Swag by Elmore Leonard: British First Edition (Penguin Paperback, 1984)

I read, and wrote about, Elmore Leonard a lot last year, both prior to and following the author's death in August, my reading and blogging fuelled, as is frequently the case, by a book collecting spree. One strand of my collecting/reading/blogging was the novels Leonard published in the 1970s, especially those issued in the UK by Secker & Warburg. Secker published almost all of Leonard's 1970s contemporaneously-set novels – i.e., not westerns – in hardback in this country: Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), The Hunted (1978; originally 1977 in the US) and The Switch (1979; originally 1978 in the US); in the latter two's cases, it was the first time they'd appeared in hardback (both were issued as paperback originals in the States). But there was one novel missing from that short run: Swag. Published in the US in hardback by Delacorte in 1976, Swag (alias Ryan's Rules) was for some reason – possibly simply caution at overpublishing the still relatively unknown Leonard in the UK market – passed over by Secker, with the result that the first edition published in the UK was this:

The 1984 Penguin paperback, with a cover – which I've added to the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page – bearing a photograph by Peter Chadwick. I picked this first printing up in Oxfam Books in Brighton a couple of months back for the princely sum of:

ninety-nine pence. Which admittedly isn't much less than you'd probably have to pay, including postage, on, say, Amazon Marketplace; but then, who knows whether you'd be getting a first printing, or even the correct edition at all – a point made by fellow book blogger Ray Garraty in the comments of my post on Donald E. Westlake's Two Much on Wednesday.

Of course, why a body would want a first printing of the Penguin paperback of Swag, especially when said body already owns a 1987 Viking edition of the Elmore Leonard omnibus Dutch Treat, which includes Swag, and in which edition that body read the novel last year and subsequently reviewed it on his daft blog, is a question for minds far more acute than mine; but given that that body also owns two editions of Stick – a 1983 US Arbor House first edition and a 1984 UK Allen Lane signed first edition – which is one of the body's favourite Leonard novels, and which is ostensibly the sequel to Swag, featuring, as it does, Ernest Stickley, Jr., erstwhile partner in crime of Frank Ryan (no relation to Jack Ryan), his co-star in Swag, the acquisition of a Penguin paperback edition of Swag on top of Dutch Treat becomes, perhaps, marginally more explicable.*

Perhaps.

I've another Elmore Leonard paperback lined up for my next missive – a signed one, no less, marking the start of an intermittent run of posts on signed editions, featuring authors both familiar and new to Existential Ennui.

* Postscript, 20/2/17: On the other hand, the fact that three years later that same body bought a (admittedly inexpensive) US first edition/first impression of Swag (jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin) purely so he could own the book in hardback is entirely indefensible.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household: First Penguin Edition, 1949, plus Robert Macfarlane on the Novel

Let's round off this short, sporadic run of vintage Penguin paperbacks with an iconic edition of an iconic work of fiction:

The 1949 first Penguin printing of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, originally published in hardback by Chatto & Windus in 1939. As with the Penguin paperback of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, this particular edition has appeared on Existential Ennui before – more than once, in fact – but not, I hasten to add, this particular copy. Because for reasons far too tedious and testing to go into I've ended up with two copies of the Penguin first edition: the one seen in this post, which is a recent acquisition, and the one seen in this 2010 review. Ridiculous really, but at least it gives me the excuse to dedicate a post to what is an uncommon edition (despite appearances to the contrary; at time of writing I can't see a single copy of the 1949 Penguin printing on AbeBooks) of a brilliant book.

Of course, the novel itself already has a dedicated post on Existential Ennui, in a 1939 Chatto & Windus Services Library edition; if you've a mind to, you can read that or my 2010 review – or indeed this post on the 1982 sequel, Rogue Justice – for my thoughts on it. But I'd direct you instead to this more recent Guardian piece on the book by the travel writer Robert Macfarlane. When I came across it in the Review section of the paper the other week it was an unexpected delight; an edited version of Macfarlane's introduction to Orion's new edition of Rogue Male, it covers, as Macfarlane himself says on Orion's Murder Room website: 

...its cult status, my own relationship/history with it, my visits to its landscapes, my tracking of Household's hero, Household himself, the book's qualities and histories and interests, why it compels (and survives) and why it is still read – and still should be read – now, more than seventy years after it was published.

I was especially struck by Macfarlane's pilgrimage to what he'd been led to believe was the Dorset "holloway" in which Household's initially nameless hero – later christened Raymond Ingelram in Rogue Justice – literally goes to ground in order to elude his pursuer, the cunning Major Quive-Smith. It's this part of the novel that I found the most affecting, not to mention alluring: a retreat into a primitive rural idyll, one which for me exerts a powerful appeal. Many others of Household's novels have a similar rustic fascination (A Rough Shoot springs to mind), something that Macfarlane touches on when he mentions on the Murder Room site that "Household has been, in his odd way, at the heart of my writing for years now."

And as luck would have it I have another Household novel lined up for my next post, in which I'll be revisiting what has become by far the most popular post or page on Existential Ennui: Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.

Kingsley Amis: My Enemy's Enemy (1965, Penguin #2346) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Lewes Book Bargains)

A Friday Forgotten Book.

From one Penguin paperback edition of a Kingsley Amis book, to another – one which, like that copy of Lucky Jim, I again plucked from the dump bins outside Lewes secondhand bookshop A & Y Cumming (although rather more recently; just the other week as opposed to a couple of years ago):

Published in paperback by Penguin in 1965 under a Pop Art cover designed by Alan Aldridge (who became Penguin's art director that same year), My Enemy's Enemy was Amis's first collection of short stories, originally issued in hardback by Gollancz in 1962. All bar one of the stories had been published prior to appearing in this collection – mostly in the 1950s in the likes of The Spectator, Esquire and an anthology or three – and three of them form a sequence of sorts, all set within the ranks of the Royal Corps of Signals at the tail end of the Second World War: "My Enemy's Enemy", "Court of Inquiry" and the previously unpublished "I Spy Strangers".

It's these three tales that are the standouts of the collection; taken together they can be considered the equal of the best of Amis's novels, including my personal favourite, The Anti-Death League, for which they act as a kind of aperitif, tackling similar themes of prejudice, class and petty point-scoring in the British Army. (Amis served in the Royal Signals during the war; in 1975 he told Michael Barber of The Paris Review that "Court of Inquiry" was based on his own experiences.) "I Spy Strangers", where the politics of Westminster – and Europe – are played out in a mock parliament, is especially good, but for reasons to do with an ongoing situation at my place of work (don't ask), it was the title story that really struck home with me: a cautionary tale for anyone who's ever considered clambering up the greasy pole.

I wasn't quite so taken with the ensuing (unlinked) trio of tales of civilian life: "Moral Fibre", "Interesting Things" and "All the Blood Within Me"; of the three, I found the latter the most affecting, dealing as it does with regret, old age and the lies we tell ourselves (themes Amis would return to in later works). But perhaps most intriguing of all is the final story, "Something Strange", wherein Amis has a stab at writing science fiction. I've blogged about his interest in the genre before – he published a critical volume on SF (New Maps of Hell, 1960), edited a series of SF anthologies (Spectrum, with Robert Conquest), and some of his novels have elements of SF to them (alternate history tale The Alteration, for example). But "Something Strange" is one of the few – possibly only – pieces of "proper" science fiction Amis wrote, and while it pales in comparison to the better stories in My Enemy's Enemy, it's still not bad at all: a little stiff, and with a telegraphed "twist" that anyone familiar with, say, Ray Bradbury will see coming, but otherwise effective and thoughtful.

"Something Strange" had actually been published three times prior to appearing in My Enemy's Enemy: in 1960 in The Spectator; and in 1961 in Pick of Today's Short Stories 12, and here:

The November issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Vol. II, No. 12, British edition). Which in fact is where I first read it: I found the copy seen here in, I think, the Lewes Antique Centre last year, and bought it expressly for Amis's tale. To my knowledge it was the only time Amis contributed fiction to the magazine (correct me if I'm wrong, SF fans); his story appeared alongside his friend Brian Aldiss's novelette "Undergrowth", which would become part of the full-length novel Hothouse the following year.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis: First Penguin Edition (1961, #1648); a Lewes Book Bargain

Y'know what? That post on the first Penguin edition of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop from the other week has got me hankering after some more hot Penguin action (steady), so rather than showcase random softcovers in amongst the Peter Rabe paperback posts, let's stay with the Penguins for a little while and pluck some vintage examples of the publisher's wares from my collection – such as this:

The first Penguin edition of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Penguin #1648, published in 1961, with a cover illustration by Nicolas Bentley, who would later illustrate Amis's excellent book on booze On Drink (Jonathan Cape, 1972 – in fact one of three boozy books Amis wrote). Not an especially uncommon Penguin this one; I found this copy in a dump bin outside one of Lewes's secondhand bookshops – probably A & Y Cumming – a few years ago, and you can pick up copies online quite easily. But it's a nice edition in which to own Amis's debut novel, I feel, and certainly a damn sight less expensive than the 1954 Victor Gollancz first edition, i.e. a few quid as opposed to a couple of thousand.

This particular copy of Lucky Jim has popped up on Existential Ennui before, back in 2010, when I used it to illustrate a highly tedious essay on Kingsley Amis, but it's never had its own dedicated post. However, there's little point in my reviewing the thing; as Amis's best-known work, doubtless there are already countless critiques available online – I can't be arsed to look right now, but I'd be astonished if there aren't – so I'll simply restrict myself to saying that while it's not my favourite of the Amis novels I've read (that honour would go to either The Anti-Death League or Ending Up), it's still first rate, and an indispensable part of the Amis canon – and even more so now that Twitter users have adopted the novel's eponymous lead, Jim Dixon's habit of deploying "faces" to denote emotional states (*Sex Life in Ancient Rome face*).

Actually, I've changed my mind: I will direct you to one review of the book, because during the writing of this post I came across an excellent Penguin collector blog, one to which I suspect I'll be referring again before too long: A Penguin a week, in which, unsurprisingly given the blog's title, owner Karyn Reeves reads and reviews a Penguin a week. A splendid and admirable endeavour, I'm sure you'll agree.

And I've another Lewes-found Kingsley Amis Penguin lined up for the next post: a collection of short stories, no less, dating from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s...

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; First Penguin Paperback Edition (Penguin #455, 1943)

Back in December 2012, I intimated at the close of my month-long series of posts on vintage paperbacks that there'd be further paperback posts on Existential Ennui in the new year. Not entirely unpredictably – this is, after all, a blog about old books (although ones of the hardback variety for the most part) – so it has proved: I posted a 1962 Peter Rabe sleaze softcover at the end of last week – with plenty more non-sleaze Rabe softcovers to come – and now I have for you an even more recent online purchase, the first of a handful of random paperbacks I'll be showcasing in an intermittent fashion over the coming weeks. It's one of my favourite novels, but I've never owned it in any edition of note – until now.

It's the first Penguin paperback edition of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, published in 1943 (Penguin #455), five years after the Chapman & Hall first edition (although, curiously, the copyright line in the Penguin edition states the novel was first published in 1933). Still the preeminent "Novel About Journalists" (as the subtitle has it) – up to a point, Lord Copper; Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning (1967) is, I'd suggest, just as sublime – there have been umpteen impressions and resets of the Penguin paperback over the decades, some of them bearing very similar front covers to this iconic design. But true first impressions are quite uncommon (at time of writing there's only one other copy on AbeBooks, for example), a consequence, perhaps, of the edition's wartime provenance – apart from anything else, the book is printed on very thin paper stock and therefore prone, I imagine, to damage – and, related to that, unique features. Such as the back cover:

where an ARP warden evinces the evident benefits of Eno's Fruit Salt via a toothsome grin worthy of a Terry Gilliam Monty Python animation. Or the inside front cover and first page:

where an advert for Norvic Shoes rather overshadows the admission from Penguin that "war-time production difficulties" have buggered up their backlist. And there's one further advert to be found, on the inside back cover, promoting a confectionery that's very close to my heart:

the good old Mars Bar. Although as the ad's small print states, due to wartime zoning, at the time Mars's "sustaining", "energising", "nourishing" properties could apparently only be enjoyed by citizens in the "Southern Counties". Well, at least I'd have been OK down here in Lewes. "So here's hoping for a quick victory," it adds cheerily, "and plenty of Mars for everyone – everywhere." Hear hear.

Next: finally, the Great Tom Ripley Reread resumes, with The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

Len Deighton's London Dossier (Penguin Paperback, 1967)

Having blogged about Len Deighton's first two Secret File novels, The Ipcress File (1962) and Horse Under Water (1963) – and thanks are due for their assistance with those posts to Rob Mallows, Edward Milward-Oliver and everyone who left a comment – for this Deighton bonus post I have a splendid book of non-fiction, one which I was alerted to by the ubiquitous Jeremy Duns...

Len Deighton's London Dossier was first published in the UK in 1967 simultaneously by Jonathan Cape – in hardcover – and Penguin – in paperback, which is the edition you can see above. I say "first published", but in fact that should really be "first and only", because those two editions represent the only appearance of the book, which has been out of print for decades. Consequently, London Dossier is in very short supply in either edition: there are no copies at all on Amazon Marketplace at present, and only ten on AbeBooks, only one of those – a Cape hardback – from a UK-based seller. So any Brits wishing to get themselves a copy have a slight problem... although, if you're quick, you could always swoop in on this eBay auction for a Penguin paperback, which ends just before 6.30pm on Tuesday 20 December.

And it is worth getting hold of, not least for the terrific cover, which was designed by Len Deighton's friend, Raymond Hawkey. Hawkey designed the covers of both editions of the book, and while his concoction for the Cape hardback dustjacket, which replicates the notices you'd often find in a public telephone box, is inventive – you can see it on the book's dedicated page on Rob Mallows's Deighton Dossier website – the Penguin cover is, to my mind, equally alluring. It's actually a double-cover, comprising an outer front cover with a die-cut keyhole, and an inner cover bearing a photo of famed model Twiggy's face, whose left eye peeps through the keyhole. It's an innovative piece of design, and foreshadows Hawkey's slightly later "bullet hole" covers for Coronet's line of Richard Stark "Parker" novels.

As to the book itself, it's a collection of essays by Deighton and others on London – a kind of tourist guide, if you will. Deighton provides an opening general guide to London – with lots of helpful advice, such as this for umarried couples: "British hotels... (being primarily concerned with the proprieties), prefer you to [book in as] Mr and Mrs even if you are sinning" – and another dozen or so short pieces, sprinkled in amongst essays by the likes of journalist and noted Soho boozer Daniel Farson, photographer Adrian Flowers (who took the cover picture of Twiggy) and thriller author Eric Clark. For my part I was pleased to spot mentions of my old Soho haunt The Coach & Horses, as well as The Colony Room – Michael Andrews's evocative 1962 painting of which (part, I recently discovered, of the permanent collection at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester) can be seen below – both of which were frequented by one of my favourite writers, Jeffrey Bernard (I sat next to him at the bar of the Coach a few times, and saw Peter O'Toole play him in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell) – that's him in the white shirt on the left of Andrews's painting.

The essays are fascinating, idiosyncratic and often hugely entertaining, and last year the book as a whole acted as a springboard for a series of columns in The Londonist, taking each chapter in turn and looking at how London has changed since. It's tough to beat the original, though, which has obviously dated in some respects, but still contains plenty of information on the capital which will prove useful to the befuddled tourist. That's if they can find a copy...

And with that, I'm done with Mr. Deighton for now, and almost done with the regular posts for this year as well. But there should just be time to squeeze in a Violent World of Parker cross-post before I get to my long-dreaded – I mean, awaited – end-of-year-review posts, so look out for that soon...

A Present from a Pal: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Here's a book given to me by my good friend and colleague Roly that, as Roly himself noted when he gave it to me, is neither scarce, nor valuable, nor indeed any edition or printing of note:

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, published in paperback by Penguin in the UK in 1981, although this is the reprint from the same year. The story behind it is, Roly and I were up in London following a meeting, and I was dragging him round the second hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road. In one of those, Roly spied this book, and mentioned it was brilliant and that I should read it. I, however, had the scent of first editions in my nostrils, so I pretty much ignored him and headed down to the basement to browse the shelves down there instead (I know, I'm a charmer aren't I?). When I came back up again, he was at the till, buying the book. He then turned around and handed it to me. Which was really rather sweet of him, and for which I've wanted to thank him properly ever since. So Roly, consider this post your (slightly public, possibly permanent) thank you.

True to form I haven't read it yet, but I'm planning on doing so very soon. I was actually vaguely aware of it before Roly gave it to me, as it cropped up in a book I worked on recently in my Ilex Press managing editor capacity – 500 Essential Cult Books. Turns out it was down to Roly that A Confederacy of Dunces made it into 500 Essential Cult Books in the first place – and that the entry on it was written by him. Cheeky blighter. Anyway, famously Toole committed suicide in 1969, despairing that he couldn't find a publisher for his only novel. A carbon copy of the manuscript was later discovered by his mother, who harangued author Walker Percy into reading it. Percy eventually did, and realised that it was a work of comic genius. He managed to get it published, and it subsequently won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and went on to sell in the millions.

The front cover illustration on this paperback is by Ed Lindlof, an art alumnus of the University of Texas who provided illustrations for a 1994 edition of Thomas Wolfe's The Lost Boy and a 2004 edition of Horacio Quiroga's The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories. As for Roly, well he was also partly responsible for my buying the next book I'll be blogging about (probably later today), a book which should prove useful for a number of forthcoming posts...

The Mordida Man by Ross Thomas: From Simon & Schuster First Edition Hardcover to Penguin Paperback

Something slightly unusual for this latest post in Ross Thomas Week. It's unusual in that it's an American first edition of one of Thomas's novels, and ordinarily on Existential Ennui I tend to witter on about British first editions; and it's unusual in that it's a one-of-a-kind copy of that American edition, offering a unique insight into a bygone era of publishing. The novel in question is this:

The Mordida Man, published in hardback by Simon & Schuster in 1981. It's a political caper revolving around the kidnapping of the American President's brother and the efforts of the eponymous Mordida Man, a.k.a. ex-congressman, ex-UN representative, expatriate and expert in the art of bribery – hence the "Mordida", which is Spanish for "bribe" – Chubb Dunjee, to recover him; there's a short overview of the novel here. The dustjacket of this US edition was designed by Janet Halverson, and for once someone else has done my work for me: there's a rather excellent visual guide to her covers right here. Which is all to the good, because it leaves me free to explore this particular copy's other, more peculiar aspects...

I came across this copy of The Mordida Man during the epic internet big game – or rather big book – hunt that resulted in most of the Ross Thomas books I'm showing this week. As with those other books, I was initially searching for a reasonably priced UK first edition. But I saw this US copy listed online, and an element of the listing caught my eye (well, that and the fact it was only three quid). The seller mentioned that a few of the early pages in the book had pencil notes on them. Nothing out of the ordinary there: students, scholars and other assorted loonies often scrawl notes in books, and at least in this case the notes were in pencil, not pen. But the seller went on to state that the notes were made by an editor at the book publisher Penguin.

That got me intrigued. Naturally I bought the book, and once I had it in my hands, I realised what it was: it's the copy of the 1981 US first edition that an editor at Penguin UK used to mark up the changes to be made for the 1983 UK paperback edition. Evidently a file copy of the book was sent by Simon & Schuster US to Penguin UK once Penguin picked up the UK paperback rights, so that Penguin could see what alterations they'd need to make for their edition; an editor at Penguin then physically wrote on the book, and that would have been sent to the typesetter/printer as a guide. Nowadays, of course, digital files would simply have been sent from S&S to Penguin and then to the printer, but this was the early '80s, before email and the internet, and before computers were even in wide use in offices.

So in the first instance, Penguin would obviously need to get rid of any Simon & Schuster logos in the prelims (i.e. preliminary matter – the stuff at the front of every book):

The line through the logo basically means "delete", and the "Take Penguin prelims" is an instruction to drop in the standard Penguin preliminary matter. Penguin also might only wish to list the Ross Thomas books previously published by them, rather than all of Thomas's books, so his complete backlist up to this point would need to be excised:

The title page – or rather title spread in this case – which again has Simon & Schuster's logo and also their name on it, would have to go:

On the next spread, the Simon & Schuster copyright info would be deleted, and then we're into the changes that need to be made to the meat of the book:

On that right hand page, in the top right corner, you can see the instruction for how much space there should be at the top of every page. In publishing, the height of type and vertical spaces is measured in points; a "pica" is the standard unit of typographic measurement, and is equivalent to twelve points. So "33/4 pica head margin to normal text start thr'out" tells the printer/typesetter how much space to leave at the top of each page throughout the book. Next to that is an instruction for "Chapter numbers to be in different typeface thr'out", which is fairly self-explanatory, and then circled is "layout & repro supplied", which means the printer already has the files for the book.

"23/4 pica back margin thr'out" is a similar instruction to the one at the top of the page, except here it tells how much space to leave so that text doesn't disappear into the gutter, i.e. where the pages are glued to the inner spine; in paperbacks in particular you really don't want text running too close to the gutter, otherwise you won't be able to read it without folding the pages back too far and cracking the spine.

At the bottom of the page we have an instruction on how much space to leave between the bottom of the text and the page number, or folio: "8pt" is eight points; the hash sign means insert a space; and "thr'out" means... yeah, you're way ahead of me there. And "refolio" simply means renumber the pages, so that instead of this being page 9, as it is in the Simon & Schuster edition, it will become page 5 instead.

Most of the major changes have been accounted for by this point, but there are still one or two things to fix. On the next spread:

There's another instruction on how much space to leave between the text block and the folio, and there's a curious note on the facing page, which might be somewhat baffling, but is straightforward once you understand publishing lingo. It says, "[squiggle] all r/heads", and points to the "THE MORDIDA MAN" and "ROSS THOMAS" text at the bottom of the pages. What that means is to get rid of that text. The squiggle is the proofing shorthand for "delete", while "r/heads" denotes "running heads" – i.e. the title and author name at the bottom of each page. So it simply means, "delete all running heads".

Finally, later in the book there are a few more notes concerning the chapter numbers:

Clearly Penguin weren't keen on the way the in the Simon & Schuster edition the chapter numbers stacked on top of each other once they reached double figures. And that's pretty much it, apart from noting one thing that hasn't been marked up for changing: the American spelling. Seems that even back in the 1980s, UK publishers had largely given up changing American spelling to English spelling.

So there you have it. Hopefully that wasn't too tedious. I don't know how this copy of The Mordida Man ended up in the hands of a second hand bookseller – presumably Penguin and/or the printer had no more need of it once the Penguin paperback edition had been produced – but it's a little piece of publishing history, so I'm glad it did... even if I have thoroughly bored any hardy readers who've made it this far as a result. Never mind. Next up in Ross Thomas Week it's a double-header of a post, so maybe that'll liven things up a bit.

Then again...

Lewes Bookshop Bargain: X v. Rex by Philip Macdonald

I've still got a couple of recently bought Book Bargains to blog about, both of which, as the title of this first of two posts suggests, were bought in Lewes, the East Sussex town in which I oh you know the drill. So let's see if we can't get 'em squared away by the end of the week. And look! Here's one now:

A 1955 first Penguin paperback edition of X v. Rex by Philp Macdonald. I found this in the cheapo paperback dump bins outside second hand bookshop A & Y Cumming up Lewes High Street (the Bow Windows Bookshop has similar dump bins, as do a few other Lewes book emporiums). Really, I just liked the sound of the story: a policeman is killed in a country town near London, and then another, and another, until panic spreads and the government becomes involved (the "X" of the title is the killer; not sure who "Rex" is though... Rex Stout? Rex Harrison? T.Rex? Rex-N-Effect?). In fact, according to the ever-reliable (ahem) Wikipedia, it's a very early example of a serial killer novel, before the term 'serial killer' had even been invented.

X v. Rex has a somewhat convoluted publishing history; I think it was originally published by Collins in 1933, under the pseudonym Martin Porlock. It then gained the title The Mystery of Mr. X for a Literary Press printing, possibly around 1934, again under the Porlock pseudonym, before finally being published once again as X v. Rex under Philip Macdonald's own name in this Penguin edition. To add to the confusion, it was also published as The Mystery of the Dead Police, again under Macdonald's own name, certainly by Dell in the US in 1955, possibly by Collins in the UK earlier. What I do know for sure is that Macdonald largely wrote whodunnits or locked room mysteries, which makes X v. Rex even more unusual. Leafing through it outside the shop, though, two things grabbed me more than the serial killer angle: the political intrigue, with the Prime Minister growing increasingly alarmed at the situation with the murdered policemen; and that the descriptive prose is intermingled with diary entries by the killer himself.

This edition of X v. Rex was one of ten books issued as a Penguin paperback to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Collins' famed Crime Club, along with the likes of Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia and Nicholas Blake's A Question of Proof; all ten books were published on the same day in 1955. Which is quite a neat little idea, and just goes to show that even back then publishers weren't above the odd publicity stunt...

Latest Arrival

A warm welcome, please, to the latest addition to my burgeoning paperback collection:











A 1949 first Penguin edition of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male. I've seen one other copy of this edition online, but that listing's now vanished (and was more expensive than my copy anyway). Looking forward to reading this one: for those who don't know, it was originally published in 1939, and is about a sportsman and hunter who elects to stalk and possibly kill a European dictator, modelled on Adolf Hitler. Which, it has to be said, is a brilliant notion for a novel at that time (and even today).

Speaking of reading, I've just started George Pelecanos' The Way Home, and it's already utterly compelling. It follows a young guy, Chris, a ne'er-do-well who gets sent to a young offenders institution. That's all I know so far, but Pelecanos draws his characters so deftly in such a short space of time (without reams of description) that you're hooked almost from the off.














God I love books.