Ian Mackintosh, The Sandbaggers (TV Series and Novelisation, 1978), and the Writer's '60s Spy and Crime Thriller Novels

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 15/11/12.

Ian Mackintosh – or MacKintosh, depending on who you believe – is a name which excites a fair bit of interest in certain spy-obsessed circles, due in large part to his being the creator and writer of (most of) The Sandbaggers:

a cult television series which ran on ITV from 1978 to 1980, starring Roy Marsden as Neil Burnside, the head of a small team of troubleshooters – the eponymous "Sandbaggers" – within Britain's Special Intelligence Service – this being the Mackintosh-penned novelisation of a couple of episodes thereof, published in paperback by Corgi in 1978. I've only ever seen the odd clip of The Sandbaggers (a state of affairs I intend to rectify) and don't remember it being on telly when I was a kid (unlike another British TV spy series, Callan, which I wrote about the other week and do dimly recall) but I have been aware of it for a while due to Greg Rucka pointing to it as the chief inspiration for his fine espionage comic book (and novel) series Queen & Country in an essay in the first issue in 2001. And Rucka's not alone in his admiration either: earlier this year The Guardian ran a positive review of the three-season DVD box set of The Sandbaggers (written, incidentally, by an old mucker of mine from Mixmag days, Toby Manning) and there's an active dedicated fan site.

For espionage enthusiasts, a big part of the appeal of The Sandbaggers lies in the fascination with Ian Mackintosh's life. A career naval officer who was awarded an MBE upon his retirement in 1976, he created the hugely successful BBC drama Warship in 1973, embarking on a new career as a television writer and producer in its wake. And then in July 1979, halfway into the writing of the third season of The Sandbaggers (Mackintosh wrote all thirteen episodes of the preceding two seasons), the light aircraft Mackintosh was flying in with his girlfriend, Susan Insole, and his friend, Graham Barber – who was piloting the airplane – vanished over the Gulf of Alaska after sending out a distress signal. No survivors or wreckage were ever found, and this, along with Barber reportedly having failed to file a flight plan and the plane making an unscheduled stop at a disused World War II airfield, has led to much speculation about what actually happened, not least in Robert G. Folsom's biography The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian MacKintosh (Potomac Books, 2012).

Further fanning the flames of intrigue, fans of The Sandbaggers have long wondered whether Mackintosh was himself a spy, such was the apparent authenticity of the series. And reading Mackintosh's The Sandbaggers novelisation, the picture he paints of SIS does seem plausible: a grey, worn-out world of late nights, endless paperwork and office politics, and with the fug of cigarette smoke hanging heavy in the air, punctuated by all-too-rare and usually grubby missions where the odds of making it back alive are fifty-fifty. Small wonder, then, that Greg Rucka drew on the series so heavily for Queen & Country, right down to the overworked, irritable head of department – Burnside in The Sandbaggers, Paul Crocker in Queen & Country – and the M.O. of having two Sandbaggers – Minders in Rucka's comic book – on standby and referring to them as Sandbagger One and Two (or Minder One and Two).

Irrespective of its origins – not having seen the TV series I can't comment on how accurate an adaptation it is – The Sandbaggers novelisation is an effectively downbeat and latterly – during a climactic assault on a mountainous Cyprus stronghold by Sandbagger One (Willie Caine) and a female double-agent – nail-biting little spy thriller. (Randall Masteller at Spy Guys and Gals reckons so too, though he thinks less highly of the subsequent loose spin-off novel The Sandbaggers: Think of a Number, written by Donald Lancaster – an alias of Australian mystery novelist William Marshall – and published by Corgi in 1980.) It's also quite uncommon these days: it's been out of print for decades and there are a scant few copies available online. But even more scarce, and little-remarked upon – this Mystery*File review being (heretofore) practically the only online commentary – are the handful of novels Ian Mackintosh penned in the late-1960s before he embarked on his TV career – and it's these that kindled my particular interest in the writer.

From 1967 to 1970 Mackintosh published five crime and spy thrillers. Each received just the one printing – by Robert Hale in hardback in the UK – and each is so scarce that there isn't a single copy of any of them currently for sale online. Their titles in order are:

A Slaying in September (Hale, 1967)
Count Not the Cost (Hale, 1967)
A Drug Called Power (Hale, 1968)
The Man from Destiny (Hale, 1969)
The Brave Cannot Yield (Hale, 1970)

I blogged about one of them, Count Not the Cost, in passing a couple of months ago, as part of this Barbara and Eileen Walton cover gallery. I acquired that ex-library copy from fabled crime fiction book dealer Jamie Sturgeon last year, and since then have taken three other Mackintosh novels off his hands (the only one I'm now missing is A Drug Called Power). What's remarkable about them – aside from their scarcity – at least the two that I've read thus far (the first two), is how extraordinarily, deliciously bad they are: overwrought, hysterical, melodramatic and laced with the kind of painfully over-extended metaphors that cause editors to wake in the wee small hours bathed in sweat. Compare The Sandbaggers novelisation, with its pared-back prose and attempts at naturalistic dialogue, with A Slaying in September or Count Not the Cost and it's almost as if they're the work of a different writer, although in Burnside's romantic obsession with Sandbagger Two – the chilly, remote but beautiful Laura Dickens – there are admittedly hints of Mackintosh's earlier writing.

Indeed, so terrible are these books that they frequently teeter over into brilliance. Certainly they're compulsively readable, and part of me wonders whether they weren't Mackintosh's idea of an extended situationist prank (largely at the expense of Robert Hale, who never managed to sell paperback rights on any of the novels). (There's an inscription by Mackintosh in one of Jamie's own copies of the novels which suggests that might not be far from the truth.) Three of them – A Slaying in September, A Drug Called Power and The Brave Cannot Yield – star private investigator-turned-scourge of the drugs underworld Tim Blackgrove, but the (anti)heroes of the other two novels – Rod Holt (Count Not the Cost) and Danny Mason (The Man from Destiny) – are so similar to Blackgrove as to be almost indistinguishable: grey-eyed, pale, haunted loners prone to excessive violence who are nonetheless (reluctant) media celebrities.

As you may have gathered, I've become ever-so-slightly obsessed by these bloody awful but strangely beguiling books; so over the next few posts I'll be taking a closer look at them, starting with Mackintosh's debut, A Slaying in September.

William Haggard's Colonel Charles Russell Spy Novels in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

It's been nearly two years since I last devoted a post to William Haggard, an author fellow spy novelist Anthony Price once memorably described as "more right wing than even me!" But though I haven't written about Haggard at any length for a while – and in truth am not planning to do so now either – I have been quietly collecting cheap first editions of his Colonel Charles Russell spy series when I see them. I must have acquired another five since I posted this cover gallery in 2011, and it so happens that three of them meet the criteria for my recently established British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s gallery (in which I'd already deposited a pair of Haggard covers: The Bitter Harvest, 1971, and Yesterday's Enemy, 1975) – i.e. they're thrillers, and they were published in the '70s. And since as of Friday British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s needed just three books to bring the number of covers therein up to 110, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to blog about them, however briefly. And they are:

The Old Masters, the fifteenth instalment in the twenty-six-book Colonel Russell series, published in hardback by Cassell in 1973, jacket design by Design Practitioners. I can't recall now where I bought this copy – or indeed an increasing number of the secondhand books I've bought over the past few years and then stowed on my 'to-blog-about' shelves. I have a feeling I got it from Eastbourne's excellent Tome (where secondhand books are two pound a pop), so for the sake of expediency let's just say that is where I got it, and that I got these ones there too:

The Scorpion's Tail, the sixteenth Colonel Russell novel, published in hardback by Cassell in 1975, jacket photograph by Michael Lyster and further credited to the Zoological Society of London, and:

The Poison People, the eighteenth Colonel Russell novel, published in hardback by Cassell in 1978, dust jacket uncredited. Interesting thing about this one is, as noted by commenter 'faithful researcher' in March last year, the plot hinges on the death of a chap named Harry Maxim – which makes ones wonder if perhaps Gavin Lyall read Haggard.

I've loads more additions to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s lined up, but next I'm turning to another writer of '70s spy fiction – of the televisual variety.

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer in Black Money and The Underground Man: British First Editions (Collins, 1966 / 1971)

As is her occasional wont, Patti Nase Abbott is running another of her author-specific Friday's Forgotten Books round-ups today, the author this time being Ross Macdonald. The previous recipient of this honour was Patricia Highsmith, and for that Friday's Forgotten Books – in September – I managed not only a review of Deep Water (and an accompanying prolix account of how I came into possession of a first edition of that novel) but a Highsmith shelf porn post and a Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery too. By comparison, my contribution to the Ross Macdonald round-up is paltry: I haven't had a chance to read any Macdonald so you won't be getting a review, so all I can proffer is a pair of recently bought British first editions, both of them late-ish instalments in Macdonald's eighteen-novel Lew Archer private eye series, both impulse online purchases (they were cheap, basically) and both sporting striking restricted-palette dust jacket designs. Like this one:

The sadly uncredited jacket wrapping the 1966 Collins edition of Black Money, the thirteenth Lew Archer novel. Quite an uncommon edition this one – there are just four copies available on AbeBooks at present – which is partly what prompted me to acquire this copy from Brighton book dealer Alan White – that and that it's reportedly one of the better novels in the series, a "watershed", according to Thrilling Detective, "modelled on (or a homage to) Macdonald's favourite book, The Great Gatsby".

Perhaps more acclaimed, though, is this:

The Underground Man, the sixteenth Archer novel, seen here in its – not especially uncommon, which is why I managed to nab this copy for a few quid – 1971 Collins edition, with a dust jacket designed by the unfortunately named Roy Belcher. Frequently pinpointed as one of, if not the, best Lew Archer novels – see, for example, Malcolm Forbes' Daily Beast review, or Prof. William Marling's Detnovel.com article – it was reviewed on publication by the author Eudora Welty, whose laudatory front-page New York Times Review piece (excerpted here) helped break Macdonald into the mainstream, turning The Underground Man, according to Robert L. Gale in A Ross Macdonald Companion, into "Macdonald's biggest bestseller".

In keeping with the general drift of book cover design from the mid-1960s on, post-Black Money the dust jackets of the Collins editions of four of the five remaining Lew Archer novels – The Instant Enemy (1968), The Goodbye Look (1969), Sleeping Beauty (1973) and The Blue Hammer (1976) – were photographic in nature – the exception being The Underground Man, the wrapper of which is very much of a piece with that of Black Money: an arresting, simplified design using bold blocks of colour. But as the two books fall either side of the dividing line between my two galleries – Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s and the recently established British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s – I've added Black Money to the former (under "Designer Unknown" down the bottom) and The Underground Man to the latter, thus illustrating the point I made in the introduction to British Thriller Book Cover Design that the division between design styles of particular eras isn't as clear cut as one might suppose.

I guess those four Collins editions with the photographic covers would have been a better fit for British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s than The Underground Man, but I don't own any of them (my Ross Macdonald collection is highly selective, comprising just a handful of books). I do, however, own this:

The 1971 second impression of the 1966 Fontana paperback edition of the debut Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, which I bought over three years ago in Kim's Bookshop in Arundel. Fontana – Collins' paperback imprint – introduced this style of photographic cover design across their range of Macdonald titles in the early '70s, all variations on the same titillating theme of a close-up of part of a woman's body in conjunction with a target or a gun or a badge or somesuch. This one appears to feature the woman's buttocks – which, as I'm sure many would agree, makes the cover eminently suitable for the load of old arse that is British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. (I thank you.)

Next: HAGGARD.

Andrew York, George V. Higgins, Brian Garfield and Charles McCarry in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

When I established Existential Ennui's new permanent page, British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s, at the end of last week, I did so partly with the purpose in mind that it would afford me the opportunity to blog about some of the many secondhand books I've collected but haven't yet found the time to read (and probably won't for a while), thus at least allowing me to clear them from my groaning 'to blog about' shelves and instead move them to boxes in the loft – my reasoning being that though they may be out of (direct) sight, I can always refer to their posts on Existential Ennui when I'm pondering what to read next. Of course, what will probably happen is I'll forget all about this and instead do what I usually do when pondering what to read next, which is to stand before my bookcases (often in my pants) and study the books therein; but that's the idea, anyway. Cases in point are the books below, all of them by authors already represented in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. And they are:

The Dominator by Andrew York – an alias of author Christopher Nicole – published in hardback by Hutchinson in 1969, jacket photograph by George Coral. This is the fifth novel in York's nine-book series starring Jonas Wilde, a.k.a. the Eliminator, and not only is it now in the British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s gallery, I've also added it to this Jonas Wilde cover gallery, where a number of other George Coral wrappers can be found (Coral's work can also be found on the jacket of the 1968 Jonathan Cape edition of Kingsley Amis's I Want it Now). Strictly speaking, as it was published in 1969 it really falls outside the purview of the former, but stylistically I'd say it's very much a child of the '70s rather than the '60s, so I'm bunging it in anyway, alongside the 1984 Severn House edition of York's non-Wilde novel The Combination, which sports a jacket photograph (of a mosque in Isfahan, Iran) by Michael Lancaster, and which I picked up on holiday in Suffolk.

The Digger's Game by George V. Higgins, published in hardback by Secker & Warburg in 1973, jacket design by Tom Simmonds. Higgins has made a few prior appearances on Existential Ennui, the last time being in 2011; The Digger's Game was his second novel, following 1970s's classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I blogged about in its 1972 Secker edition back in 2010, and which also boasts a Tom Simmonds dust jacket, beneath which The Digger's Game now resides in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. And very fetching they both look too.

The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry, published by Hutchinson in 1975, jacket illustration by Ian Robertson (who also illustrated the wrappers of the Collins editions of Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare). This is the spy novel sequel to McCarry's debut, The Miernik Dossier, which I wrote about in its 1974 Hutchinson edition in 2011 in relation to how plagiarist Quentin Rowan had nicked chunks of McCarry's – and other authors' – novels for his debut novel Assassin of Secrets – The Tears of Autumn being, I believe, one of the McCarry books Rowan lifted passages from. Rowan later turned his experiences as a plagiarist into, you guessed it, a book, which was published last year to little acclaim.

Death Sentence by Brian Garfield, published by Macmillan in 1976, jacket photograph by Steve Puplett. Another sequel here, this time to Garfield's 1972 classic Death Wish, which I wrote about last year in its 1973 Hodder & Stoughton edition. The wrapper of this one intrigues me, as in its styling and setting it seems to be playing on the Michael Winner-directed Charles Bronson-starring 1974 film adaptation of Death Wish. A natural thing for a publisher wishing to shift books to do, I suppose, even though Garfield's Death Wish is a far superior best to its movie offspring: challenging, nuanced and thought-provoking as opposed to undemanding, bludgeoning and ham-fisted. And by the sounds of this Pulp Serenade review, Death Sentence is just as good, "a desolate but distinguished suspense novel".

There'll be further additions to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s over the coming days and weeks, including a couple of covers from books by the subject of my next post: Ross Macdonald.

Parker Mega Score Finale: Richard Stark Joins British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s Gallery

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

If you missed the announcement on Friday, some (relatively) exciting news: I've established a brand new Existential Ennui permanent page:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

A companion page to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s – the dark flipside to that gallery, if you will – it gathers together dozens and dozens of covers from '70s and '80s editions of thrillers and crime fiction and spy fiction and the like. Already in the gallery are a bunch of Donald E. Westlake dust jackets – along with contemporaries like Ross Thomas (and his Oliver Bleeck alias), Elmore Leonard, Max Allan Collins and Dan J. Marlowe – and now Westlake's alter ego, Richard Stark, makes his entrance, stalking through the doorway (the door having been kicked down by Parker, naturally) to take his place – in his own right, not under Westlake's name – with seven paperback covers, plus one hardback.

Some of those covers hail from the Parker Mega Score, that haul of Coronet paperback editions of the Parker novels I've been blogging about on and off for over two months – there are a couple more, the 1971 Coronet Printings of The Mourner and The Jugger, randomly illustrating this post – and which after four posts (five if you include this one) I think we've probably all had enough of by now (accordingly, this will be the final post to make mention of it). I've picked four books from the Mega Score to represent Raymond Hawkey's Parker bullet hole double cover design – The Steel Hit (Coronet, 1971, alias The Man with the Getaway Face), Run Lethal (Coronet, 1972, alias The Handle), Deadly Edge (Coronet, 1972, which shows a hand holding a gun on the inner cover, rather than the novel's title) and Slayground (Coronet, 1973, which boasts a gold rather than a silver outer cover) – plus the 1977 Coronet edition of Butcher's Moon, which sports a very '70s photographic cover which may or may not have been by Hawkey's design (I don't know for sure either way).

(Incidentally, I already owned copies of two of those Coronet editions before I came into possession of the Parker Mega Score – Deadly Edge and Butcher's Moon – but the Mega Score copies are in slightly better condition than the others, so I'll be divesting myself of my original copies in due course.)

As well as those, I've included the 1970 Coronet second printings of Point Blank! and The Rare Coin Score, both of which sport entirely apposite photographic covers, and my copy of the very scarce 1973 Gold Lion hardback edition of The Sour Lemon Score. By my reckoning that brings the number of book covers on the page up to 100, although it won't dally at that milestone for long: I'll be adding even more thriller covers as the week wears on, and there'll be yet more Westlake and Stark in there before too long. Needless to say, I'll update both The Violent World of Parker and Existential Ennui when that happens. And that link to the gallery again is:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

Introducing British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s: a New Permanent Page

Here's a potentially entertaining diversion for you on a Friday: over 90 British – and British edition – thriller book covers from the '70s and '80s, all lovingly arranged in a brand new Existential Ennui gallery:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

You can read all about the gallery and what my aim was in putting it together by following that link, but as well as introducing the permanent page, I just wanted to make a few additional comments and fill in some of the background here on the main blog. As with the recently established Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery, this one took me by surprise somewhat. The idea only really came to me last week, when I was posting those Elmore Leonard '70s dust jackets. Those, and Graham Miller's wrapper for the 1974 Heinemann edition of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game – Miller also having provided the cover photos for two of those Leonard books – plus a subsequent exchange with Andrew Nette of the excellent Pulp Curry on Twitter, got me thinking: perhaps there might be some mileage, a la my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page, in a gallery devoted to 1970s thriller book covers, especially British ones.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it could work. I certainly had enough of those kinds of books to assemble such a thing, a lot of them already photographed, the images appearing elsewhere on Existential Ennui. But limiting it to just the '70s didn't feel quite right. After all, the bold, brutalist, largely – but not exclusively – photographic style of 1970s British thriller book cover design was still prevalent in the 1980s – and there was the added impetus that presenting two decades rather than one would mirror the original Existential Ennui gallery, the aforementioned Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.

Once I'd settled on showcasing the '80s as well as the '70s, and elected to limit the selection to the covers of thrillers, suspense novels, crime and spy fiction published in the UK – which is what my book collection essentially consists of – it all fell into place remarkably swiftly and easily. And so now British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s is, for better or worse, a reality. At last, here is a permanent home –accessible via the link at the top of Existential Ennui's sidebar (although it may at some point move under the masthead) – for all those brilliantly blunt, sometimes bloody awful Beverley le Barrow covers I've been banging on about for ages; for those stray '70s and '80s thrillers I've collected over the last few years and have never quite known what to do with; as well as for covers for novels from the '70s and '80s by some of my favourite authors: Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Ross Thomas, Donald E. Westlake, Gavin Lyall, Anthony Price, Geoffrey Household and others.

Alongside those authors you'll find a couple of dozen more besides, over forty in total, represented by over 90 dust jackets and paperback covers (yes, paperback covers: there's no format snobbery in this gallery). Many have appeared elsewhere on Existential Ennui. Some, like Robert Ludlum's Bourne books, I've rephotographed especially for the page. Others are making their Existential Ennui debut, such as some of those illustrating this post: Jon Knights' classic Ipcress File-style arrangement for the 1980 Granada first edition of Ted Allbeury's The Twentieth Day of January; Jeremy Ford's stark illustration for the 1979 Hutchinson edition of Robert Littell's The Debriefing and Barry Glyn's realist one for the 1975 Collins first of Berkely Mather's With Extreme Prejudice (purchased just the other day for a pound in a Lewes charity shop); and of course the wrapper for the 1979 Cape edition of Raymond Hawkey's Side-Effect, designed by the man who bears more responsibility for the look of British thriller covers in the '70s and '80s than any other: Raymond Hawkey.

And I'm not done yet. Over the coming weeks I'll be adding loads more covers to the page, starting next week with a bunch of covers wrapping books by perhaps Existential Ennui's most enduring abiding concern.

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s