Mike Ripley's Not Single Spies, a Readers' History of Thrillers, Published 2017

Now this is rather exciting. Crime writer and thriller aficionado Mike Ripley has announced the publication next year of "a readers' history", as Mike himself puts it, of "the boom in British thrillers" from 1953–1975. Titled Not Single Spies, the book takes as its starting point Ian Fleming's debut Bond novel Casino Royale (1953) and its end point Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed (1975), featuring along the way the likes of Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth, and drawing on discussions Mike has had over the years with such luminaries as Len Deighton, Anthony Price, Alan Williams and Gavin Lyall.

Set to be published by Harper Collins on 18 May 2017, Not Single Spies also boasts a foreword by Lee Child, who, when approached to write the foreword, apparently noted that he knew: "It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for!" I couldn't agree more.

Lost Callan Episode and Short Stories by James Mitchell Collected for First Time

Quick bit of news: crime writer and critic Mike Ripley has drawn my attention to Callan Uncovered: The Collected and Missing Files, a newly published – by Mike's Top Notch Thrillers imprint – anthology of long-out-of-print Callan short stories plus a never-before-seen treatment and script by Callan TV show creator and writer James Mitchell. Mike "spent the best part of a year tracking down the stories for the collection" – 24 of which originally ran in the Sunday Express from 1973–1976, with one, the first Callan story, appearing in the TV Times in 1967 – "with the help of the British Library and a network of die-hard Callan fans". In addition, as Mike explains in an article on the Ostara Publishing (TNT's parent publisher) website, Peter Mitchell, the late James Mitchell's son, unearthed "an outline treatment for an episode of Callan and a complete script, originally called The Senator’s Daughter but then changed by James Mitchell to Goodbye Mary Lee. Although Mitchell was credited with writing the scripts for some 30 episodes of the highly successful television show between 1969 and 1972, it seemed that Goodbye Mary Lee was one script which had never been filmed and which could genuinely be called the 'lost Callan episode', not having been read by anyone outside the Mitchell family for more than forty years."

I'm told by Mike there's a copy of Callan Uncovered on its way to me, so I shall be giving it a thorough going over as soon as possible. In the meantime, allow me to point anyone interested in Callan and James Mitchell to these previous posts:

A Magnum for Schneider Book Review

The Callan Spy Thriller Series by James Mitchell

The Man Who Sold Death: James Mitchell alias James Munro

Russian Roulette Book Review

First Editions of Bonfire Night and The Money That Money Can't Buy

Russian Roulette (Callan Novel #2) by James Mitchell (Hamish Hamilton, 1973 / Top Notch Thrillers, 2013): Book Review

NB: Linked in Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, which this week is celebrating its sixth anniversary.

I made a mental note last October, when I finished reading A Magnum for Schneider, the excellent first book in James Mitchell's five-book Callan spy thriller series – which span out of the Mitchell-created Callan TV series – not to leave it too long before trying the second one, Russian Roulette. Mostly that was because I hugely enjoyed A Magnum for Schneider (alias A Red File for Callan) – it wound up taking the number two spot in my 2013 year-end top ten – but also because I knew that Mike Ripley had reissued both books that October under his Top Notch Thrillers imprint, and I like to lend a hand – in however minor a capacity – in Mike's tireless efforts to resurrect overlooked old thrillers whenever I can. In the event, it's taken me five months to get round to Russian Roulette, which probably isn't of much use to Mike in promoting his new edition of the novel – I'd have been better off reviewing the third Callan book, Death and Bright Water, which I believe Mike is reissuing sometime over the next month – but actually isn't bad for me: I've been known to let years elapse between reading instalments in a series of novels.

Russian Roulette was first published in hardback in 1973 – under a dust jacket sporting a gloriously '70s photograph of Edward Woodward as Callan, taken by glamour snapper and one-time Existential Ennui obsession Beverley le Barrow (here credited in the traditional Hamilton fashion as Beverly Lebarrow) – by Hamish Hamilton – a change of publisher from the first book, which was issued by Herbert Jenkins in 1969. Accordingly, Hamilton make very little of this being a sequel – there's a mention of A Red File for Callan on the jacket back flap and under "Other books by James Mitchell" in the prelims, but that's about it. Mind you, neither does Mitchell: as the novel opens, working class assassin David Callan is once more happily ensconced in the bosom of British Intelligence dirty tricks department the Section, with nary a mention of his being temporarily booted out by his boss, the supercilious Hunter, in A Magnum for Schneider.

It's ironic, then, that Russian Roulette once more sees Callan being kicked out of the Section, this time because Hunter has offered him up to the Russians in exchange for British Intelligence's "top man in Russia", who's been nabbed by the Soviets. To compound Callan's problems, not only does he have a specially imported KGB death squad on his tail, and not only has Hunter blocked any means of his obtaining a gun – right down to freezing his current account and even stealing his most valuable model soldiers (Callan is an enthusiastic wargamer) so that he can't sell them – but Callan's eyesight is failing too. All of which means he's forced to turn for assistance to his only friend, the odoriferous thief Lonely.

Whereas in A Magnum for Schneider the relationship between Lonely and Callan was mostly based on the former's fear of the latter, here it seems to have developed into a genuine friendship. Lonely is still scared of Callan, but then Lonely is scared of pretty much everything; he's happy to call Callan a proper mate, which is a change from his professed hatred of his erstwhile prison cellmate in the first book. And that bond is certainly tested in Russian Roulette: Callan asks things of Lonely that even the firmest of friends would balk at, and Lonely pays a terrible price for standing by him, as Callan is beset by a trio of KGB killers and betrayed by Hunter, by his fellow Section assassin Meres – in fact by almost everyone he gets close to.

Mitchell's characterisation is as surefooted as that in A Magnum for Schneider – not just Callan, who remains a convincingly common-as-muck lead, owing a small debt to Len Deighton's nameless operative but otherwise quite an original creation, but also the put-upon Lonely, the various criminals they encounter (some related to Lonely) and Hunter and Meres, representing the Establishment/old boys network, from which Callan will forever be excluded. As in the first book Mitchell grounds the espionage action in a recognisable milieu of London cafes, boozers, building sites and grubby little flats, and if the hunter/hunted story isn't quite as compelling as that in the more confined, more focused, and thus more intense, A Magnum for Schneider, Russian Roulette still rates as a very good vintage spy thriller indeed.

I showcased first editions of almost all of the Callan novels in my series of posts on Mitchell last year, as well as firsts of almost all of the John Craig spy novels Mitchell wrote under the alias James Munro. Back then, however, in both cases I was missing one book from each series. No longer: in the interim I've come into possession of first editions of those absent titles – so I thought I'd take a look at them in the next post.

A Magnum for Schneider, alias A Red File for Callan, by James Mitchell (Herbert Jenkins, 1969 / Top Notch Thrillers, 2013); Book Review

NB: Proffered as part of this Friday's Forgotten Books.

I've a few posts planned on the various spy novels penned by author and television writer James Mitchell, beginning with this:

The 1969 Herbert Jenkins British first edition of A Magnum for Schneider (with a dust jacket designed by Ian Kestle), perhaps better known under its American title of A Red File for Callan – a title subsequently adopted – minus the "A" – for the British Corgi paperback edition. Callan, for those who don't know, was an ITV drama series which ran in the UK from 1967 to 1972 – with a big screen spin-off in 1974 and a one-off TV revival in 1981 – created by James Mitchell and starring Edward Woodward as David Callan, a reluctant assassin working for a section of British intelligence known as, er, "the section". I was a bit too young to have watched Callan at the time, but I was dimly aware of it being on telly when I was a kid (I guess either in repeat or via the 1981 TV movie), and so have that vague childish sense of it being something that was serious and adult and consequently, to my young mind, really boring.

These days, of course, a gloomy, murky espionage series starring a recalcitrant killer sounds right up my strasse, and I fully intend to investigate it on DVD at some point; but for right now, my exposure to Callan consists of A Magnum for Schneider, a terrific novel which Mitchell adapted from his own eponymous teleplay for Armchair Theatre (broadcast in early 1967 and effectively the pilot for the Callan TV series). As is explained early on in the story, Callan worked for the section for seven years before his conscience got in the way of his job and he was let go by Hunter, the head of the department. Since then Callan has been working as a bookkeeper for Waterman, a wholesale grocer, but Hunter has called Callan back in again with a chance of redemption: a red file – the section's colour code for the most dangerous subjects, those most likely to be offed – a man named Schneider, whom Hunter wants executed within the week. And it so happens Schneider's office is across the hall from Callan's.

Not having seen the television version of A Magnum for Schneider I couldn't comment on how close the novel is to the Armchair Theatre production – although this telesnap synopsis suggests fairly close – but I'm given to understand that Mitchell considerably expanded on his teleplay, especially as regards Callan's background. We learn that Callan had been a commando in the jungles of Malaya, where he'd once single-handedly rescued a captain from the clutches of the enemy, killing all six opponents; that he'd twice lost his stripes for drunken brawling; and that, upon being demobbed, out of sheer boredom he'd robbed a supermarket and was subsequently sent down for two years.

It was in Wormwood Scrubs that he met Lonely, an odoriferous lowlife who fell under Callan's protection in prison, and who Callan now seeks out in order to purchase a gun. And it's here, in Callan's edgy exchanges with Lonely (who calls him "Mr. Callan", even though Lonely despises Callan), or his combative conversations with Hunter and Meres, a fellow assassin from the section, or his battles of wits with his irascible boss Waterman, or indeed his friendlier ones with Schneider (who he finds he quite likes) rather than in the scant sequences of action, where much of the appeal of the thing lies. For me, these passages are the most compelling parts of the book, and it's perhaps no accident that in their parry and thrust these encounters reflect Callan's only real passion: wargaming, i.e. the reenactment of historical battles with toy soldiers, a passion shared, oddly enough, by Schneider. (I wonder too if it was shared by James Mitchell. He wouldn't have been alone among thriller writers if so: Gavin Lyall was a committed wargamer, and even wrote a book about it.) (UPDATE, 28/11/13: Spy novelist and espionage aficionado Jeremy Duns just pointed out to me on Twitter that another thriller writer was an active wargamer too: Desmond Bagley.)

But another attraction of the novel – at least it will be for those of us who respond to this kind of stuff – is the milieu. This is a very grimy, grubby, street-level sort of espionage, residing in warehouses and cramped offices and pubs and fuelled by pork pies and pints of bitter. Callan is chippy, working class and unremarkable-looking, more in line with Len Deighton's nameless secret agent (or Harry Palmer, if you're cinematically minded) than Ian Fleming's far-from-anonymous James Bond, while the section is a pretty rum outfit, not averse to resorting to kidnapping and torture (one poor sod, having run afoul of Callan, is effectively stripped of most of his memories – as well as his ability to speak English – by sadistic section doctor Garstang; we never learn his ultimate fate) alongside its main purpose of, as Hunter says, "Getting rid of people," whether that be "Bribery, blackmail, frame-ups" or, as Callan adds bluntly, "death". That last eventuality being, despite Callan's conscience, his particular area of expertise, as he lethally demonstrates on more than one occasion.

The Herbert Jenkins edition of A Magnum for Schneider is quite hard to come by these days, and the novel itself had, until very recently, been out of print for decades. Happily this splendidly dour spy thriller is now readily available again – both as a paperback and an eBook – courtesy of Mike Ripley's excellent Top Notch Thrillers imprint – as is its 1973 sequel, Russian Roulette. Because you see Mitchell published a series of Callan novels – a series that stretched into the early 2000s. And what's more, it wasn't his first spy series either, as I'll be exploring in subsequent posts.

Parker Score: Richard Stark's The Steel Hit (alias The Man with the Getaway Face) (Coronet, 1971) and Raymond Hawkey's Bullet Hole Cover Design

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

Plucked from atop the Parker Mega Score stack – i.e. that haul of British Coronet/Hodder Fawcett paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker crime novels I recently acquired – comes this:

The Steel Hit, Coronet's title for the second Parker outing, The Man with the Getaway Face (the publisher retitled a number of the Parkers, as we'll see in a later post). Published in paperback by Coronet in the UK in 1971 (originally published in the States in 1963), this was the first time the novel had been issued in Britain, four years after The Hunter – or rather Point Blank, it being a movie tie-in – had made its British debut. In the interim Coronet had published a further five Parkers, but these dated from later in the series (Coronet was loosely following the pub programme of its American sister company, Fawcett/Gold Medal). It wasn't until 1971 that the publisher began filling in the gaps, over the next year or two issuing the Parkers from The Man with the Getaway Face to The Handle (Parker #8). And when they did, it was under highly unusual covers...

Up to this point, the covers of the Coronet paperbacks had sported either film stills (Point Blank, 1967; The Split, 1969), illustrations (The Rare Coin Score, 1968; The Green Eagle Score, 1968; The Black Ice Score, 1969; The Sour Lemon Score, 1969) or posed photos (the 1970 reprints of Point Blank and The Rare Coin Score). But in '71 the publisher introduced a new cover concept: the "bullet hole" design. Created by Raymond Hawkey – the man behind the iconic dust jackets for Len Deighton's novels – the bullet hole covers were in effect a double cover: a metallic-finish card outer cover featuring, on the front, the author's name, the legend "a novel of violence" and a rough-edged "burnt" die-cut hole, through which the novel's title could be seen. Open it up:

and the thinner inner cover is revealed, bearing the text "Parker is in" and then the title. It was an innovative approach to paperback cover design, but actually typical of Hawkey, who already had form both with bullet hole-style designs and die-cuts on paperback covers – witness his cover treatments for the 1963 Pan edition of Ian Fleming's Thunderball and the 1967 Pan edition of Len Deighton's London Dossier.

But for Parker/Stark/Westlake fans, it's the back double-cover that might be of more interest. The outer cover carries the usual sort of stuff: description of the novel, ISBN, price, a blurb from the New York Times about Stark. Flip it open, however:

and there's a photo and short bio of Donald E. Westlake on the inner cover. Now, considering Richard Stark's true identity was still being kept a secret by his American publisher, Random House, even by the time Butcher's Moon was published in the States in 1974, it's notable that in the UK, by 1971 he'd already been "outed" as Westlake by Coronet. Although I don't believe they got there first; legend has it that it was the critic Anthony Boucher who unmasked Westlake as Stark in his New York Times "Criminals at Large" column – which presumably is how Coronet got the idea it was OK to do the same on their (inner) back covers: that New York Times quote on the back of The Steel Hit is taken from a Boucher review.

Copies of The Steel Hit are currently very thin on the ground; there are a couple on AbeBooks going for around £20 a piece, but that's about it – this despite it being reprinted in 1972 (with minor amends to the cover – see above). Indeed, the Coronet Parkers have become quite collectable in some circles – something I'll be exploring in the next Parker Score post.

Yet More Beautiful British Book Covers: Harry Carmichael's A Question of Time (a Lewes Book Bargain) and Alistair MacLean's H.M.S. Ulysses and The Golden Rendezvous

Before we get stuck in to the signed editions again, and having added another fabulous Denis McLoughlin dust jacket – this time wrapping the 1962 T. V. Boardman edition of Donald E. Westlake's 361 – to the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page, I thought I'd update the Beautiful Book Jackets page further with a few more covers, bringing the total in the gallery up to 85. All of the books in this batch were published by Collins in the UK, and two of the wrappers were provided by crime writer and critic Mike Ripley, who's now contributed a creditable eight covers to the gallery (and whose latest "Getting Away With Murder" column for Shots is up now).

Let's take a look at my offering first, which I picked up just the other day in a Lewes charity shop:

A Question of Time by Harry Carmichael, published in hardback in the UK by Collins in 1958. I'm not familiar with Carmichael's work, but he had a heck of a lot of crime fiction published from 1951 to 1979, both under his Carmichael alias (his real name was Leopold Horace Ognall) and the nom de plume Hartley Howard – getting on for a hundred books in total. There's certainly a demand for Carmichael first editions: a copy of the Collins first of A Question of Time recently sold on eBay for over forty quid, which is rather more than the £3.95 I paid for my one. Mind you, the Collins edition appears to have been the only printing of the novel, so it's no wonder it's sought after by collectors.

The wrapper design is uncredited, but there's a signature at top right of the front cover: William Randell (I originally thought it was "Kandell", but book dealer and crime fiction aficionado Jamie Sturgeon put me right – thanks, Jamie!), who illustrated the wrappers for a run of Collins-published Carmichael novels from the mid-1950s onwards, among them Put Out That Star (1957), James Knowland: Deceased (1958) and, I believe, Of Unsound Mind (1962), which deploys a telephone receiver design device similar to that of A Question of Time. (The symbiotic relationship between writers and cover artists is a theme I'm planning on returning to next week.)

Turning to the two covers sent to me by Mike Ripley, and both of those are from Alistair MacLean novels, as it was my posts on Where Eagles Dare and Ice Station Zebra that inspired Mike to scan his MacLean jackets:

That's the 1955 Collins first of MacLean's debut novel, H.M.S. Ulysses, cover design by John Rose, and the 1962 Collins first of The Golden Rendezvous, cover design by John Heseltine. I already had Rose and Heseltine in the Beautiful British Book Jackets gallery, the former with his design for the 1960 Collins first of Geoffrey Jenkins's The Watering Place of Good Peace – which again was supplied by Mike – the latter with his design for the aforementioned Ice Station Zebra (Collins, 1963), but it's nice to be able to include a couple more.

Incidentally, veering off-topic momentarily, Mike mentioned that he's encountered problems commenting on Existential Ennui recently, something that a few other folk have said as well. I did, as a result, experiment with removing the captcha word recognition step for a day or two (still leaving comment approval on), but my email in-box started filling up with spam comments again, so I've re-enabled word recognition. Apologies if that means your comments go astray on occasion, but don't blame me, blame the annoying bastards attempting to advertise shoes and portrait oil paintings and electricians and, most bizarrely of all, the services of convicted felons. The mind boggles, it really does.

Anyway, it's back to the signed editions next, with an obscure science fiction first edition which I again found in a Lewes establishment...

Click here to visit Existential Ennui's Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page.

A Brief Hiatus, a Word About Commenting, and More Beautiful British Book Jackets

Well I hope we all enjoyed my exclusive Q&A with spy novelist Jeremy Duns – and indeed the preceding posts on his Paul Dark thrillers and on one of his favourite spy novels, Adam Hall's The Ninth Directive. After that flurry of Duns-shaped blogging, however, I'm afraid that Existential Ennui will be going on a short hiatus, because I'm moving house – an undertaking that can be difficult and time-consuming for most people at the best of times, but one that, given the number of bloody books (and records, and CDs... and let's not even mention the comics) I own, is even more of a pain in the arse for me. So I hope you'll understand why things will be going kind of quiet round here (that and the fact that I'll probably have no internet for a bit).

But the move should be done and dusted by the end of this week, which means, all being well, I'll be back, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, with more blogging next week. Ahead of that, though, a quick word about commenting: as anyone who's read this irritable post will know, I've been having problems for a while now with spam comments – problems which I thought had been resolved by the introduction of an additional word recognition (captcha) step in the commenting process, but which, apparently, have not: spam comments still seem to be making it through onto Existential Ennui itself. Therefore, I've also now enabled comment moderation. Thus far it doesn't appear to have put anyone off commenting, but if you haven't left a comment since I enabled moderation, please don't let that deter you: I welcome any and all (genuine) comments, and I'll be receiving notification of new comments by email, so I'll publish them as soon as I possibly can.

But of course, I couldn't very well leave you in the lurch with nothing to look at while I'm otherwise occupied, and so I'm pleased to announce that I've updated my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – which, by the way, has now sailed past the 3,000 hits mark – with ten new covers. Two of those new additions – both of them by Peter Rudland, whose spectacular jacket for Anne Chamberlain's The Tall Dark Man you can see up top – are very recent acquisitions, one of them bought from Jamie Sturgeon, who brought a fine selection of wares along to Sunday's Midhurst Book, Postcard & Ephemera Fair (and who also gave me permission to reproduce these Richard Stark Gold Lion hardback covers last year); as a little taster of things to come, here's the pile of books I took off Jamie's hands:

Of the other wrappers, four were provided by crime writer and critic Mike Ripley, who, having seen my gallery, decided to dig out some suitable examples from his own collection and scan them for me (many thanks to Mike for that); two, both by illustrator Charles Mozley, come from the collection of my other half, Rachel (one being the cover to an early Iris Murdoch first edition; thank you also to Rachel); and two are from my own collection, and are both by Val Biro (the full-front-and-back wrapper for Nevil Shute's Requiem for a Wren is especially lovely). That brings the total number of dustjackets up to forty, which should give you plenty to gaze at while I'm gone. Oh, and a huge thank you to Margaret Atwood, who, as before, once again kindly retweeted my link to the gallery.

See you shortly.

Tales of Adventurers: Short Stories by Geoffrey Household (Michael Joseph First Edition, 1952)

Geoffrey Household is chiefly remembered these days for his novels – in particular his 1939 classic thriller Rogue Male – but he was also a prolific writer of short stories. He had seven collections of short stories published, many of which originally appeared in periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly and Argosy, but it was the second of those collections which, for Household, held a special significance.

Tales of Adventurers was published in hardback in 1952 by Little, Brown in the States and Michael Joseph in the UK – that's the Joseph edition you can see above. According to crime writer and critic Mike Ripley – who, of course, has resissued two of Household's novels under his Top Notch Thrillers imprint – of all the novels, novellas and short story collections Household published – thirty-six in total – the author "always maintained that the one book he wanted to be judged by was his anthology Tales of Adventurers".

It's remarkable, then, that the Little, Brown and Michael Joseph first editions remain the only printings of the book. The Little, Brown first is fairly easy to come by at present (if you're in the States) – AbeBooks currently has eleven copies listed for sale – but the Joseph first is extremely uncommon: I bought the only copy on AbeBooks, which means there are, right now, no copies available. (There are two copies listed on Amazon Marketplace, but I suspect they might be "phantom" listings, and they're very pricey anyway.) The dustjacket design is uncredited, but it reminds me a little of the (similarly uncredited) jacket for the 1955 Heinemann first edition of Grahame Greene's The Quiet American.

The stories in Tales of Adventurers run the gamut of themes and genres, from spy thrillers to historical romps, from the poignant to the comedic, from wartime vignettes to tales with a touch of the supernatural. I haven't read all of them yet – the book only turned up in the post the other day – but those I have read are utterly beguiling. The opening story, "First Blood", details the Mediterranean sea voyage of Mr. Avellion, a civilian businessman recruited by the British Board of Trade on the eve of World War II by dint of his supposed familiarity with Alexandria in Egypt. But Mr. Avellion, "pear-shaped" and with "a powerful nose sprouting blue-grey buds like a tree in winter", hadn't reckoned on the lack of alcohol on the long, overcrowded cruiser passage, and soon the crossing becomes for him a DTs-induced hallucinatory nightmare.

"Culture" takes place slightly later in the Second World War, and finds a Greek waiter shivering in a snowbound Albanian valley awaiting an attack on the Italian outpost above – an attack which climaxes with a surprising and strangely cheering exchange of polite pleasantries. "Woman in Love", meanwhile, deals with a rather colder war, in which a spymaster of Greek origin named Theotaki operating in Roumania is forced at short notice to enlist the aid of a female agent who's due to be married in Sweden, exhorting her to memorize Russian troop movements and pass on the information. But the woman, Alexia – codename D17 – is naturally preoccupied by her impending nuptials, leading to an oversight so potentially perilous it's almost funny.

One story, "The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessey", takes the form of a letter of reference, written to an American security official as a spirited defence of the extraordinary eponymous Hungarian who became a Jew to spite the Nazis, a Baron to vex the communists, and has now, in the wake of Senator McCarthy's accusations (although these are never directly referenced), been asked whether he was ever a Red. Needless to say, Hevessey's response is as trenchant as the exploits depicted in the letter would suggest. Another story, "The Pejemuller", is set in a Spanish fair ground, where two proud Basques enter into an argument with the Andalusian proprietor of a booth displaying what appears to be a live mermaid ("pejemuller" translating as "fish woman") – a disagreement which can only be resolved by an honourable act of vandalism and liberation.

Reading these stories, one begins to understand why Household held this collection in such high regard. The tales are populated by lightly sketched but wonderfully vivid and colourful characters, set in recognizable European locales – evidently informed by the widely-travelled Household's familiarity with them – and grounded in (largely) realistic events, yet laced with irony and a wry wit and told in an engrossing, absorbing fashion. One of the stories, "Brandy for the Parson", was even turned into a film in the year of publication, starring James Donald, Kenneth More, Jean Lodge and Charles Hawtrey. It's a wonderful comic fable, featuring a troop of minor crooks who disguise themselves as the in-training British Imperial Andean Exploration Society in order to explain the Exmoor ponies they're using to carry smuggled brandy into Dorset – a ruse that eventually takes on a life of its own.

The back of the jacket of this Michael Joseph edition features an assortment of notices for the two books which preceded Tales of Adventurers – both novels, one a sequel to the other – the only time, apart from the much later Rogue Justice, that Household ever wrote a sequel. And it's those two novels which will form the basis of the final pair of posts in this series on Household – both of them in rather lovely British editions...

Geoffrey Household: The Sending (Michael Joseph, 1980), Summon the Bright Water (Joseph, 1981), and Ruminations on the Rural

Thus far in this ongoing run of posts I've been occasionally referring to Geoffrey Household as a thriller writer. But "thrillers" only goes some way towards describing the books and stories he wrote. Some aren't thrillers at all, but even those which fall within that loose term are often something else besides, and such is the case with the two books I'm showcasing in this post. Published in consecutive years just prior to 1982's Rogue Justice, one features occult elements, while the other details a quest for hidden golden treasure, but both revisit Household's abiding concern of the countryside as a place of escape, refuge, and indeed danger. And the first of those two books is this:

Published in hardback by Michael Joseph in the UK in 1980, with a jacket cover photo by Chris Yates – whose work as both a photographer and a professional angler (!) I explored in this earlier Geoffrey Household post and this P. M. Hubbard post – The Sending was Household's twenty-fourth novel, and like many of his books is written in the first-person. In this instance the narrative takes the form of a diary, that of the intriguingly named Alfgif Hollaston, "a government surveyor" and "mystic and painter" who returns to "the Somerset home of his ancestors" where he inherits a polecat named Meg who, it transpires, is a witch's familiar. All of which sounds very odd indeed – have a read of the jacket flap blurb below for more:

I bought this first edition in the excellent secondhand bookshop Dim and Distant in Heathfield, East Sussex, for the princely sum of four quid, and it's in very nice, near-pristine condition – with one or two curious exceptions. Here and there in the text someone has marked up in pencil typos:

Which makes me wonder if this copy is a file copy, marked up by a publisher for a prospective paperback printing, as was the case with this Simon & Schuster hardback of Ross Thomas's The Mordida Man. Either that, or its previous owner was a particularly over-zealous editor unable to leave his or her work behind of an evening.

The second of the two books I'm showing in this post was bought even closer to home – in A & Y Cumming in Lewes, to be precise, again for £4, which was even more of a bargain than The Sending, since copies of this one are in rather shorter supply:

Published again by Michael Joseph, this time in 1981, and once again featuring a Chris Yates cover photo, on the surface (hey!) Summon the Bright Water's plot appears more conventional than that of The Sending: the narrator, Piers Colet, travels to the Forest of Dean, and on a skin diving expedition in the River Severn is nearly drowned by his guide, Simeon Marrin, thereafter coming to suspect that there is treasure in the river. But of course there's more to it than that: Marrin is financing the "esoteric community" of which Colet is a guest in the Forest of Dean – and that community is "preparing its members for the collapse of urban civilisation by learning the simple crafts of the Dark Ages". As before, allow me to guide you to the jacket flap blurb for more details:

In common with a good many of Geoffrey Household's novels and stories, both The Sending and Summon the Bright Water are set in and deal with rural locations and life – a preoccupation Household shares with suspense writer P. M. Hubbard, although in Hubbard's case the countryside is often a much more hostile place. Not that Household romanticizes the English countryside: as crime writer and Top Notch Thrillers head honcho Mike Ripley points out in this 2011 Crime and Detective Stories article, despite not actually moving to the country until he was in his late forties, Household was "able to bring the reader closer to nature, albeit a nature very red in tooth and claw".

Mike continues: 

The central theme of most of his thrillers is the hunter and the hunted and many of his heroes are solitary ('Rogue'?) figures, almost cat-like animals with their scented 'runs' and burrows where they take cover from their enemies. In Household's world, ground is most efficiently covered on horseback and every dip in the landscape, every ditch, every hedge and every copse of trees is noted as a possible source of cover, camouflage or danger.

That affinity for the rural and sense of the wild as a place in which to seek refuge and respite is something I touched on in my 2010 review of Rogue Male (alongside Concrete Island and Ordinary Thunderstorms), and it's a theme I'll be returning to in a review of a similarly rustic Household novel later in this run of posts. But next, I'm turning to Geoffrey Household's short stories, and an early collection which Household always maintained was the book he wished to be judged by...

Book Review: the Sequel to Rogue Male – Rogue Justice, by Geoffrey Household

From a 1939 British first edition (third impression) of thriller writer Geoffrey Household's third novel, Rogue Male, we move on in this series of Household posts to his third-from-final novel – a book which is, in fact, a direct sequel to that hands-down classic, but published over forty years later:

Rogue Justice originally appeared in 1982, published in the UK by Michael Joseph – I blogged about that edition back 2010. The cover seen above, however, isn't that edition; it's the Top Notch Thrillers reissue, published by Mike Ripley's imprint in 2011 – just one of many overlooked thrillers that Mike has brought back into print. And it's great that Rogue Justice is widely available again, because even though it doesn't scale the lofty literary/thriller heights of its illustrious forebear, it's an intriguing novel nonetheless.

For a start, whereas in Rogue Male the identity of the European dictator the narrator attempted to assassinate at the beginning of the novel was never revealed, in Rogue Justice it's plainly stated that it was indeed Adolf Hitler. Not a huge or especially startling revelation, I know, but remember that Rogue Male was written and first published in peacetime, so basing a character on Hitler was pretty daring, even if he wasn't named. But we don't just learn the identity of the dictator in Rogue Justice: we also learn the name of the narrator of both novels. In Rogue Male, we're given to understand that our protagonist is noble enough in heritage that he's well-known in Britain, but we aren't told his name. In Rogue Justice, his name is finally revealed: Raymond Ingelram. (Curiously, in his 1977 survey Who's Who in Spy Fiction, Donald McCormick calls the narrator of Rogue Male "Sir Robert Hunter" – influenced, no doubt, by the 1976 Peter O'Toole BBC TV adaptation – an error he then repeats for his 1990 follow-up, Spy Fiction: A Connoisseur's Guide, published eight years after Household had named his lead Raymond Ingelram!)

Rogue Male ended with Ingelram determining to take another crack at killing Hitler – whose thugs murdered Ingelram's one true love – having survived a perilous pursuit by agents of Nazi Germany, in particular the cunning and savage Major Quive-Smith (or von Lauen, to give him his true name). Rogue Justice picks up his story four years later in 1942, and finds Ingelram languishing in a Rostock prison cell. As he explains, he used Quive-Smith's Nicaraguan passport – issued under the name Don Ernesto Menendez Peraza – to try and inveigle himself into German society as a Nazi sympathizer, in the hope of getting close enough to Hitler to off the bugger, but was unmasked and banged up instead. But a fortuitous RAF raid destroys the gaol in which he's being held, and he makes his escape, dressed as his now-dead captor, Hauptmann Haase.

From there, the action ranges across Nazi-occupied Europe, as, realising that he'll never be able to assassinate Hitler, Ingelram embarks instead on a quest to exact a different sort of vengeance. Effectively, he turns himself into a one-man army, falling in with the occasional resistance or guerilla movement, attacking German troops where he can, notching up a steadily increasing number of kills. In that sense, then, Rogue Justice is less focused than Rogue Male. In the former novel, Ingelram's aim was simple: to evade the enemy agents on his tail. In Rogue Justice, however, he becomes by turns pursuee, then attacker, then pursuee again, with no real purpose beyond slaughtering as many Germans soldiers as he can (and perhaps returning home to England).

But while Rogue Justice lacks Rogue Male's elegantly streamlined plot and consequent escalating tension, it does work as a kind of wartime travelogue, offering glimpses of life in occupied Poland (Ingelram has a near-brush with Auschwitz), Slovakia, Romania and Greece. And Ingelram remains an agreeable companion: resourceful (his long experience as a hunter comes in very handy here), obviously aristocratic yet never patronising towards the many downtrodden locals he meet, his observations are often barbed with a sly, witty sarcasm (Mike Ripley has written about how in Rogue Justice Household "has perfected the cool, very British (English) attitude of self-deprecation when under fire"; see this excellent Crime and Detective Stories article on the TNT/Ostara website).

Quite apart from its intriguing revelations as to the identity of the narrator of the novel (and its predecessor) and his intended target, Rogue Justice is interesting bibliographically too. The gap of forty-three years between the publication of Rogue Male and Rogue Justice must surely rank as the longest between a novel and its sequel (written by the same author) in publishing history (don't just take my word for it: Mike Ripley reckons that's the case as well). Then there's the fact that Rogue Male gained a sequel at all: Geoffrey Household didn't, as a rule, write sequels, and only one other novel in his canon besides Rogue Male was awarded a follow-up – although in that case the length of time between the two books was considerably shorter.

I'll be returning to those two novels later in this run of Household posts, but next I'll be looking at the two novels which precede Rogue Justice in Household's backlist – both of which boast cover designs by the same photographer-turned-professional fisherman responsible for the jacket photo on the Michael Joseph edition of Rogue Justice...

An Interview with Christopher Nicole, alias Andrew York, Author of the Jonas Wilde Eliminator Spy Novels (and More Besides)

As promised, to start the working week I have another exclusive Existential Ennui interview for you. Previously I've posted Q&As with Dexter creator Jeff Lindsay and espionage novelist Anthony Price; today it's the turn of an author who, like Price, penned a series of spy novels, but who, uniquely, has also written a quite remarkable number of other novels besides: Christopher Nicole.

I blogged about Nicole at the beginning of the year, specifically the excellent series of books he wrote under the pen name (one of many) Andrew York in the 1960s and early '70s, starring Britain's state executioner Jonas Wilde, a.k.a. The Eliminator. I was tipped off to the Wilde novels by John at Pretty Sinister Books, when John reviewed the first instalment in the series, 1966's The Eliminator, in August of last year. John has since progressed a lot further in the series than I have, which was why I asked him to contribute half the questions to this Q&A, for which I thank him. Thanks also to Mike Ripley at Top Notch Thrillers for setting up the interview, which was conducted via email last month; Mike has been reissuing the Jonas Wilde books since last year, and the latest books, The Predator and The Deviator, are available now.

John and I concentrate in large part on the Jonas Wilde novels in the interview because those are the books with which we're most familiar (the answers Nicole gives to some of our more convoluted, crackpot-theoretical questions about the books are amusingly prosaic). But the Wilde series is but a tiny part of Nicole's backlist; as will become clear, there's a hell of a lot more to this writer than spy thrillers... 

NICK JONES/JOHN NORRIS: You've been astonishingly prolific in your career – you've had more than 100 books published, I believe, probably a lot more (do you know the total?), and under a dizzying array of aliases. To what do you credit your fecundity?

CHRISTOPHER NICOLE: When Queen of Glory is published in May, it will be number 210. Three of these are non-fiction. I have always written because I enjoy telling stories; that more than 35,000,000 people have seen fit to buy my books never ceases to amaze me. 

Are the many nom de plumes you've written under a consequence of having written so many books, or is there another reason for using so many aliases? Writing in different genres, perhaps?

Andrew York was my first pseudonym. I wanted a break from my historical novels and my then publishers, Hutchinson, thought that in view of the drastic change in genre we should have a different name. Later pseudonyms were usually caused by contractual difficulties; writing for different publishers at the same time. 

Was it always your intention to write in different genres – romance, espionage, historical, adventure, etc. – or do you simply write and not think about where the novel will fit?

I am sorry to say that the Jonas Wilde books are my only venture into spy fiction per se. Anna Fehrbach, while a natural progression from Wilde, and is an altogether more rounded and attractive character, is technically World War II. I am an Historical Novelist by choice. Nowadays WWII seems to be included in the Historical category. But as I lived through it it seems like yesterday. 

Anthony Price once remarked that the past is lying in wait for the present. As someone with a passion for history, is that a statement you'd agree with?

I entirely agree. One of the most distressing aspects of modern education, and therefore society, is the neglect of knowledge of where we come from. H. G. Wells wrote that to confront an enemy is to look into the red, hate-filled eyes, of Neanderthal man.

Would it be fair to say that many of your novels are informed by a sense of place? Whether that be the West Indies, where you were raised, or the Channel Island of Guernsey, where you live and which, of course, features in the Jonas Wilde novels as part of The Route. Is location an inspiration for you?

I am concerned only with plot and character. The background is drawn in afterwards. However, whenever possible, I have visited the location where the book is set. 

You've lived and worked on Guernsey since, I believe, 1957 (correct me if I'm wrong!). I've been there myself a few times and love the island. What was it about Guernsey that first attracted you, and what keeps you there?

I had never set foot on Guernsey until, on passage to the Mediterranean [Nicole is a keen yachtsman], I misjudged the tides in fog and struck a rock off the west coast. It was necessary to put into St Peter Port and have the damage assessed and repaired. By the time this was done we had liked the island and the people so much that we bought a house and have used the island as a base ever since. 

What inspired you to begin writing spy novels, specifically the Jonas Wilde ones?

As mentioned above, Wilde was a break in my routine. I have never read a spy novel but after seeing a couple of Bond movies with their absurd and increasing obsession with gadgetry I did not see how I could do worse. 

Very few spy novels during the period you wrote the Jonas Wilde books had a character arc, or changed and developed throughout the books. And I can't think of any who aged through the series as Jonas does (Anthony Price's David Audley novels aside). Was it intentional that things like Wilde's sciatica and his haunted past with Jocelyn be recurring features in the books? How important do you think it is to readers to better know a series character over the course of several books?

To me, as with all my characters, when I was writing about him Wilde was a living, breathing human being sitting beside me at my desk. All processes were a natural progression. 

The women characters far outshine the men in the Wilde novels, in my opinion. Often, as in the case of Glorious Torro, Jonas seems to have met his match. What led you to focus on the women in these books?

I hate to confess this, but women have always been my hobby. So I enjoy writing about them. Nearly all of my big historicals have been about women.

I was surprised by what I call genre blending in some of the Wilde books. The Coordinator to me seemed like a throwback to the old 1930s pulp magazines with its blind character and his sonic glasses and his glass furniture. There was also the mad scientist and his cryogenic experiments in the finale. The Deviator had an element of science fiction it as well with the invention of the impervious alloy Tition. Where did those ideas come from? Are you a fan of old science fiction or the pulp magazines? Which writers have you read, if any?

As indicated above, I never relate my work to anyone else's and therefore do not consider my work as belonging to a genre. I have never read any science fiction save for my boyhood hero John Carter on Mars. 

I'm always interested to find out if a writer I enjoy is familiar with writers who came before him. Are you familiar with any of the early spy writers who were popular in the early part of the 20th century? Like Oppenheim, William LeQuex or Francis Beeding? Maybe someone else?

I have actually read an Oppenheim, simply because I was once interested in buying the house he lived in in Guernsey. I don't remember what the book was about. My reading almost entirely history and biography. In my novel reading days it was Hemingway, Maugham and wild historical romance such as Sabatini. 

What happened to Wilde's taste for Bacardi? I liked waiting for the scene when I would be introduced to yet another odd "Cocktail of the Book" and was disappointed when the unusual rum cocktails like the Moscow Mule and the Bijou disappeared and Jonas was suddenly a Scotch drinker. Or in one instance was forced to drink sherry! Did you forget about the Bacardi? Did your publisher think it was too much free advertising? Or did Jonas sort of take over and change his mind for you?

Again, I don't analyse my work to that extent. Wilde drank Bacardi because I drank Bacardi. Towards the end of the series I had switched to Scotch. 

Finally, which of your many novels are you most proud of, and why?

This is a tricky one with such a choice. Ratoon would have to be my favourite simply because it was my first big seller: over 2,000,000 copies in the States. Lord of the Golden Fan ranks high as does Ottoman. I consider the two Jane Digby novels as my best. But my favourite character of all is, and I think always will be, Anna Fehrbach: the Angel series.

Undertow (Feramontov Quintet #1) by Desmond Cory (Muller, 1962 / Walker, 1963 / Top Notch Thrillers, 2011): Book Review

In this latest run of an ongoing series of posts on various spy fiction series, I'm blogging about British author Desmond Cory's series of novels starring secret agent Johnny Fedora – specifically the five novels, commonly known as the Feramontov Quintet, which close out the Fedora adventures: Undertow (Frederick Muller, 1962), Hammerhead (Muller, 1963, alias Shockwave), Feramontov (Muller, 1966), Timelock (Muller, 1967) and Sunburst (Hodder & Stoughton, 1971). Each of those stories sees Fedora facing off against Soviet spymaster Feramontov, who makes his debut here:

That there is the 1963 US Walker hardback first edition of the twelfth Johnny Fedora novel, Undertow – jacket design by Frederick Marvin – which was as close as I could get to a 1962 British first edition. I have seen one copy of the UK Frederick Muller first for sale online, but it was sans dustjacket, which is no use to anyone – although of course if you couldn't care less about book collecting, the novel is readily available courtesy of Mike Ripley's Top Notch Thrillers imprint. And I really would recommend getting yourself a copy, because it is, quite simply, brilliant – so good, in fact, that it more-than-comfortably made it into my 2011 Best Books I Read This Year chart. (And let's face it: praise doesn't come much higher than that.)

The reasons for that are many, but chief among them is that Undertow is so beautifully written. Right from the off Desmond Cory's quiet facility with the written word is self-evident, as he describes the dead body of an escaped prisoner, Juan Guerrero, lying face down beside a Spanish road, a "black halo" of blood staining the ground around his head. Guerrero has been murdered by a fellow escapee from one of Franco's jails, Moreno, whose extraction has been effected by Feramontov, orchestrating events from a yacht off the coast. Feramontov and his associates Meuvret and Elsa need Moreno to secure certain logbooks, which are hidden in or near a house overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar... a house owned by an Argentinian heiress and currently occupied by two idle Englishmen...

The Englishmen are, of course, Johnny Fedora and his pal Sebastian Trout. By this point in the series Fedora is practically retired, loafing around his girlfriend's house in Spain (a country Cory knew well; he lived there for a time and eventually retired to the area around Malaga where Undertow is set), lounging by the swimming pool, drinking too much and playing the piano. It's sheer bad luck on Feramontov's part that Fedora happens to be in residence at Moreno's target, but when the housemaid winds up dead in the pool, Fedora makes it his business to find out who killed her, in the process getting sucked into Feramontov's scheme.

Cory has been criticized in some quarters for his unhurried pacing and apparent lack of interest in plotting (the words "boring", "lame", "nothing" and "happens" have been trotted out in response to his work), but that's to overlook his books' very particular qualities as idiosyncratic thrillers. For sure, Undertow is characterized by long, languorous passages where seemingly little of note occurs, and yet those sequences are wonderfully vivid and descriptive, subtly delving into the psychology of the protagonists. Take the scene where Fedora, Trout and Elsa are diving in the harbour. Fedora finds himself, unusually, utterly at peace with the world, subsumed into the aquatic environs, "a pair of eyes and a brain behind a vaseline-smeared plastic panel... no longer human... a disembodied spirit".

Cory continues: 

Looking up, he could see the sunlight broken by the wavelets on the surface into shuddering, boiling bands and flecks, into streamers of bright gold and orange that became suddenly alive with all the colours of the prism; and he could see the bubbles of his own breath rising swiftly, colourless like pearls, then glinting as though with flame as they reached that surface froth, mingled with it and disappeared...

Offsetting these calm interludes are moments of extreme violence and gripping bursts of action, which punctuate the prose at intervals. One of the most memorable of these is an assault by Feramontov-hired thugs on a police station where Fedora is being held. From start to finish this episode is just two two-page chapters long (the numberless chapters in Undertow are typically very short), but Cory packs a hell of a lot into that scant space, his economy with words lending the scene a shocking intensity.

Equally shocking are some of the things Cory's cast do to one another. Elsa goads the dangerous, unhinged Moreno into attacking her (and then nearly kills him), while the antagonistic relationship between her and Feramontov explodes into sexualised violence twice in quick succession. That Feramontov is left gasping for breath after the first encounter and sporting a bloodied lip after the second speaks to Elsa's strength as a character, but she's as damaged as the rest of them, although nowhere near as twisted and sadistic as Feramontov himself.

Mind you, Johnny's no saint either. His reasons for becoming involved in the affair amount at first to little more than boredom and a professional interest in a fellow killer (Moreno), although the death of his maid does give him an added impetus to dig deeper. But as we'll see in the next Fedora book I'll be reviewing – the second Feramontov Quintet novel, Hammerhead – Johnny isn't above resorting to questionable methods himself in order to get what he wants, even if that entails torture...

NB: A version of this review also appears on the Shots website.