P. M. Hubbard Short Stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1953–1969

Cult British suspense author P. M. Hubbard published just fourteen short stories in his lifetime – a smaller number even than his published novels, of which there are eighteen (including his two children's novels). Appearing in a variety of magazines and anthologies across twenty-five years, to date the stories remain uncollected, and anyone interested in reading them must seek out the original publications in which they appeared – not a straightforward task by any means (more on one aspect of why shortly), although I haven't let that deter me from getting hold of ten of them, chiefly the seven that were published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By and large that's involved strokes of good fortune in secondhand bookshops and at book fairs (notably London's Paperback & Pulp Book Fair), but for the three earliest Hubbard F&SF tales, all of which were published in the 1950s, I had to resort to downloading PDFs of the issues (from here).*

As there doesn't seem to be much online about those seven F&SF stories – apart from my own post on "The Golden Brick" that is – I thought I'd write something about them – a niche endeavour, I realise, that serves little purpose other than to interest myself and possibly Hubbard's already niche readership, but then surely that's what blogging is all about.

The first Hubbard story to appear in F&SF – and his earliest known story – was actually a reprint, having previously been published in an issue of the weekly Punch sometime in December 1952. The very short "Manuscript Found in a Vacuum" (US F&SF Vol. 5 No. 2, August 1953, cover by Jack Coggins illustrating Marion Zimmer Bradley's "The Climbing Wave") is atypical Hubbard, a wry, verbose take on vintage space opera that's mildly amusing in its own way but fairly inconsequential as regards the author's wider canon, with little evidence of the intensity of Hubbard's later work.

Much more Hubbardesque is his second short, "Botany Bay" (US F&SF Vol. 8 No. 2, February 1955, cover by Kelly Freas), which deploys his "poet's sense of concise beauty", as the story's introduction has it ("the narrow strip of tarmac reflected like water the tremendous sultry glow that lay across the tops of the hills", for example), with hints of his propensity for obliqueness and allusion ("he had a look on his face that needs describing, but isn't easy to describe – not adequately... a look of longing, a sort of shocking hunger, but so overlaid with hopelessness that the impression was one of complete passivity") in service of a story in which a motorist stops at a petrol station and encounters a victim of possible extraterrestrial interference of some kind.

Even more Hubbardian is his third short work, "Lion" (US F&SF Vol. 10 No. 3, March 1956, cover by Nicholas Solovioff illustrating Poul Anderson's "Superstition"). One of three Hubbard shorts – the others being "Special Consent" and "The House" – which might reasonably be described as dystopian or perhaps more accurately post-apocalyptic in nature – although in each case, in true Hubbard fashion, the apocalypse itself is never properly defined – it follows a regressed couple as they gather rushes in an overgrown landscape near a bronze lion statue whilst discussing their more intelligent forebears. Initially I thought that statue and the river the story locates it nearby might be one of the ones in Trafalgar Square up from the Thames, but after further investigation I believe it to be the Maiwand Lion, which stands near the River Kennet in Reading, where Hubbard was born. Anyway, Hubbard's evocative handling of the setting is typical of him, and there's a deliciously distressing twist in the tale that I shan't spoil.

The fourth Hubbard short, "The Golden Brick", I've already written about at length, but arriving at it in this essay does give me the opportunity to expand on one of the difficulties of collecting Hubbard's F&SF stories if you're based in the UK. The main source of info about Hubbard and his work is the excellent The Worlds of P. M. Hubbard, but while its bibliography does note which issues of F&SF his stories appeared in, it only gives the American numbers and dates. Here in the UK, for the first half of the 1960s a British version of F&SF was published that used the same stories as its American counterpart but not in the corresponding issues (they tended to lag behind by a number of months). So while in the US "The Golden Brick" appeared in F&SF Vol. 24 No. 1, January 1963 (cover by Ed Emsh illustrating Mack Reynolds' "Speakeasy"), in the UK it was in Vol. 4 No. 6, May 1963. In addition, in the case of "The Golden Brick", the US edition boasts a page-and-a-half introduction comparing Hubbard favourably to M. R. James and incorporating a self-penned bio ("My first novel (a thriller of sorts) just accepted for publication this autumn. Married, three children, two grandchildren. Like making things with my hands, planting and tending trees, swimming, sailing. Have cottage in Cornwall. Expect to die early in 1965, but I may crawl away over the sea yet...") that in the edited-down UK edition intro is brutally excised in its entirety.

The American intro to Hubbard's fifth short, "Special Consent" (US F&SF Vol. 24 No. 4, October 1963, cover by Chesley Bonestell), is also curtailed in the British edition (UK F&SF Vol. 5 No. 4, March 1964), although nowhere near as savagely. In this second short dystopia, Hubbard paints a scenario where women have risen to dominance after men propelled the planet back to the stone age by unleashing "the Fire". There are some interesting ideas present, but the gabby exposition – not a typical Hubbard trait – and the officious nature of the matriarchal society depicted seem to me somehow off.

A more familiar and authentic slice of Hubbard comes with his sixth short, "The Shepherd of Esdon Pen" (US F&SF Vol. 26 No. 2, February 1964, cover by Jack Guagham illustrating S. S. Johnson's "The House by the Crab Apple Tree"/UK F&SF Vol. 5 No. 7, June 1964), in which Hubbard spends a good deal of the story's length vividly establishing the ancient chalk upland surroundings and the social and religious milieu in order to deliver a tale of escalating dread centring on the eponymous horn-headed pagan herder, a carving of whom can be seen in the local church and whose serpent-like staff figures at the story's climax.

Just as good is "The House", Hubbard's ninth short story overall and his last to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (US F&SF Vol. 36 No. 4, April 1969, cover by Bert Tanner illustrating Gregory Benford's "Deeper Than the Darkness"). The third Hubbard post-apocalyptic tale, it shares with "The Shepherd of Esdon Pen" a kind of excavatory epilogue, as a man and his wife try to erect a home and start a new life on their government-allotted square mile of overgrown rubble – all that remains of North London – but find that the going is far harder than they expected. Transplanting a characteristically Hubbardian sense of a sullen rurality to a keenly rendered shattered cityscape ("fairly fine rubble, pretty wet in winter and thickly grown with scrub and the larger annuals, broken by coppices of hazel and alder"), the accruing details – the scarcity of glass, silent birds that might be deaf, the backbreaking work of shifting by hand the "infernal jigsaw" of masonry to find "a reasonably stable and compact surface" to fill in and then level up – build into a convincing portrait of English stoicism in the face of catastrophe.

Of the seven F&SF stories, I would say "Lion", "The Golden Brick", "The Shepherd of Esdon Pen" and "The House" are all approaching prime Hubbard and are well worth tracking down; the other three perhaps less so. In addition, F&SF ran three Hubbard poems, and these too are worth a read (again, they can be downloaded here). Both "Free Flight" (US F&SF Vol. 10 No. 4, April 1956, cover by Chesley Bonestell) and "Air Space Violated" (US F&SF Vol. 15 No. 5, November 1958, cover by Pederson) deal to a degree with man's efforts to escape his earthly shackles, but my favourite I think is "Nobody Hunts Witches" (US F&SF Vol. 8 No. 5, May 1955, cover by Stanley Meltzoff). It brought a smile to my face when I first read it, and in that spirit I hope I'll be forgiven for including it in full below.

*A year on from this post, I secured physical copies of all three in the basement of the Quinto Bookshop on Charing Cross Road.

Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 1/12/17.

The Ten Best Books I Read in 2015

For this, my final post of the year, I present the ten best books I read in 2015. As has been the case with every one of my year-end books top tens since I started assembling such things six years ago, barely any of the books in this year's top ten were actually published this year – in fact just one, by an author who in 2013's top ten was the sole representative of that year's new publishing too – and so this post will as usual be of absolutely no use to anyone in discerning the prevailing trends in publishing over the past twelve months. But it may be of some use in discerning the prospective trends on Existential Ennui over the coming months, in as much as I've yet to get round to reviewing just under half of the books in this top ten – nor a good number of the books in my big long list of the books I read in 2015, from whence this top ten is drawn – and so whatever prolix piffle I eventually manage to cobble together about them may well form the substance of at least some of Existential Ennui in 2016.

Unless of course I decide not to blog about any of them. Or indeed blog at all. Merry Christmas, and a happy new year!

10. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1958)

Informed by Graham Greene's experiences working for the Secret Service during the war, Our Man in Havana may be a fairly frothy confection (the fate of poor Dr. Hasselbacher aside) but it still effectively skewers what Greene perceived as the credulity of British Intelligence. "It seemed to me that either the Foreign Office or the Intelligence Service had amply merited a little ridicule," he wrote of the novel in Ways of Escape. Speaking of which...

9. Ways of Escape by Graham Greene (Bodley Head, 1980)

Part autobiography, part travelogue, Greene's book-by-book saunter down memory lane is not only illuminating as to the origins of many of his novels, short stories and plays (the background to, and inspiration for, The Quiet American, for example, is extensive, incorporating diary entries) but frequently arresting and eye-opening too, not least when he discusses his fondness for opium, marijuana and cocaine.

8. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador, 2014)

I noted in my top ten of the best graphic novels I read in 2015 that I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic dystopias, and Station Eleven is a fine example of the sub-genre – elegantly written, strangely uplifting and with a fascinating and compelling internal mythology (as evidenced by the one-page Dr. Eleven comic book insert in my copy of the first edition).

7. The Holm Oaks by P. M. Hubbard (Joseph, 1965)

In my review of The Holm Oaks I ventured that it "might be the quintessential Hubbard novel", and further suggested that "the novel could almost be seen as a prototypical eco thriller". True to form I neglected to say whether it's any good or not, but its appearance in this top ten should offer some guidance there.

6. Eleven by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1970)

Graham Greene – who, as is becoming clear, features heavily in this top ten (to paraphrase New Order, everything went Greene for me this year) – wrote in his foreword to Eleven that Highsmith in her short stories "is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader, and how admirably and with what field-craft she hunts us down". Quite so.

= 5. private i / Foreign Exchange by Jimmy Sangster (Triton, 1967 / 1968)

I think Hammer Horror-meister Jimmy Sangster's two spy/crime thrillers starring ex-British Intelligence operative turned private investigator John Smith might have been the most purely enjoyable novels I read in 2015 – "kind of early le Carré crossed with Len Deighton's unnamed working class secret agent and with a dash of Adam Hall's Quiller mixed in for good measure", as I put it in my review.

4. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, 2015)

A companion novel to Life After Life, A God in Ruins is as evocative in its own way of life during wartime as Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (about which more shortly); but it's also a beautiful – and beautifully written – meditation on the big stuff of existence: love, death, family, chance, choice.

3. Carol by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1990)

"If [Todd] Haynes's film brings [Carol] and Highsmith to a new audience, so much the better, because Carol deserves to be widely read, especially by those who might otherwise dismiss Highsmith as a crime writer," I wrote in my review, adding that "it's recognisably the work of the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), This Sweet Sickness (1960) and The Cry of the Owl (1962), and as good in its own way as any of those novels". Still haven't seen the blummin' film yet though.

2. Touch by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1988)

I was surprised by how great Touch was; it's such an overlooked novel in Leonard's backlist that I wasn't expecting it to be up there with the likes of The Big Bounce (1969), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), Split Images (1981), Stick (1983) or LaBrava (1983). But it really is that good, boasting among its scenes "a climactic, brilliant, farcical TV interview conducted by a rictus grinning hairpiece-bedecked towering shit of a host which is about the best sequence I've read in a Leonard novel", as I put it in my review.

1. The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1946/1960)

When I reviewed The Ministry of Fear in July I praised the novel's "unexpected depth" and Greene's "vivid evocation of London during the Blitz, penned while the bombs were falling"; I highlighted the "undercurrent of pain and suffering which weaves through the story" and the themes of "the spirit of adventure and the loss of innocence" that inform the narrative; and I stated in closing "that The Ministry of Fear is the best of Greene's novels that I've read... and by far the best book that I've read this year". Couldn't have put it better myself.

Anthony Price on Patricia Highsmith, P. M. Hubbard, Victor Canning, Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas and Donald E. Westlake

When I interviewed spy novelist Anthony Price four years ago one of the areas we covered was Price's parallel career as a book reviewer. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s Price reviewed crime fiction and thrillers for the Oxford Mail – sister paper to The Oxford Times, for which Price worked and of which he eventually became editor – and his reviews were frequently excerpted for dust jacket and back cover blurbs for subsequent books by the writers he reviewed. Since my 2011 interview with Price I've often noticed blurbs by him on the secondhand books I buy (the presence of such contemporaneous reviews on covers and sometimes inner pages is for me part of the attraction of old books) and especially so when they're reviews of authors and novels I admire. It's an opportunity to see what one of my favourite novelists, the writer of the splendid David Audley spy series, thought of some of my other favourite novelists and novels – like, for instance, Patricia Highsmith and Ripley's Game.

I've noted before how Ripley's Game is my favourite novel above all others, so when at the last Lewes Book Fair I clocked that Jamie Sturgeon had a 1976 Penguin paperback of said on his table, I couldn't resist (this despite already owning a 1974 Heinemann first edition and a 1989 Heinemann uniform edition; then again, it has afforded me the opportunity to add the Penguin paperback, cover photograph by Paul Wakefield, to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s). It was only later that I realised the lone review excerpted on the back was by Anthony Price, who praised the novel thus: "Ripley's Game is beautifully written, its attraction lying in the unpretentious simplicity of the Highsmith prose both as it takes us through the seduction of an ordinary decent man and – which is what Ripley admirers will most enjoy – the mental processes of the psychopathic anti-hero who ensnares him."

I think it's safe to assume that Price himself numbered among those "Ripley admirers". Mr Price was similarly effusive in his praise of the prose of another writer I'm enthusiast of and for: P. M. Hubbard. Review excerpts for High Tide (1971) and The Graveyard (1975) appear on the back covers of the Macmillan first editions of respectively A Rooted Sorrow (1973) and The Causeway (1976). Of High Tide, Price wrote, "Admirably described setting – dangerous estuary, all sand one moment, all water the next – but the real attraction is the strong, controlled narrative line and the impeccable English," while of The Graveyard he wrote: "Mr. Hubbard's marvellous atmospheric prose has never been used to better advantage. This is a real beauty of a suspense thriller, restrained in the telling, but with its menace as taut as a bowstring."

The Price review excerpts for Victor Canning novels that I have in my possession are rather briefer, but they do tell a story of an author, Canning, reaching the peak of his powers in the 1970s. The jacket flap of the 1973 Heinemann first edition of The Finger of Saturn carries a snippet of an Oxford Mail review – which though unattributed I think we can assume was by Price – for what is regarded in some quarters as Canning's finest novel, The Rainbird Pattern (1972), of which the review confidently states, "There hasn't been a better thriller this year." And on the back cover of the 1974 Heinemann first of The Mask of Memory, an attributed Price proclaims of the aforementioned The Finger of Saturn that "Mr. Canning has never written better".

The sole excerpt of an Anthony Price review of an Elmore Leonard novel that I can find in my book collection appears on the back of the Secker firsts of both Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) and The Hunted (1978), and is for Fifty-Two Pickup (1974); but in truth it's more descriptive than critical: "Features a self-made auto components factory owner from Detroit whose philandering marks him for blackmail. But you don't run a Detroit factory by turning the other cheek, and the more the blackmailer squeezes (by escalating his blackmail with a murder frame and a kidnapping) the greater his own danger becomes."

Price was more forthcoming on the qualities of Ross Thomas's If You Can't Be Good (Hamish Hamilton, 1974), Price's review of which was excerpted for the back covers of the 1974 Hamilton editions of The Porkchoppers and The Highbinders (the latter published under Ross's Oliver Bleeck alias): "...the digging into the garbage of the past and the digger's growing distaste of his dirty hands are beautifully entwined themes and there are some well-staged shocks and surprises".

He had kind words too for a number of Donald E. Westlake novels. The jacket back flap of the 1965 T. V. Boardman edition of Pity Him Afterwards features an excerpt of a Price review of Killy (Boardman, 1964) declaring that "...for sheer, cold-blooded ingenuity, and for a most stimulating disregard for his readers' feelings, the palm goes to Donald Westlake with Killy", while the jacket flap of the 1966 Boardman edition of The Fugitive Pigeon carries this pithy summation of the merits of Pity Him Afterwards itself: "Nasty but clever." And Price was evidently partial to a spot of Dortmunder as well: the back cover of the 1973 Hodder edition of Cops and Robbers carries a snippet of an Oxford Mail review (again unattributed, but surely by Price) describing the debut Dortmunder outing, The Hot Rock (Hodder, 1971), as "Fast-moving and engagingly whacky." Quite so, sir. Quite so.

P. M. Hubbard, A Hive of Glass: First Edition (Michael Joseph, 1965), Uncorrected Proof (Michael Joseph, 1964)

One would be forgiven for thinking in the internet age that pretty much any edition of any old book a book-collecting body might desire would be (fairly readily) available online, if only said book-collecting body had sufficient funds. In fact some books still prove stubbornly elusive, irrespective of cost. I've been on the lookout for a 1965 British first edition of A Hive of Glass, perhaps the finest novel in cult crime/suspense writer P. M. Hubbard's queasily compelling canon, ever since Book Glutton got me into Hubbard's work four years ago, and though the occasional jacketless copy has hoved into view, a first edition in its wrapper has, until very recently, remained frustratingly out of reach. This has been especially maddening because there haven't even been any images of the British first's jacket available online, so I had no idea even what the thing looked like – an inexcusable state of affairs for a novel that I would consider to be among the ten best that I've read in the past half-dozen years.

Happily, I'm finally able to rectify that situation:

That there is the British first edition and first impression of A Hive of Glass, published by Michael Joseph in 1965 and purchased by me just last week. It's an ex-library copy:

but both book and jacket are in very good condition (despite having been borrowed from a Kesteven county library twenty-nine times over a five year period), with all pages (and indeed library dockets) present and correct and the wrapper quite bright and unclipped.

That wrapper, now added to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, was designed by Ivan Lapper, an artist and illustrator whose best-known book jacket work is probably the 1966 Bodley Head edition of Graham Greene's The Comedians but who has latterly found wider fame as a painter. Those familiar with A Hive of Glass will recognise the curious object on the front of the jacket as a Venetian tazza (albeit one with the embellishment of a lid); those unfamiliar with the novel and wondering what the bloody hell a tazza is and why it should feature on the cover will just have to go and read the book (or maybe my review – or better still John Norris's).

There is more to this particular tale of book collecting, however; because not only have I at long last laid my hands on possibly the scarcest book in Hubbard's backlist, I've also laid my hands on something which, I'd hazard, is scarcer still:

An uncorrected proof of A Hive of Glass. I've only ever come across one other proof of a Hubbard novel – 1964's A Picture of Millie, still listed on AbeBooks (for about £100) as I type – so this one is rather a rare thing indeed. (And I should just like to state for the record, for those who are au fait with the novel, that no murders were committed in the acquisition of this item.) What's really interesting about it, aside from the little errors one expects to find in proof copies –

compare page 17 of the proof (top) with that of the first edition (bottom; click on the images to see them larger) – is its copyright page. The stamped date on the card cover gives the pub date as 11 January, 1965 (and the price, scrawled in pen, as 18 shillings, as per the first edition's jacket flap); but on the copyright page, the year of publication (and copyright date) is given as 1964:

Whereas on the copyright page of the first edition, the year of publication (and copyright date) is given as 1965:

In a way I suppose that's fair enough: the uncorrected proof was indeed 'published' – in the sense that it was printed and distributed (in presumably a very small edition) – in 1964, whereas the first edition wasn't published – in the sense of being made available for sale to the public – until the following year. But it's not something I think I've seen before with a proof and a finished edition, and it does lend some credence to the notion that an uncorrected proof is the true first edition of any book. Which, at least in this case, it's hard to argue that it isn't.

The Tower by P. M. Hubbard: First Edition (Geoffrey Bles, 1967), Book Review

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 29/5/15.

Do authors know when they've written a duff book? Kingsley Amis was in little doubt that he had with I Like it Here (1958), later calling it "a very slipshod, lopsided piece of work". Patricia Highsmith certainly knew she had with A Game for the Living (1958), describing it (in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction) as "the one really dull book I have written". And of A Thirsty Evil (1974), P. M. Hubbard wrote (to the wife of his friend and fellow novelist Alan Kennington) "...it's not one I'm very keen on myself".

I'm a lot keener on A Thirsty Evil than Hubbard was, but I'd be interested to find out what he thought of The Tower. Chances are he would have been as self-effacing about it as he was all his novels – "they are not very good books," he wrote in a letter to critic Tom Jenkins, although he did concede they were "beautifully written" – but in the case of The Tower, he would have had a point.

Published by Geoffrey Bles in 1967 under a stark, strident dust jacket designed by Donald Green (also to be found, naturally, in the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery), The Tower was Hubbard's fifth novel for adults, and the first of three to be issued by Bles (Hubbard's chief publisher to this point had been Michael Joseph). It's also, I think, Hubbard's weakest novel (at least of those that I've read, which is well over half). As one would expect of the author, it's nicely written in that detached, wry, almost arch manner of his, and additionally it boasts some divertingly off-piste word choices – a "bedizened" here, a "pargeted" there. But it lacks either the intensity of A Hive of Glass (1965) or The Holm Oaks (1965), or the charm and vigour of Flush as May (1963) or Picture of Millie (1964).

I wonder if it's the setting that lets the thing down – not in the sense that it's not an intriguing place in and of itself, because it is, at least mildly so: a fictional English village, Coyle, where one night a year the locals build a pyre and parade around with flaming torches held aloft (remind you of anywhere...?). No, it's more the lack of that main character in so many of Hubbard's novels, the British countryside, or rather a discombobulating rustic locale or unusual and unnerving feature of that countryside. For the most part Hubbard confines himself here to Coyle, and so that feeling of a somehow dangerous rurality is missing from the book, although Hubbard tries to counter that by making the eponymous bell tower of St. Udan's church the focus of such action as there is, and at least introduces a superficial sense of unease in the shape of the pyre atop the "tump" (shades of The Wicker Man there).

It doesn't help that Hubbard's lead, John Smith, who lands in Coyle as a result of car trouble, prosaically – and thus appositely – enough, is a rather less tortured soul than others of the author's protagonists. Certainly he's bewitched by a wayward woman, as is the wont of Hubbard's males, but only marginally so, and soon comes to his senses anyway, finding himself a more orthodox romantic interest instead. Hubbard admitted in a subsequent letter to Tom Jenkins that "places mean more to me than people", and it's true that in most of his novels the place is usually more memorable than any of the people; but even by that measure John Smith is an unengaging creation. Perhaps that's why Hubbard named him so: an ordinary name for an ordinary character – albeit one who prompts the odd amusing moniker-related line (for instance,  "...he felt an overpowering urge to tell her that he really was John Smith. Someone had to be") – leading an ordinary – but still readable – book.

An earlier review of The Tower can be found over at The Passing Tramp.