New Arrival: Breakout by Richard Stark

This arrived in the post yesterday:













A 2003 first UK Robert Hale hardback of Richard Stark's Breakout, the twenty-first Parker novel, originally published by Mysterious Press in the US in 2002. I got it for practically nothing on Amazon, and inevitably came a cropper: it's ex-library, and not that great condition. It's OK, the insides are clean and perfectly readable, but the dustjacket's obviously been well handled, and it's not as firm as it could be. Just goes to show you can't trust a lot of Amazon dealers when you buy cheapo books. I really like the jacket illo on this one – a slick, fist-slammin' painting by Derek Colligan – so, hopeless case that I am, I've just ordered another, hopefully better condition, copy. Mind you, there aren't many copies to choose from of this one; Amazon/AbeBooks only have a couple listed.

One thing I did find interesting was the case was a PLC with the same design as the jacket printed on it:













The other two Robert Hale editions I have – Flashfire and Firebreak – have standard imitation cloth cases, as most hardbacks do. I don't know if that means Breakout was only issued in hardcover for libraries, as sometimes happens? That would explain the PLC. It's also slightly shorter than the previous Robert Hale hardbacks:













Intriguing. And points deducted from the designers at Hale for not lining the spine designs up properly – checking that was drummed into me when I first started in book publishing. Anyway, I'll have a different Robert Hale edition in my hands shortly, at which point it could be time for a Parker Robert Hale cover gallery...

(UPDATE: Turns out that ex-library edition of Breakout with the printed case was an edition produced presumably for libraries only. When the other copy I'd ordered turned up, it had the same imitation cloth case as the other Robert Hale editions. So there you go...)

Because your kiss is on my List of the best things in lii-iiiife

Although, kisses apart, it's not much of a list at all this week. I count three comics I might wanna get. So after a couple of weeks where my cup runneth over, we're back down to the usual dribble of interesting comics. And I'm not even certain I'll get this one:













Amazing Spider-Man #632. I picked up the previous two issues because they had Chris Bachalo on art, but Bachalo only managed to draw half of the second of those two comics, and the writing was, frankly, diabolical. These days reading Amazing Spider-Man is like stepping through a time warp into the 1970s-80s, except with any of the inventiveness or freshness of that period (if there even was any, which is debatable) surgically removed. I've got no problem with referencing the past or even remixing it, but the current editorial direction of Amazing Spider-Man seems to consist of trying to recapture the feel of a supposed golden period without understanding why that period was good in the first place – if it even was. Anyway, I might pick this up, but it'll be for the art alone, which is unusual for me.

I will definitely get this though:













That's Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato's Secret Avengers #1. I'm a big fan of Brubaker, and even though he's had some misfires – The Marvels Project was unforgivably dull – chances are this'll be pretty good. And I'll get this:













Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2, although I still haven't read the first issue. But it's Grant Morrison. It's bound to be decent. Hopefully I'll be able to pick up Frazer Irving's rather spiffing variant cover, the one on the right.

And that is all.

The New Adventures of Hitler

Almost forgot, I picked up some comics at the weekend too, in Brighton: Crisis issues #46–49. Crisis was a UK comics anthology published fortnightly by Fleetway in the late '80s, a kind of more mature, edgier spin-off from 2000 AD. There were a few interesting strips in it, notably Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Troubled Souls, about the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Peter Milligan and Brendan MCarthy's Skin, which featured a thalidomide skinhead. But the one I always wanted to read was Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's The New Adventures of Hitler – basically a humorous exploration of Hitler's (unsubstantiated) time living in Liverpool from 1912 to 1913.











It ran in four parts (covers for parts 1 and 3 seen above), and it may have been collected at some point, although I don't think I've ever seen a copy if it has. But now I have the original comics (well, the strip first ran in a Scottish magazine called Cut, but anyway...). In fact I have two copies of each of them. Don't ask. I may stick one set on eBay at some point...

The Stark/Parker Coronet Editions (Slight Return)

I've blogged before about the UK Hodder Fawcett/Coronet paperback editions of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's Parker novels from the late '60s/early '70s, and how I figured there were basically two types of design on the books over two printings, plus the odd movie cover. But with the arrival of a second printing (I already had the first and third printings) of The Rare Coin Score (Parker #9, but actually the second Parker novel Coronet picked up after Point Blank) I scored on eBay, I've now discovered there was another iteration of cover design:









From left to right we have the first Coronet paperback printing from 1968 (one year after the first US printing in 1967); the second printing from 1970; and the third printing from 1972. I knew there'd been a second printing of The Rare Coin Score, as the 'bullet-hole' edition stated as much on its imprint page; but I didn't realise it had been under a different cover design, a photo-cover which echoes the 1969 movie cover Coronet edition of The Split:













On the imprint page of the second printing of The Rare Coin Score, the previous Coronet edition Parkers are listed (in Coronet's order, not mine) as Point Blank, The Split, The Green Eagle Score, The Black Ice Score and The Sour Lemon Score. I stated in that previous post I thought that after Coronet published Point Blank (Parker #1) in 1967, they then jumped forward to The Rare Coin Score (Parker #9) because that was the most recent US Parker book. It now seems fairly clear that they published The Rare Coin Score, The Green Eagle Score (Parker #10), The Black Ice Score (Parker #11) and The Sour Lemon Score (Parker #12) consecutively around 1968(ish), under this type of cover design:













and then jumped back to The Split (Parker #7) to tie in with the 1969 movie, giving it a movie cover. After that, it looks as if they ran out of their original printing of The Rare Coin Score and had to reprint it, so they gave it a cover that reflected the movie cover of The Split.

So there you go. Of course, I'm still left with the question of which – if any – of the other Parker novels Coronet published with those photo covers, and also when it was they switched to the bullet-hole design, i.e. which was the first of their paperback Parkers to sport that design?

Unless anyone can help, those'll have to be questions for another day...

Books I Done Got Dis Weekend

What with the weekend post and the Lewes book fair, I ended up with a fair haul of books over the weekend. Friday brought a couple of things in the post:














That's a 1970 UK Coronet paperback second print of Richard Stark's The Rare Coin Score. I picked that up off eBay so I could compare and contrast, which I'll go into in a separate post. And this:














A 1962 first Pan UK paperback of Patricia Highsmith's A Game for the Living. And what that means is I now have all five of the novels Highsmith published under her own name in the 1950s as first edition UK paperbacks, most of which were published by Pan (usually a year or two after their hardback debuts):














Neat, huh? Some great artwork on those Pans by the likes of David Tayler and Sam Peffer. Anyway, at the Lewes Book Fair on Saturday I went in with twenty-five quid and found precisely two books that together set me back exactly... twenty-five quid. Sometimes it feels like the whole universe is built around me, which is awfully solipsistic of me, but there you go. It's my universe and I'll be solipsistic if I want to. Both books came from the same dealer:











A 1966 first edition of the second Modesty Blaise novel, Sabre-Tooth, by Peter O'Donnell (who sadly died recently), cover art by Jim Holdaway (the original artist on the Modesty Blaise newspaper comic strip), published by Souvenir Press (that's my first edition of the debut Modesty Blaise novel on the left next to it, published by Souvenir Press in 1965); and:














A 2005 UK hardback of George Pelecanos' Drama City, published by Orion, and signed by Pelecanos. At least I hope that's his signature. Hard to tell. I guess the dealer could've scrawled that there. I read Pelecanos' The Way Home and really liked it, and I'm a huge fan of The Wire, which he wrote for; this is another of his standalone books, as opposed to the various detective series he's written. Should be good. (And yes, that is me you can see reflected in the shiny dustwrapper, taking the photo. Jesus, what a doofus.)

And then when I got back to the house later that day the postman had been again and left me this:














A 2002 UK hardback of Richard Stark's Flashfire, published by Robert Hale (originally published in the US by Mysterious Press in 2000), with a cover painting by Derek Colligan (as with all the Robert Hale editions). This is the nineteenth Parker novel, and it was only when I had it in my hands I realised what Donald Westlake had done with the titles of the Parker books when Parker came back in 1997 after his twenty-plus year break: he tag-teamed them. He kicked off with Comeback, then Backflash, Flashfire, Firebreak, and then Breakout. He changed tack again with the subsequent Nobody Runs Forever, possibly 'cos he struggled with a coming up with a title starting with 'Out'. Interesting. Or maybe not. But there it is. So I now have the first twenty Parker novels (up to and including Firebreak)... and I'll have news on the next couple soon.

So farewell, then, Lost.

You were filled with non-sequiturs, and dead-ends, and dangling plot threads, and characters never answering questions, or often even failing to ask the right (and obvious) questions in the first place, and it was increasingly evident that your producers were making it up on the hoof. But your final episode almost made me cry a few times, so I must have been fairly invested. You'll be missed.