceded the birth of Richard Stark. I blogged about one of those, John B. Allan, back at the start of June, but Allan's single contribution to the Westlake canon, a 1961 biography of Elizabeth Taylor, is somewhat mild in comparison to the material published under some of his other nom de plumes in the late '50s and early '60s. For, like many of his contemporaries, including Lawrence Block, Westlake bashed out (so to speak) dozens of pseudonymous soft porn paperbacks.

Now, I hadn't intended to start collecting any of the soft porn books Westlake wrote under names like Edwin West or Andrew Shaw. But as luck would have it, a chance trip to a bookshop over in Essex the other week turned up a novel written under the disguise that Westlake used the most for his more titillating titles:

A US paperback of Backstage Love by Alan Marshall, published by the amusingly named Midwood/Tower Publications in 1959. This was lurking in a pile of similarly smutty paperbacks in an alcove under some stairs to the side of the rather ramshackle shop. It took me a few moments before I realised what it was; I would've recognised one of the better-known Westlake alter egos right away, but I'm less familiar with the filthier end of his oeuvre. And not carrying the complete annotated list of Westlake wank-fodder round in my head, I wasn't completely sure Backstage Love was the genuine article: quite apart from the immediate poser of whether Alan Marshall was indeed Westlake, there's also the thorny problem that, as with many of these soft porn author identities, other writers also used the Alan Marshall moniker, so not all the Marshall-written books were by Donald E. Westlake.

I'd like to say I leafed through the book and immediately recognised Westlake's style, but while these opening lines:

He had to change buses in New York, with a two hour wait. He had never been in New York City before, so he left the Port Authority Terminal and walked up a block to 42nd Street. It was early June and the late-morning sun made the sidewalks look bright and the buildings look clean.

could conceivably have been penned by him, coming across as proto-Stark, they could also have been penned by countless other writers. No, what I think really tipped me off was the setting for the novel: a summer stock theatre. That's a theme that Westlake has returned to more than once, with the events of Pity Him Afterwards (1964) being set in a similar location, and Alan Grofield from the Parker novels spending his summers acting in stock theatre. And anyway, at £1.50 it was worth the gamble.

There's a few copies of Backstage Love on AbeBooks for up to £25, but those are all in the States; it's unusual to chance across a copy in a UK bookshop. I rhapsodised briefly on Sunday about the pre-internet 1970s and 1980s (and even '90s) when books like this were tantalisingly out of reach for us Brits; finding this book was almost like stepping back in time to those years, when a junk shop in Penge Market might, if you're lucky, turn up a dreamed-of comic or paperback. I figured that sort of thing just didn't happen anymore, with collectors being so virulent. Turns out, it does.

The cover artist on Backstage Love is the appropriately named Rudy Nappi, who, rather ironically given the book's naughty nature, is best known for his covers for that squeakiest of squeaky clean characters, Nancy Drew. Which just goes to show, everyone has a dark side...