Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (Panther, 1958)

No. 6 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do. NB: linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 8/4/16.

What is it?
The first British paperback edition of Dashiell Hammett's classic 1929 noir novel Red Harvest, published by Panther in 1958.

Who illustrated the cover?
John Vernon, who also illustrated the 1957 Panther edition of The Maltese Falcon; perhaps that's why the Continental Op on his Red Harvest cover bears a passing resemblance to Humphrey Bogart (who played Sam Spade in the 1941 John Huston film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon).

Where and when did I buy it?
On eBay, last year.

Why did I buy it?
It was a bit of an impulse purchase. I'd been on the hunt for an affordable first edition/first impression of the The Dashiell Hammett Omnibus (Cassell, 1950), and managed to find one, in its dust jacket, on Amazon Marketplace for under twenty quid (see previous post). At the same time I spotted this paperback of Red Harvest on eBay, and even though Red Harvest is one of the novels in The Dashiell Hammett Omnibus, I couldn't resist snapping up this rare first British paperback edition of Red Harvest too. In my defence, at least it means John Vernon's cover is now freely available to view online – possibly the first time that's been the case.

Have I read it yet?
I have.

High-Rise by J. G. Ballard: First Edition, First Paperback Edition, Book Review, Thoughts on Ben Wheatley's Film Adaptation

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

When news broke a couple of weeks ago that British film director Ben Wheatley would begin filming an adaptation of J. G. Ballard's High-Rise in June with Tom Hiddleston as his lead, I was prompted to finally pick up and read this:

The British first edition (and first impression) of High-Rise, published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in 1975, dust jacket design by Craig Dodd (who would go on to design the wrapper for the 1979 Cape edition of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and who earlier designed the wrapper for the 1969 Hodder edition of Richard Stark's The Dame). I bought this copy early last year in Wax Factor in Brighton – a secondhand record shop which also stocks a good selection of secondhand books – for a pretty good price – a fraction of what first editions ordinarily go for (upwards of £100). The jacket is a little worn and stained, and the book was evidently owned by a smoker and, I'd hazard, drinker who apparently nodded off whilst reading it:

but cigarette burns on the pages and stains on the wrapper are kind of in keeping with the nature of the novel, which centres on a 40-storey tower block which becomes gradually more dilapidated as the story unfolds, strewn with rubbish, fag butts, faeces and eventually bodies. And those defects aside, the book is in pretty good nick, although not in as good nick as this:

The British first paperback edition, published by Triad/Panther in 1977, cover art by Chris Foss. I blogged about this copy back in 2010, noting its relative scarcity, and it hasn't become any less scarce since: there are at present no copies on AbeBooks, and just a single copy on Amazon Marketplace (I think; it's often hard to tell which edition sellers are offering on Amazon Marketplace, but there's a paperback copy priced at £8.99 which I believe is the 1977 Panther paperback).

The only Ben Wheatley film I've seen is Kill List (2011), but even on that meagre evidence I can well imagine what he'll do with High-Rise. Ballard's tale of middle class residents of a tower block surrendering to their base desires seems tailor made for the director, especially if he remains reasonably faithful to the book. The way in which the novel's triumvirate of Dr Robert Laing (25th floor, and Hiddleston's character), Richard Wilder (2nd floor) and Anthony Royal (40th floor, and the building's architect) – along with the rest of the high-rise's residents – shun the world outside their walls and follow their curious internal logic to their ultimate debasement in a way reflects the horrific descent into degradation by Jay (Neil Maskell) in Kill List, although the three protagonists' cool detachment and the state of strangely beatific squalor they achieve is uniquely Ballardian (see also Concrete Island, and I'm sure others too). It's an arresting read, and in Wheatley's hands should make for an intriguing film.

From the Lewes Book Fair: Vintage Paperbacks by Michael Dibdin, Isaac Asimov and Patricia Highsmith, Plus Some Children's Books

It's been a while since I've blogged about the Lewes Book Fair and the books I've bought thereat (is "thereat" even a word...?), chiefly because despite attending almost all of the fairs over the past year or so (apart from the one in May, due to little Edie choosing that weekend to make her grand entrance), I didn't buy a single book (this 1958 third impression of the Hart-Davis edition of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man was, I believe, the last thing I got there). However, that dry spell was broken at Saturday's (12 October) event – the final one of the year (there were, I think, only four this year, as opposed to the usual five) – when I came away with three vintage paperbacks for a pound a pop, plus some kids' books; so before we get to those promised Elmore Leonard posts, I thought we could take a look at wot I got.

A 1980 first Sphere paperback edition of Michael Dibdin's debut novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, originally published in hardback in 1978 by Jonathan Cape. I'm not quite sure why I decided to purchase this, given that my interest in Sherlock Holmes extends to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's Sherlock and not much farther, and that I still have umpteen Dibdin first editions – the majority of them Aurelio Zen novels – to read and blog about (the only ones I've covered thus far are the Zen books Ratking and And Then You Die). Maybe it was the Kingsley Amis blurb on the front cover wot did it – that and the fact that the book was only a quid, whereas a first edition would be more like sixty quid (and probably more).

A 1960 first Panther paperback edition of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, originally published in hardback in 1953 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. I have a habit of occasionally picking up cheap paperback editions of science fiction classics with a view to, at some point, in some mythical future era where I miraculously have hours and hours of leisure time at my disposal (not retirement, before you suggest that; I doubt I'll ever be able to afford to retire), finally getting round to reading them (see also Brian W. Aldiss's Non-Stop). Never gonna happen, obviously, but dammit I can dream, can't I? The cover artist, by the way, is unknown (even to the illustrious Steve Holland) – as is the cover artist of the third and final paperback.

A 1968 first Macfadden paperback edition of Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away, originally published in hardback in the States in 1967 by Doubleday. This is my prize score from this bunch; unlike the other two paperbacks, which were published by British outfits, this one was was published by an American imprint, which, in conjunction with the fact that it's pretty scarce – there are at present just four copies on AbeBooks, all offered by US sellers – makes it quite unusual in the context of it being found at a provincial British book fair. I actually already own the novel in its 1967 UK Heinemann edition – see the recently established Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery – but such is my passion for Highsmith I couldn't resist nabbing this too, especially for a pound.

Those, then, were the books I bought for myself at the Lewes Book Fair. But I also bought three books for Edie, who made a special guest appearance at the fair (to the accompaniment of much cooing and the odd comment about starting her reading rather young). In fact Edie did better than I did on the day, because Rachel subsequently picked out a couple more books for her from the Red Cross charity shop (newly reopened as a children's outlet) at the top of Station Street, so that Edie's haul in the end looked like this:

Left to right we have Jemmy Button by Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali; Red Ted and the Lost Things by Michael Rosen and Joel Stewart; Marigold Garden by Kate Greenaway; The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base; and Noddy Meets Father Christmas by Enid Blyton. (That last one we're of course keeping in reserve for Christmas.) Phew. As Bruce Forsyth was once wont to say: didn't she do well?

Westlake on Rabe: Murder Me for Nickels & Anatomy of a Killer by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal, 1960 / Panther, 1962)

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Featured in Friday's Forgotten Books.

In his 1989 essay on Peter Rabe for the critical anthology Murder off the Rack, Donald E. Westlake identified two distinct periods during which, Westlake reckoned, Rabe produced his best work. The first came at the start of Rabe's career, encompassing the five books from Stop This Man! (1955) to Kill the Boss Good-by (1956). The second – also encompassing five books – began in 1959 and comprised the final Daniel Port novel, Time Enough to Die, along with My Lovely Executioner (1960), The Box (1962), and the final two novels I'll be blogging about in this current run of Rabe posts: Murder Me for Nickels and Anatomy of a Killer (both 1960).

Only the second of Rabe's novels to be narrated in the first person (the first being the aforementioned My Lovely Executioner), for Westlake Murder Me for Nickels was "absolutely unlike anything that [Rabe] had done before... as sprightly and glib as My Lovely Executioner was depressed and glum". Westlake isn't alone in appreciating the merits of the novel, either: it's also a particular favourite of Westlake aficionado and The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, who has called it "marvelously sardonic". And the Gold Medal original – this copy of which I found at the last-but-one London Paperback & Pulp Bookfair – boasts one of the best covers ever to grace a Peter Rabe book, by the great Robert McGinnis.

But for anyone looking for the single Rabe novel that perhaps exerted the greatest influence on Westlake, especially on his pseudonymous (as Richard Stark) Parker series, I'd still point to Anatomy of a Killer. I blogged about this one two years ago, in its original hardback edition – published, as Westlake puts it in his essay, by "a penny-ante outfit called Abelard-Schuman" – that post later appearing in an altered form over at The Violent World of Parker. In order to demonstrate the similarities between Anatomy and the Parkers I quoted extensively from the opening of the novel, and would you Adam and Eve it that's precisely what Westlake does too, sampling the exact same passage – including the opening "When" – and labelling the novel "as cold and clean as a knife".

The copy seen here is the British paperback edition, published by Panther in 1962 as part of their Crime Circle line. The cover art is uncredited and I can't make out the signature, but around this time Panther had a habit of taking cover art from often random and unrelated American paperbacks and reusing it, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that this artwork is lifted from a completely different book.

UPDATE: Ray Garraty quickly identified the original book the cover art was taken from as Harry Whittington's 1959 novel Strange Bargain, as seen on Killer Covers. No word as yet on cover artist, although that signature could be "Darcy", an alias of Ernest Chiriaka.

I do have a handful of other Peter Rabe paperbacks to blog about, dating from the mid-1960s to the early '70s, but Westlake doesn't have much to say about those in his essay, so I think I'll save them for another time. But before I leave Rabe behind, there is one last book of his I'd like to take a look at – an atypical entry in his canon that has a special significance for me right now...

The Curse of the Collector: A Hive of Glass (1965) by P. M. Hubbard – Novel Review

This week I'm blogging about British novelist P. M. Hubbard, whose strange, evocative suspense novels – almost all of which are out of print – draw on a very particular sense of place – chiefly an unnerving, oppressive and remote rural Britain. Yesterday I posted a brief overview of his oeuvre and a bibliography, and for the rest of the week I'll be focussing on books and stories from either end of his sixteen-year career – although not necessarily the books and stories a Hubbard fan might expect. Today it's the turn of his fifth novel (counting his two children's novels): A Hive of Glass.

A Hive of Glass was first published in Britain by Michael Joseph in 1965 (1966 Panther paperback edition seen on the right there – unfortunately I wasn't able to find a first edition), when Hubbard was, I believe, fifty-four (he came to novel-writing quite late). The narrator is Johnnie Slade, a collector of fine glass who gets wind of a Verzelini Tazza, a sixteenth-century glass dish standing on a central stem, crafted by the Venetian Giacomo Verzelini. This priceless piece is featured in an article by noted glass scholar Levinson in the latest issue of Old Glass, a quarterly periodical edited and financed by Peter Sarrett, but Sarrett is unable to furnish Slade with either the name of the owner of the tazza or its location. Desperate to discover more about it, Slade visits Levinson, only to find him dead of a heart attack. But there is one clue in Levinson's desk diary – a single word: "Dunstreet".

Determining that the Dunstreet in question is a (fictional) country town 150 miles outside of London, near the south coast of England, Slade sets off in pursuit of the tazza. As he explores the town's verdant surroundings, there's an early hint of the environment as an entity in and of itself – something which is common in Hubbard's work: 

The whole countryside was dark and green and crouched a bit... the trees filled all the valley bottoms as if they had been poured into them – as indeed, in embryo, they probably had – and the valleys ran together in a network always pointing southwards to the place where their combined streams met salt water almost between the oak roots. The air was so soft and wet you could squeeze it out. It smelt of dead wood and land-locked brine.

This sense of an enveloping, decaying, stifling landscape intensifies throughout the novel, until the rural environs become almost an active participant in events (quite violently in one scene where a stag and a hellish hound cause a car accident). As Slade inveigles himself into Dunstreet's affairs and becomes involved with a young woman, Claudia, he learns of Claudia's Aunt Elizabeth, who lives in a remote house on an outcrop of densely wooded land near the sea, which becomes cut off at high tide. It's a gloomy, forbidding, eerie terrain, all loamy ground and tangled roots and deep creeks, heavy with foreboding and symbolizing the isolated existence of the blind Aunt Elizabeth and her deaf servant, Coster. Claudia is at the beck and call of her aunt: it transpires that when Elizabeth eventually dies, Claudia stands to inherit her aunt's possessions – which might just include the tazza...

The environmental aspects of Hubbard's novels have been much remarked upon, but it was another aspect of A Hive of Glass which particularly struck me, one which Book Glutton identified in his original comment drawing my attention to the author. This strand manifests itself right at the outset, when Johnnie visits an antique shop in the Midlands and spies an eighteenth-century glass at the back of a cabinet. Knowing what it's worth, and knowing the proprietor doesn't, he manages to buy the glass at a knock-down price; realising his mistake, the dealer relents, but sees something in Slade's eyes that causes him to back off. What he glimpses is the madness of the collector.

This unhinged zeal is one I'm more than familiar with (as regular readers of this blog might have noticed). It's a compulsion to possess objects – glass, antiques, books, whatever – a need which clearly speaks to an absence elsewhere in one's life (although I hesitate to explore what exactly that might be). The collecting impulse is, for the most part, fairly benign – Johnnie's evident delight at his newly bought glass as he gingerly washes it in a nearby stream is a joyous moment. But it does have its dark side, and that unpleasant facet of collecting rears its head throughout the novel.

The first instance comes in a Dunstreet auction room, where Johnnie pinpoints the dealers in the room and remarks upon the way they bid up pieces so that regular punters don't buy them for less than the market price. But the impulse becomes more personal as the novel progresses: Slade begins to suspect someone else is on the trail of the tazza, and in time events conspire to bring him to a place where it becomes unlikely he will be able to secure it for himself. It's at this point that Slade verbalizes the dark side of collecting: "So long as nobody else gets it."

This is the collector's curse: the desire to own, but also the desire to ensure that no one else is able to own that which one desires. Here, then, we reach the crux of the novel: Johnnie's romantic entanglement with Claudia proves an agreeable distraction (as does a brief liaison with a friend's wife – Slade is a randy bugger), but it's only a diversion; the hunt for the elusive tazza is all. It's never far from Slade's mind, even when he maintains it is; his statement at the close of one chapter – "I had not given the tazza a thought since six" – only serves to make a lie of his professed disinterest. The glass is the thing, and the pursuit of it takes Slade to ever murkier climes, ever greater extremes, eventually leading to a dark denouement at the bottom of an old mineshaft.

A Hive of Glass is a terrific book, perhaps Hubbard's first out-and-out classic (there's another recent and glowing review of it on the Pretty Sinister Books blog). But he was to write many more over the next fourteen years – and it's to his final novel that we turn next, a fine example of the hunter-and-hunted subgenre that weaves through British fiction: 1979's Kill Claudio.

Lewes Book Bargain: Colonel Sun by Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis); Triad/Panther Paperback, Beverley le Barrow Cover; Review

Inveterate collector that I am, it's not unknown for me to buy different editions of books I already own in other editions when I chance upon them, and such is the case with this Spy Fiction Fortnight find/Lewes Book Bargain (which, I almost forgot, I'm posting on World Book Day, although I'm uncertain what that's all about; what can I say – every day is book day for me):

This 'ere is the 1977 UK Triad/Panther paperback edition of Robert Markham's Colonel Sun, which was the first James Bond novel to be written by someone other than Ian Fleming after Fleming's death in 1964. Penned by Bond fan Kingsley Amis under a pseudonym that was intended by Fleming's literary estate to be a kind of hand-me-down moniker for any authors who wished to pick up the Bond baton – but was, in the end, only ever used for this book – it was originally published in 1968 by Jonathan Cape – which is the other edition I already own. But when I saw this '77 first print paperback on the shelf at the Lewes branch of Oxfam recently, for, as you can see by the price sticker on the back, 99p, I couldn't resist it.

Colonel Sun went through three UK paperback publishers following its 1968 hardback debut: there was a Pan edition in 1970 (some say 1968, but I'm unsure about that); this Panther paperback in '77; and finally a Coronet edition in 1991. All of those went through multiple printings under different covers (two covers in the case of Coronet, I think), but the novel is currently out of print. Which is a shame because, although in Bond fan circles I know it's not terribly well-regarded, I actually thought it was a decent read.

It's not up there with, say, Casino Royale (1953), or From Russia, with Love (1957), but it's probably the equal of Diamonds Are Forever (1956), which I slightly struggled with due to its rather too relaxed American travelogue plot (one too many chicken dinners for Bond there, I felt). Colonel Sun suffers from a similar problem once Bond decamps to the Greek islands on the trail of the nefarious eponymous Chinese colonel, where it becomes slightly directionless. But Amis's characterization of 007 is solid, the novel gets off to a cracking start with the kidnapping of M and a couple of affecting deaths, and there's an obligatory but effective torture sequence towards the end, a bit of business of which Fleming would surely have approved.

I covered the Panther editions of the Bond novels, with their golden gun Beverley le Barrow covers, extensively in this post and this post, and reiterated what I've learned about Beverley himself in this post last week. But now I have this copy of Colonel Sun in hand, I can confirm a couple of other details from the photo session credits on the inside front cover. The dress the lovely legs-akimbo lady is wearing is by Jean Varon (misspelled as "Varron" in the cover credit), which means it was probably created by Youthquake designer John Bates. The model's hair, meanwhile, was styled by Schumi, so that's likely Chelsea hairdresser Gregor Schumi. So now you know, and now I can add the back cover to that Bond Triad/Panther cover gallery I linked to earlier.

Right then. What have we got to round off the first week of Spy Fiction Fortnight? How about a little-seen 1957 first edition of a collection of excerpts from sundry espionage stories, compiled by Graham Greene and his brother, Hugh...?

Bleeck Week: The Highbinders by Oliver Bleeck (Ross Thomas); Hamish Hamilton First Edition, Cover by Beverley le Barrow, a.k.a. Beverley Goodway

We're stumbling towards the end of Bleeck Week now, with just two more of the pseudonymous Philip St. Ives thrillers written by Ross Thomas to look at. And today it's the turn of the fourth St. Ives novel... not to mention the return of a cover photographer who's become a firm favourite in the palatial abode of Louis XIV (i.e., round my gaff):

Seen above is the UK hardback first edition of The Highbinders, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1974 – originally published by William Morrow in the States in 1973. And if we take a look at the US cover:

We can see that the approach on the UK one was a little... different... I'll come back to the design of the Hamilton edition dustjacket momentarily, but as is traditional by now, let's take a gander at its jacket flap copy to see what it's all about:

Professional go-between Philip St. Ives finds himself in a London jail even before he has accepted an offer from Ned and Norbert Nitry to recover the fabulous Sword of St. Louis which as (or has it?) been stolen from them and is being ransomed. When Philip does accept the offer, he becomes involved in a deadly game of deception and murder with a bizarre group of characters that includes two professional con men (highbinders). This is a top-flight novel of intrigue and fun from an acknowledged master of the suspense novel.

Good of Hamish Hamilton's copywriter to tell us what a highbinder is – I had no idea before reading that blurb – and also, the novel's set in London, from whence I hail (I didn't always live in Lewes, y'know). I've already spotted references to New Cavendish Street and Watney's the brewers, so it'll be interesting to spot other Lahndahn Taaahhhn locations...

As I mentioned in the previous post on the second St. Ives novel, Protocol for a Kidnapping (which really should have been the second post in Bleeck Week instead of the third – don't ask), after the third St. Ives book, 1971/72's The Procane Chronicle/The Thief Who Painted Sunlight, the UK rights for Oliver Bleeck's novels were picked up from Hodder & Stoughton by Hamish Hamilton. Indeed, from 1974 onwards, ALL of Ross Thomas's novels – pseudonymous or otherwise – were published by Hamilton in Britain. And for five glorious years from 1974–1979, the vast majority of those novels were graced by dustjackets 'designed' by Hamilton's go-to cover 'designer' – or rather, photographer – during that period, one Beverley le Barrow.

Beverley has featured on this blog numerous times now, both in conjunction with Ross Thomas books and with those by other authors, too. At first, in this post on The Money Harvest/Yellow-Dog Contract, then in this one on P. D. James's Cover Her Face, and subsequently in this post on the paperbacks of If You Can't Be Good and Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, and indeed this one on The Eighth Dwarf, I figured Beverley was a woman; with a name like that you would, wouldn't you? But by the time I got to Chinaman's Chance, I was starting to wonder whether Beverley le Barrow might in fact be a pseudonym. After all, in the Hamish Hamilton books with covers by Beverley, they were credited to "Beverly Lebarrow", while in other paperbacks, it was "Beverley le Barrow". Why the discrepancy?

And then in this post on the Panther paperback editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels (followed by this post on the box set of those books) I started to make the connection between Beverley le Barrow and famed Sun newspaper Page 3 photographer Beverley Goodway, theorising that they might be one and the same. That theory was later pretty much confirmed by Francis from the Stanley Morgan Website, who left a couple of comments on that Eighth Dwarf post saying that he'd got in contact with an American photographer who'd worked as Beverley's assistant in the '70s and asked him if Le Barrow was a pseudonym. Said photographer confirmed it was, and he confirmed he was a man, and he reckoned that he thought Beverley's real surname was... Goodway.

All of which convoluted nonsense means that the photo on the jacket of The Highbinders you can see up top – credited on the front flap to Beverly Lebarrow – was almost certainly taken by saucy Page 3 snapper Beverley Goodway, who seemingly moonlighted as a book cover photographer all through the '70s and '80s. Mind you, it doesn't explain why the picture on the front of The Highbinders depicts a bloke stuffed into a piano in a graveyard. What's that all about? Beverley was known for his, ah, literal interpretations of a novel's story or title – see Chinaman's Chance and The Eighth Dwarf – so presumably it's something to do with the plot of the book. Perhaps our resident Ross Thomas expert, Book Glutton – who in a comment on yesterday's post on Protocol for a Kidnapping revealed the meaning of that cover – can shed some light.

(UPDATE: And indeed Book Glutton has done just that – see comment on this post – and in the process pointed out that the piano is actually a tomb in Highgate Cemetery in North London (where Karl Marx is famously buried), known as the Thornton piano. It looks as if it's fallen into some disrepair these days, but if you google it you'll find lots of pictures of it through the years, including this one from 1977.)

Anyway, we'll be seeing more from Beverley le Barrow before too long. But next up, it's the final book in Bleeck Week: No Questions Asked.

The James Bond Triad Panther Granada Box Set: From Russia, with Love, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy

Let's take a breather from the 2010 Review of the Year in Books and Comics – fret not; there's plenty more to come yet – to catch up on a recent acquisition or two. And today I've got something rather fab which also acts as a coda to that post on the 1970s Triad/Panther/Granada paperback editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. You remember those: the ones with the terribly glamorous – or perhaps glamorously terrible – Beverley le Barrow covers. Well feast your eyes upon this obscure object of desire:

This magnificent box contains six Panther paperback Bond novels: From Russia, with Love, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy. It was published, I'm guessing by the dates in the books – which are all either 1978 first prints or 1979 reprints – in 1979. That's at odds with the information on Amazon, though, which reckons the box set was published in 1978. However, the box design on Amazon is different too: the Amazon box has the Beverley le Barrow photo from You Only Live Twice on its front (or possibly its back; depends on your perspective really), along with the titles of the books:

While mine has the photo from The Man with the Golden Gun cover on the front (and the one from Goldfinger on the back), and no mention of the books, although they are the same six novels listed as being inside the Amazon version:

Curious. Presumably there was more than one version of the box. And it's an odd selection of books inside, too; why no Casino Royale, or Dr. No? Mind you, I think the Panther editions were published out of sequence anyway, so perhaps the books in the box were the initial six that Panther issued.

I went into the creative process behind those glorious Beverley le Barrow photos in the previous Bond/Panther post, but I can add a tiny detail about the Goldfinger cover (duplicated on the box itself): the gold goblet the model is holding and the champagne bucket at her feet were supplied by luxury goods emporium Aspreys of Bond Street, London. So, what with the Terry de Havilland shoes and Hooper Bolton jewellery, this was one classy photo shoot.

I have no idea how sought-after or collectable this box set is, or how much it's worth. There aren't any for sale on Amazon or AbeBooks; I got this one for £4.50 from a seller on eBay who had simply called it "bond box set" or something, which wouldn't make it easy to find for any 007 collector (I just happened to stumble upon it). But it's a fun thing to own, nevertheless.

Ian Fleming James Bond 1970s Triad Panther Paperback Cover Gallery feat. Beverley le Barrow... or is it Beverley Goodway...?

Another relatively random selection of blog posts this week, among them a guide to how the covers for Coronet's UK paperback editions of Richard Stark's Parker novels developed in the late 1960s/early 1970s (featuring a little-seen cover for Point Blank); a look at a proof copy of Dennis Lehane's latest Kenzie-Gennaro novel, Moonlight Mile; and a review of Francis Clifford's The Naked Runner. But first, and continuing the Bond theme from the weekend, we return to a firm favourite of Existential Ennui: 1970s glamour photographer extraordinaire, Beverley le Barrow.

Beverley, you'll recall, has been the subject of a number of previous posts on this blog, chiefly this one and this one. Le Barrow's starkly lit photos, tendency to use models and minor actors, and awesomely literal approach made the photographer a firm favourite with British book publishers like Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph and Panther in the '70s and '80s, who harnessed Beverley's singular talents on covers for Ross Thomas, Dick Francis and others.

Beverley's schtick was photographing models in studios against flat black or white backgrounds – a stylistic quirk that may have owed something to a possible parallel career as a snapper of topless Page 3 girls. Indeed, I'm starting to wonder whether Beverley le Barrow was in fact a pseudonym for famed Sun newspaper Page 3 photographer Beverley Goodway, who is actually a bloke, and not, as I assumed Le Barrow to be, a woman. "Le Barrow" being a pseudonym might also explain the discrepancy between the spellings of that name in various book cover credits: "Beverly" – no third "e" – "Lebarrow" – one word – in the credits for the Hamish Hamilton Ross Thomas covers, "Beverley Le Barrow" elsewhere.

(UPDATE: Further evidence for my theory has emerged since I wrote this post. Francis from the Stanley Morgan Website – Beverley Le Barrow photographed a good many Morgan covers – commented on this earlier post that he'd contacted an American photographer who assisted Le Barrow in the 1970s. That photographer confirmed Le Barrow was a pseudonym... and he also reckoned Beverley's real surname was indeed Goodway... Go read this post for a round-up on all things Le Barrow.)

Anyway, perhaps Le Barrow's crowning achievement were the covers for Triad/Panther's paperback range of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, issued (out of sequence, I believe, i.e. not in their original 1953 Casino Royale to 1966 Octopussy order) from 1977 to 1979. The concept for these was audaciously bald, even by Beverley's standards. Gaze upon their magnificence and you can almost see Le Barrow's mental processes at work; when she (he?) was handed the assignment to create covers for fifteen Bond books, naturally her (his?) inclination would be to round up a bunch of leggy models, dress them – or even underdress them – in the finest '70s clobber... and then... and then... Hmm. What to do to make the covers distinctive? Well, one of the Bond novels is called The Man with the Golden Gun... so... how about draping the leggy models over a great big model golden gun? Brilliant!

To realise this twisted vision, Beverley was assisted by a team of very well known creatives. Jewellery was provided by retailer Hooper Bolton; shoes – where they were worn – were by Terry de Havilland; and make-up was applied by, er, some bird called Bonny. Ahem. The giant gun, meanwhile, was designed and built by David Collins and Floris van den Broecke. Van den Broecke is a furniture designer of some note, but I'm not sure which of the many David Collinses that pop up when you Google his name is the right one. However, years ago, when I was doing an Art Foundation course at Ravensbourne, I attended a lecture by a visiting designer who created massive models of everyday objects to be photographed for advertising billboards. Because back then (1988, I think), the only way to photograph, say, a Polo mint, and blow it up to billboard size, was to create a huge man-sized model of said mint and photograph that instead. I've got a sneaking suspicion that that designer was David Collins. I could, of course, and as is often the case, be completely wrong. But a gigantic golden gun.... what are the odds?

Whatever the truth, the Bond covers photographed by Beverley le Barrow are among the most memorable ever to grace that series. So, gathered together here for the first time anywhere on the internet (at least, at this fairly large size), Existential Ennui proudly presents a complete cover gallery – with back covers where I have them – of the Ian Fleming (and Robert Markham/Kingsley Amis) James Bond novels published by Triad/Panther/Granada. Enjoy.