Tom Clancy (1947–2013), Jack Ryan, and Red Storm Rising (Collins, 1987): a Friday Forgotten Book

Events, I'm afraid, have rather overtaken me here. I've been promising – myself as much as anyone else – that I'd do a series of blog posts on Tom Clancy for bloody ages, so it was a bugger to learn on Wednesday that he'd gone and died (at the not overly ripe age of sixty-six), thus denying me the opportunity to do so while he was still with us (the swine). Not that Clancy would have cared or even noticed, I'm sure – as, say, Elmore Leonard probably didn't notice anything I wrote about him before he carked it a couple of months back – but even so, it would have been nice, as I managed with Leonard, to post something while he was still alive, given that so few of the authors I blog about are, and also given that I've been reading Clancy for longer than most of them.

There was a period in the 1990s when it felt like the only fiction I was reading was Clancy's. It was, I think, the movies wot did it. As an admirer of well-crafted action flicks and thrillers, I had a lot of time for two of the three Clancy film adaptations that had been released by the mid-'90s: John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October (1990) and, especially, Phillip Noyce's Clear and Present Danger (1994). (I was much less keen on Noyce's earlier Patriot Games, which lacked the light and shade of his later effort.) Naturally, those two films led me to the source texts: the Jack Ryan (no relation) series of novels, of which Clancy penned eight instalments proper, plus a bunch of spin-offs starring CIA agent John Clark, his partner Domingo Chavez and, latterly, Ryan's son, Jack Jr.

The Ryan books are mostly great big bricks of things, even in paperback, which was how I originally read them. (More recently I've been picking up UK Collins hardback first editions in Lewes charity shops, with that aforementioned, now likely abandoned, series of Clancy posts in mind; you can see them, with their David Scutt-illustrated dust jackets, scattered about this post; they're more akin to breeze-blocks than bricks.) Even so, I tore through them in the late-1990s and early 2000s, from The Hunt for Red October (1984) to The Bear and the Dragon (2000). (I haven't yet read the 2002 Ryan prequel Red Rabbit, which you can spy lurking in the background in the top photo, again bought in a Lewes charity shop.)

That they became, in one respect, increasingly far-fetched – the machinations necessary to elevate Ryan from CIA analyst (Patriot Games, 1987), to Deputy Director of the agency (Clear and Present Danger, 1989), then National Security Advisor, Vice President (Debt of Honor, 1994) and finally, outrageously, President of the United States (Executive Orders, 1996), left Clancy's authorial strings ever more visible – almost didn't matter: they were efficient, dense but incredibly pacey thrillers, turning on plots – Soviet defections, the war on drugs in South America, conflict between Russia and China – with more than a passing nod to real world tensions (and with an eerie prescience in the case of Debt of Honor), and narratives that were never weighed down by the technobabble Clancy loved to lace his thrillers with.

It's for the Ryan novels that Clancy will chiefly be remembered – there's a Kenneth Branagh-directed rebooted Ryan movie on the way which will doubtless help to cement that rep – but for me, Clancy's best book is one of the very few not set in the Ryanverse – his second novel:

Red Storm Rising, co-written with war gamer Larry Bond and published in the States in 1986 by Putnam's and in the UK the following year by Collins (the edition seen here). A plausible account of a hypothetical shooting war between Russia and NATO over oil reserves, its power resides in its breathless, irresistible sweep, in the way the narrative affords a swooping, God's eye view of the theatre of conflict. The action leaps from locale to locale with brazen abandon: Iceland, the north Atlantic, Europe, West Germany, back and forth, surging from one nerve-shredding military encounter to the next, and with the threat of nuclear escalation ever-present.

Admittedly the characterisation is tissue thin – the protagonists are little more than cyphers, and years later I struggle to recall a single thing about any of them (whereas I can still just about conjure up the odd bit about Jack Ryan and John Clark and Ding Chavez) – but that's a relatively minor quibble: for sheer scope and scale, the book can't be beat. Certainly it deserves not to be overlooked in the torrent of Clancy eulogies and obituaries that are sure to ensue, which is why I'm commending it (a day early, as is my wont, but also so that this post doesn't appear too far behind the news of Clancy's demise) to this week's edition of Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, in order that it should, I hope, escape that eponymous fate.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, 2013); Signed First Edition

As I'm sure I've stated before, I don't buy many new (as in, newly written and published) novels; my tastes tend to run to older, usually mustier tomes (although those tomes, though frequently foxed and smelling of fags, are often as not "new" to me). But occasionally either a new novel will catch my eye – as was the case recently with Roger Hobbs's debut, Ghostman, which I bought and read shortly after publication (verdict: not bad at all) – or an author whose work I admire will publish a new novel and I might find myself inclined to pick it up. Which brings me to Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.

I love Atkinson's four Jackson Brodie novels – I've blogged about them a few times – but I've never read any of her non-Brodie books, so I was in two minds whether or not to try Life After Life, which was published by Doubleday in March of this year under a dust jacket designed by Claire Ward. In the end, the prospect of securing a signed first edition at cover price swayed me, along with the novel's premise: a woman, Ursula, dies over and over again at various junctures of her life, from childhood to adulthood, throughout the twentieth century until she gets it "right". I'm a sucker for a World War II-related alternate history tale (which Life After Life in part is) – Len Deighton's SS-GB, Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, C. J. Sansom's Dominion – so for me the novel's science fiction trappings – to use the term loosely – were an additional lure, even though I knew going in that the hows and whys of Ursula's plight probably wouldn't be addressed.

Which of course they aren't. But in the event, it turns out Atkinson has inadvertently tapped into a rather different form of storytelling than the alternate history thriller (and it'll be no surprise to anyone familiar with Atkinson's work that Life After Life isn't a thriller, either, even though it opens with an assassination attempt on Hitler). Structurally, the form the novel most brought to mind for me was that of the video game, or perhaps more accurately those old "choose your own adventure" Fighting Fantasy books. Video games and Fighting Fantasy novels both hinge on a learning process: you get something wrong the first time, get killed, and have to start again either at the beginning or earlier in that level, and that's pretty much how Life After Life works too, both for Ursula and in a more passive sense for the reader. In fact, you could probably chop the novel up and rearrange it in the same manner as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and it would still function reasonably well. ("If you want to retrieve the dolly Queen Solange from the snowy rooftop, turn to page 87; if you want to leave her where she is, turn to page 36.")

I say Atkinson has "inadvertently" alighted on this approach because I kind of doubt she's ever played a video game, or indeed read The Citadel of Chaos. In that sense, while the novel's structure might have more resonance and perhaps even be more familiar to younger generations than linear storytelling, it's not comparable to what, for instance, Christopher Brookmyre was getting at in a recent interview in SFX to promote his novel Bedlam (thank you to Book Glutton for bringing it to my attention) when he said that video games are changing storytelling, pointing to the film Source Code as possessing "the structure of playing a videogame, you have someone who has to keep reloading the game until he's got it right". It's more feasible that it's a side effect of a parallel development in home computing: word processing, which has made it far easier, far more natural-feeling, for writers to write in a disjointed, out of sequence fashion – something that many have always done anyway – noting random lines of dialogue, penning whole scenes before embarking on a book – but which writing on a word processor particularly lends itself to.

Mind you, I've no idea what Kate Atkinson uses to write with or on – computer, typewriter, pen and paper, an Etch A Sketch. From the little I've read about her, the scattershot, seemingly meandering quality of her novels is merely a symptom of how her mind works; witness the parenthetical asides which litter her books (Atkinson has said that she herself thinks in brackets). So the structure of Life After Life could simply be a case of Atkinson starting the novel over and over again, allowing Ursula to drift almost of her own accord into a succession of (slightly deadly) cul-de-sacs (where darkness, the "black bat", awaits her) and then rewinding and trying a different plot branch.

In the final analysis, it doesn't really matter how Atkinson arrived at the approach (thus making my musings in this post even more pointless than usual); the novel is what it is: enchanting, frustrating, breathless, confounding, but above all beautifully written – and in that sense at least the equal of the Jackson Brodie books. By way of illustration, I'll leave you with a passage from early in the novel, describing how the baby Ursula is regularly left alone in her pram in the garden by Bridget, the maid, at the behest of Ursula's mother, Sylvie, who has "inherited a fixation with fresh air from her own mother, Lottie":

Bare branches, buds, leaves – the world as she knew it came and went before Ursula's eyes. She observed the turn of the seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mould and mushroom of autumn. From within the limited frame of the pram hood she saw it all. To say nothing of the somewhat random embellishments the seasons brought with them – sun, clouds, birds, a stray cricket ball arcing silently overhead, a rainbow once or twice, rain more often than she would have liked. (There was sometimes a tardiness to rescuing her from the elements.)

Once there had even been the stars and a rising moon – astonishing and terrifying in equal measure – when she had been forgotten one autumn evening. Bridget was castigated.

Dominion by C. J. Sansom (Mantle/Pan Macmillan, 2012): Signed Ltd Edition; Review

Our next signed book was actually a Christmas present from the lovely Rachel, who managed to arrange its delivery ahead of the day itself even though, in my usual indecisive manner, I'd only told her what I wanted a week beforehand:

It's a British first edition/first impression of C. J. Sansom's Dominion, published in hardback by Mantle/Pan Macmillan at the tail end of 2012. Or rather, to be more accurate, it's the limited, signed edition:

I started seeing reviews of the book at the beginning of December and was immediately intrigued; I've long been fascinated by alternate history stories, especially those which posit what would have happened if the Nazis had won the Second World War – see Len Deighton's SS-GB, Robert Harris's Fatherland (which Sansom acknowledges a debt to in a Bibliographical Note at the back of Dominion), and even Sarban's The Sound of His Horn. Dominion is set in Britain in 1952, twelve years after, in Sansom's timeline, this country signed a Peace Treaty – surrendered, to all intents and purposes – with Hitler's Germany. Unsurprisingly, it's a grim place: at the behest of the Nazis the indigenous Jewish population is finally being rounded up, and the prime minister, Lord Halifax, heads a coalition government that's little more than a puppet administration. Winston Churchill, now in his late-seventies, commands the Resistance, for whom civil servant David Fitzgerald is spying when he's tasked with a mission to assist an old friend, Frank Muncaster, who's been imprisoned in a mental hospital, and who holds a terrifying secret that the Germans would be only too pleased to obtain.

It's a deliberately paced affair; not having read any of Sansom's historical novels (he's perhaps best known for the sixteenth century-set Shardlake series) I don't know if the measured pace of Dominion is a symptom of the 1950s setting or simply the manner in which he writes, but either way, although it's a compelling read, and evidently heavily researched, I found it a tad starchy in places. That said, there's some ingenious use of London locations – Senate House as SS HQ, for example – and some decent character work; not so much David, who's a bit bland, but certainly poor, troubled Frank with his nervous "monkey grin", and, on the opposite team, the idealogically determined but war-weary Sturmbannführer Gunther Hoth (echoes there of Standartenführer Oskar Huth from SS-GB). And it's an admirable endeavour overall; there've been grumblings in the right-wing press over the treatment of some of the real historical figures, notably Enoch Powell, but Sansom's suppositions about which politicians would have kowtowed to Hitler struck me – with my admittedly meagre knowledge of history – as being plausible.

Sansom's aim in writing the novel, however, wasn't to stir up controversy over which public figures might, under different circumstances, have been collaborators. As he reveals in the Historical Note at the back of the book, he had a particular target in mind: nationalism – which he identifies as being on the rise again in Europe – and especially the Scottish National Party, to whom he delivers a well-aimed kick to the cobblers. He writes: 

If this book can persuade even one person of the dangers of nationalist politics in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, and to vote 'no' in the referendum on Scottish independence, it will have made the whole labour worthwhile. The recent record of other parties in Scotland has not been good; that is never a reason to vote for something worse, and to do so irrevocably; and a party which is often referred to by its members, as the SNP is, as the 'National Movement' should send a chill down the spine of anyone who remembers what those words have so often meant in Europe.

It's an impassioned polemic, penned with an urgency that's occasionally lacking in the preceding novel, and almost worth the price of admission by itself.

The Sound of His Horn by Sarban (Sphere, 1970, orig. 1952), feat. Introduction by Kingsley Amis: Book Review

Our next novel in this, the SF segment of a longer series of posts on paperbacks, is a cult work of alternate future fiction originally published in 1952 and largely set roughly 100 years on from then, in a Europe where the Nazis triumphed in World War II:

It's the second Sphere printing of Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, published in paperback in the UK in 1970. I bought this copy for a quid at last year's London Paperback and Pulp Bookfair, the novel – or rather novella; it's quite short – having entered my consciousness as a result of reading Len Deighton's fine alternate history thriller SS-GB. It's one of only three books that Sarban – alias British diplomat John William Wall – published in his lifetime, the others being Ringstones and Other Curious Tales and The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny, which were issued by Peter Davies in the years either side of the original Davies edition of The Sound of His Horn. It took until thirteen years after Wall's death in 1989 for further fictions to emerge – two previously unpublished novellas, collected in the limited edition The Sacrifice and Other Stories by Tartarus Press in 2002, followed eight years later by additional bits and bobs in another limited Tartarus edition, Discovery of Heretics.

In the UK, there was quite a gap between the 1952 hardback edition of The Sound of His Horn and the first paperback edition, too: seventeen years to be precise, the first Sphere printing appearing in 1969. That edition can be seen over on The Groovy Age of Horror; it sports a different cover to the 1970 second printing – photographic, as here, but even more graphic, showing the metal-clawed glove of one of the surgically altered cat women – more on them in a moment – raking across a female stomach. Personally, I find the cover of the 1970 printing, which looks to me like the work of Beverley le Barrow maybe, or Chris Yates, more effective: it's evidently meant to be titillating, but I find it a rather disturbing and queasy affair.

As is sometimes the case with paperbacks, the text in the Sphere edition isn't taken from the Davies first edition; it's taken from this:

The Ballantine paperback edition, published in the US in 1960. There's a copyright line to that effect in the Sphere paperback, but the real giveaway is that the Sphere paperback contains the introduction that Ballantine commissioned especially for the novel, written by none other than Kingsley Amis. Amis's long-held enthusiasm for science fiction was becoming common knowledge around this time: that same year, Ballantine also published in paperback New Maps of Hell, a collection of his lectures on SF, while in 1961 Gollancz in the UK issued both New Maps of Hell and the first volume of Spectrum, an anthology of SF stories selected and edited by Amis and his friend Robert Conquest. 

The Sound of His Horn merits little more than an, admittedly glowing, paragraph in New Maps of Hell, but Amis's introduction to the novel itself stretches to eight pages. Amis identifies Sarban's tale as fantasy rather than science fiction, pointing to its rural setting and the "sexual fantasy" that "gives it its irresistible energy and conviction". This takes various forms: the sadomasochistic garb worn by many of the characters; the aforementioned cat girls, turned into savage killers by the hulking Count Hans von Hackelnberg, Master of the Reich's Forests; an orgiastic feast – all aspects of the brutal regime the Nazis have established in northern Europe fifty years hence, a kind of feudal amusement park where flabby Obersts hunt game – both animal and human – and indulge their every pleasurable whim. All this is described by Alan Querdilion, an escapee from a wartime German prison camp who finds himself inexplicably flung into the far future.

Kingsley Amis, whose opinion in such matters I greatly respect, quite rightly hailed the "literary qualities" of The Sound of His Horn, qualities it shares, I'd suggest, with the work of Geoffrey Household. For the books that The Sound of His Horn most readily brought to my mind were Household's: Rogue Male (1939), A Rough Shoot (1951), Dance of the Dwarfs (1968) and others. Not so much the sexuality, although that is certainly evident in at least Dance of the Dwarfs; more the rural locale and the theme of hunting. Like Household, John Wall had a passion for the countryside and for hunting, and seemingly shared with Household the belief that hunting should be for the pot, not for sport. Querdilion's plight in The Sound of His Horn, pursued by cat girls and dog boys, recalls that of Raymond Ingelram in Rogue Male, and even Wall's elegant first person style is very similar to Household's. That said, The Sound of His Horn is a thing all its own – a brief but haunting novel, a "strange combination of daydream and nightmare", as Amis puts it in his introduction, adding: "So compelling is it that I shall always feel a slight twinge whenever I am reminded of the innocent English hunting song from which the title is taken."

Next: Ray Bradbury.

SS-GB by Len Deighton: a Review of a British First Edition (Jonathan Cape, 1978)

Let's embark on another series of themed posts. And the theme this time is the Second World War – or thereabouts. I've got reviews of two novels set in the aftermath of World War II – one by Len Deighton, the other by Ross Thomas – plus a non-fiction account of the early years of WWII, and some additional Ross Thomas business besides.

But let's begin with Len Deighton, and a novel that, while it depicts a post-World War II London, this isn't the city or the era with which we're all familiar...

SS-GB was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 1978, under an iconic dustjacket designed, of course, by Raymond Hawkey, and featuring a brilliant fake photo on the back cover of SS troops marching down Whitehall. I bought this first edition in Dim and Distant, Heathfield, East Sussex, having seen another first edition in the science fiction exhibition "Out of This World" at the British Library (archivers of this very blog) over the summer. I was already well aware of Deighton's spy novels – indeed I've blogged about them more than once – but SS-GB is a rather different proposition: an alternate history tale set in a 1941 London where Britain has been defeated by Germany.

Written in the third person, our ostensible lead is Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, a Scotland Yard policeman investigating an apparent murder. It's November 1941, nine months on from Britain's surrender to Hitler's Germany, and a Blitzed-out, fog-bound London is suffering under the yolk of Nazi rule. Archer now reports to General Fritz Kellerman, the SS Gruppenführer in charge of London's police force; it's an uncomfortably collusionary position for Archer to be in – especially as his second-in-command and closest friend, Detective Sergeant Harry Woods, has links to the Resistance – but one he rationalises by reasoning that an occupied Britain still needs law and order. Before long, however, Archer's murder investigation is complicated by the arrival of another SS officer, Standartenführer Oskar Huth, who seconds Archer to a parallel but related hunt for missing atomic bomb blueprints...

SS-GB wasn't the first novel to conjecture an alternate history where the Nazis won the war; Sarban's The Sound of His Horn and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle preceded it in, respectively, 1952 and 1962. However, Sarban's tale is a futuristic "what if" set 102 years after World War II, while Dick's novel is set in the year it was published. The closest novel to SS-GB, then, is probably Robert Harris's excellent Fatherland, published fourteen years after Deighton's book in 1992. But although SS-GB shares with Fatherland superficial suspense-cum-crime-thriller trappings, Harris's novel depicts Germany in 1964, whereas Deighton's deals with a scenario both closer to home – at least for me, as a former Londoner – and closer to the conflict itself.

Deighton paints a vivid picture of a London stricken by poverty and starvation, enduring endless checkpoints, mass arrests and summary executions, and afflicted by a gradual, systematic ostracisation and dehumanisation of Jews. That last degradation is only really touched upon, but the glimpses Deighton affords of the plight of the city's Jewish denizens – the enforced wearing of those yellow stars; designated benches in London Zoo – are all the more powerful for their incidental nature. As the Nazis tighten their grip on the country, it's evident Britain is becoming a hellish place, but Deighton doesn't sensationalize this downward spiral; rather, his deadened prose effectively conveys the humdrum but increasingly hopeless existence of Londoners and, by extension, the wider population.

That said, there are sequences of heightened tension, in particular a horrific explosion at the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery and a climactic desperate scramble on the south coast. What misfires there are in the novel are minor; there's some awkward switching of character viewpoints in some scenes, and the decent but dull Douglas Archer isn't a terribly interesting lead. But he's offset by a colourful supporting cast, notably Kellerman and Huth, the latter of whom gets most of the best dialogue and becomes strangely sympathetic towards the end (at least, as sympathetic as an SS officer can be). Deighton is especially good on the internecine low-level warfare between the various branches of the Nazi military and secret police, and Kellerman's and Huth's devious machinations against one another prove deliciously compelling.

SS-GB is terrifyingly plausible, drawing on Deighton's scholarly knowledge of the Second World War and featuring cameos from everyone from Heinrich Himmler to King George VI. One man who doesn't feature, however – except in the briefest of mentions – is the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Churchill, though, is the author of the next book I'll be showcasing in this WWII-themed series of posts, with a first edition of a non-fiction work I picked up only yesterday in a Lewes charity shop...

Lewes Bookshop Bargain: The Alteration by Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape; Tom Adams Cover Art)

Here's a book wot I bought fairly recently (does last year still count as 'fairly recently'...?) in A&Y Cumming, up near Lewes Castle:

A UK hardback first edition of Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, published by Jonathan Cape in 1976. It's from the period in Amis's career when he was experimenting with genre – see also The Green Man (1969, a ghost story), The Riverside Villas Murder (1973, an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit) and so forth. The Alteration is an alternate reality tale, set in a 1976 where, as the jacket blurb has it, "things are not the same. Due to a slight alteration in history involving Catherine of Aragon, Martin Luther, Thomas Moore and others, a Holy Victory was won in an event called the War of English Succession, and today England, like most of the world, is virtually ruled by a Machiavellian Pope who hails from Yorkshire." Residents of Lewes might note that scenario's relevance (well, maybe not the northern Pontiff) to our contrary town and its Bonfire proceedings...

I did already have a copy of this edition (and I have a paperback too, with a Beverley le Barrow cover – I'll have more on him soon), but this new copy is in much better nick than that previous one, certainly the best condition I've seen this particular edition in (and it was only a tenner, which was very reasonable). You'll often find with the Cape first that the pages have browned and the dustjacket spine has sunned (i.e. faded – and yes, I'm aware this is all dreadfully nerdy book-collector stuff; have you read Existential Ennui before?), but this copy has only lightly tanned pages and the spine is as brightly coloured as the rest of the jacket. Which is good, because the illustration, by Tom Adams, wraps all the way around it.

The Alteration isn't the only Amis jacket that Adams illustrated; he also provided the Dali-esque dustjacket for the Cape first edition of Amis's pseudonymous James Bond novel Colonel Sun (written as Robert Markham). But he's best known for the series of covers he created for the Fontana paperback editions of Agatha Christie's novels in the 1960s and '70s. There's an entire book dedicated to those – Tom Adams' Agatha Christie Cover Story (a.k.a. The Art of Her Crimes), long out of print, although we have a copy at home – not to mention a Flickr group and a Facebook page. And there's also Tom's website, which is definitely worth a gander.

If You Can't Be Good by Ross Thomas, The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, and the Return of Beverley le Barrow

And so we reach the end of Paperback Week with two books that act as taster of things to come on Existential Ennui (and apologies for that cumbersome post title, but it makes it easier to search for, should I or anyone else not in their right mind wish to do so):

Up top we have the UK Pan paperback edition of Ross Thomas' political thriller If You Can't Be Good, published in 1975 and reprinted in 1976 (originally published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton in 1974); and underneath that is the UK Panther paperback of Kingsley Amis' alternate history tale The Alteration, published in 1978 and reprinted twice (originally published in hardback by Cape in 1976). So why am I showing you these two somewhat disparate books? (Apart from they're both paperbacks, and I'm a fan of both authors.) And what could possibly connect them? (Ditto.) And why should you even care? (You'll have to answer that one yourself I'm afraid.)

Well, the Ross Thomas paperback I bought partly because I can't seem to find a reasonably priced copy of the UK Hamilton hardback anywhere, and I've been hoovering up Ross Thomas UK hardback firsts recently (more on that in a moment), but also because the cover intrigued me. See, to me that photo looks suspiciously like the work of Beverley le Barrow, also sometimes called Beverly Lebarrow. We've run into Beverley before on Existential Ennui, first on a couple of other Ross Thomas books, then on a 1976 edition of P.D. James' Cover Her Face, and I've become weirdly fascinated by her. I knew that Beverley 'had form' as far as '70s UK hardback editions of Ross Thomas books (and others) went, so I nabbed this copy of If You Can't Be Good on eBay to see if this was her work too. Unfortunately, there's no cover credit anywhere on the book. Shit. But if we compare it to these previously featured Le Barrow efforts:

I think we can surmise that it's almost certainly her work. And having now done some of my customarily exhaustive research, I've discovered that Beverley was very active throughout the 1970s, providing covers not only for Hamish Hamilton but also Panther and Grafton, Michael Joseph, and more besides. She seems to have been something of a 'glamour' photographer too; many of the models she used on her book covers were, I think, regulars on the third page of certain British newspapers (note the exposed nipple on that If You Can't Be Good cover). Sometimes she used actors as well. And while her photos did grace such insalubrious fare as the works of Xaviera Hollander, Douglas Hayes and Stanley Morgan, she also created covers for Dick Francis, Brian W. Aldiss... and Kingsley Amis.

Yep, that The Alteration cover is by Beverley too. I saw an image of that Panther edition cover online and thought it looked like it might be by her, so I bought a copy – despite already owning a hardback first edition of the novel; you see the sacrifices I make for you? – and found that it was. And it's not the only Amis cover one of her photos has appeared on:

The 1978 Panther paperback reprint of Amis' pseudonymous James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, also sports a Le Barrow cover photo. Indeed, Panther reissued every single Bond novel as a paperback in the late 1970s, all with Beverley le Barrow covers, perhaps her crowning achievement. I'll be returning to those in a few weeks with a full cover gallery, but you won't have to wait all that time for some more Le Barrow goodness, oh no. There'll be more from our Bev right around the corner, because next week is Ross Thomas Week here on Existential Ennui, featuring reviews of some of his novels, showcases of UK first editions – including a couple of absolutely stonking Le Barrow covers – some behind-the-scenes publishing history, and more besides. Truly, there will never have been so much Ross Thomasness gathered together in one place on the internet.