Westlake Score: Backstage Love by Alan Marshall (Midwood/Tower Sleaze Paperback, 1959)

Like a lot of writers toiling in the unforgiving fields of pulpy postwar paperbacks, Donald E. Westlake wrote under an array of pseudonyms. The most famous of those is, of course, Richard Stark, under which moniker Westlake created the Parker series of crime novels in the early '60s. But as well known as that particular pen name is today, it's easy to forget that, back then, it was just one of many used by Westlake to churn out umpteen books every year. Richard Stark may have proved to be rather special, but from Westlake's perspective there weren't nothing special 'bout Stark at the time.

Aside from Stark, Westlake wrote books under the names Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Curt Clark. But all of those pseudonyms debuted after Stark's debut, 1962's The Hunter; there are a whole boatload more alter egos who preceded the birth of Richard Stark. I blogged about one of those, John B. Allan, back at the start of June, but Allan's single contribution to the Westlake canon, a 1961 biography of Elizabeth Taylor, is somewhat mild in comparison to the material published under some of his other nom de plumes in the late '50s and early '60s. For, like many of his contemporaries, including Lawrence Block, Westlake bashed out (so to speak) dozens of pseudonymous soft porn paperbacks.

Now, I hadn't intended to start collecting any of the soft porn books Westlake wrote under names like Edwin West or Andrew Shaw. But as luck would have it, a chance trip to a bookshop over in Essex the other week turned up a novel written under the disguise that Westlake used the most for his more titillating titles:

A US paperback of Backstage Love by Alan Marshall, published by the amusingly named Midwood/Tower Publications in 1959. This was lurking in a pile of similarly smutty paperbacks in an alcove under some stairs to the side of the rather ramshackle shop. It took me a few moments before I realised what it was; I would've recognised one of the better-known Westlake alter egos right away, but I'm less familiar with the filthier end of his oeuvre. And not carrying the complete annotated list of Westlake wank-fodder round in my head, I wasn't completely sure Backstage Love was the genuine article: quite apart from the immediate poser of whether Alan Marshall was indeed Westlake, there's also the thorny problem that, as with many of these soft porn author identities, other writers also used the Alan Marshall moniker, so not all the Marshall-written books were by Donald E. Westlake.

I'd like to say I leafed through the book and immediately recognised Westlake's style, but while these opening lines:

He had to change buses in New York, with a two hour wait. He had never been in New York City before, so he left the Port Authority Terminal and walked up a block to 42nd Street. It was early June and the late-morning sun made the sidewalks look bright and the buildings look clean.

could conceivably have been penned by him, coming across as proto-Stark, they could also have been penned by countless other writers. No, what I think really tipped me off was the setting for the novel: a summer stock theatre. That's a theme that Westlake has returned to more than once, with the events of Pity Him Afterwards (1964) being set in a similar location, and Alan Grofield from the Parker novels spending his summers acting in stock theatre. And anyway, at £1.50 it was worth the gamble.

There's a few copies of Backstage Love on AbeBooks for up to £25, but those are all in the States; it's unusual to chance across a copy in a UK bookshop. I rhapsodised briefly on Sunday about the pre-internet 1970s and 1980s (and even '90s) when books like this were tantalisingly out of reach for us Brits; finding this book was almost like stepping back in time to those years, when a junk shop in Penge Market might, if you're lucky, turn up a dreamed-of comic or paperback. I figured that sort of thing just didn't happen anymore, with collectors being so virulent. Turns out, it does.

The cover artist on Backstage Love is the appropriately named Rudy Nappi, who, rather ironically given the book's naughty nature, is best known for his covers for that squeakiest of squeaky clean characters, Nancy Drew. Which just goes to show, everyone has a dark side...

The Mac's Place Quartet: Spy in the Vodka (The Cold War Swap) by Ross Thomas

As promised at the end of last week, over the coming week (and indeed probably into next week, and perhaps even beyond) Existential Ennui will largely be focusing on two writers who between them have monopolised much of my book-collecting time this year. On Sunday – slightly earlier than planned, but the muse overtook me – I posted the first of a number of forthcoming missives on Donald E. Westlake, who, regular readers will know, has been a firm friend for most of the year. And today sees the first in a series of posts on a writer who, thanks to Book Glutton, has recently become something of a pal too: Ross Thomas. Doubtless there'll be posts on other matters mixed in here and there, but Westlake and Thomas will loom large for the foreseeable future.

And let's open the Thomas account with something a little special:

That there's the UK hardback first edition of Spy in the Vodka by Ross Thomas, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1967, with a dustjacket designed by Peter Calcott. This is Thomas' debut novel... a statement which may have anyone who's au fait with Thomas' oeuvre, particularly anyone American, scratching their head. After all, as any Ross Thomas enthusiast will tell you, his debut novel – perhaps even his best-known novel – was 1966's The Cold War Swap. And that statement is also true.

So how can Spy in the Vodka and The Cold War Swap both be Ross Thomas' debut novel? You guessed it: they're the same book. As often happens with UK editions of American books (and vice versa, of course), The Cold War Swap gained a new title for its UK debut. But only for this first hardback printing, it seems; as early as 1968, Hodder had reverted to the original title for their paperback edition. Which begs the question, why change the title at all? Especially when the title you changed it to bears a remarkable resemblance to another espionage thriller by another American author published in the UK in the same year – 1967 – this time by T.V. Boardman. Namely, Spy in the Ointment by our aforementioned friend Donald E. Westlake. Perhaps Hodder realised the close resemblance of the titles after the fact, which was why they reverted the US title. Pure speculation on my part, mind.

Copies of Spy in the Vodka aren't exactly abundant; there's a few on AbeBooks, mostly going for rather a lot of money, and mostly with dustjackets that are in various states of disrepair – as is the one adorning my copy. Seems this particular jacket is rather delicate (see also those two Le Carre books I picked up). I mentioned in this really annoying post that I'd be returning to one of the two series that Thomas wrote during his career, and as well as being his first book, Spy in the Vodka/The Cold War Swap is also the first book in that series. Much more importantly, however (ahem), it's also the first book by Thomas that I've read – and I like what I see.

It's narrated by Mac McCorkle, an American who owns a bar, Mac's Place, in Bonn, West Germany (this is during the Cold War, remember, when Germany was two nations). His business partner is one Mike Padillo, who is also an occasional and increasingly reluctant secret agent – and perhaps even an assassin – for the US government. McCorkle drinks too much, carouses too much, but he isn't a young man anymore, while Padillo, for his part, has had enough of the double life he leads. For his latest mission Padillo is tasked with carrying out an exchange of spies in Berlin, but there's a twist, and inevitably things go somewhat sour.

It's very much a book of two halves: in the first half we follow Mac as he tries to find out what's happened to the vanished Padillo, and while there is violence, there's an easygoing lilt to the story that lulls you into a false sense of security. Once Padillo reappears halfway through, however, events take a sinister turn, and there are double-crosses and sleeper agents and killings aplenty, culminating in nightmarish attempt to escape from East Berlin. The tone throughout is resigned and world-weary, although leavened by (still cynical) humour and dry wit; as with Le Carre there are no real winners or losers here, just men (and women) trying to get out from under and ending up having to save their own skin into the bargain. It's Cold War realpolitik but on a human scale, which is, I think, the best thing about the book. I'm certainly inclined to read more Ross Thomas... which is just as well as I have more Ross Thomas to read. About which, more soon...

Richard Stark, Harry Bennett, Parker Book Covers, and The Seventh (a Westlake Score)

A couple of months back I wrote a post on artist Robert McGinnis and his portrayals of Donald 'Richard Stark' Westlake's character Parker on the covers of the Parker novels published by Fawcett/Gold Medal (the four books from 1967's The Rare Coin Score to 1969's The Sour Lemon Score, plus a few reprints too). That's still one of the most popular posts on Existential Ennui, but in my rush to identify the perfect Parker I kind of skirted around the artist responsible for the lion's share of the covers for the original run of paperback Parkers, i.e. the eight books published by Pocket Books from The Hunter (1962) to The Handle (1966). And that's an injustice that needs addressing, because the man in question, Harry Bennett, was, and continues to be, a brilliant artist in his own right.

Bennett's been on my mind because I recently nabbed a US paperback first printing of the 1966 seventh Parker novel – which, cunningly, Westlake named The Seventh, and not just because of its chronological significance – on eBay. Here in the UK, American printings of the Parker novels don't turn up on eBay that often, so when they do, I'll sometimes bid for them, even though I have at least one edition  – mostly Allison & Busby editions – of every Parker novel anyway. (I could, of course, simply buy copies from booksellers in the States via AbeBooks, but where's the fun in that?) To a Brit living thousands of miles away from America, who for the longest time dreamed of getting his hands on the exotic-seeming books and comic books and records that originated in that distant, unreachable country in those pre-internet years (even when, in my teens, UK bookshops, comic shops and record shops started importing US wares, there were still items that were legendarily elusive), there's a tangible thrill in holding a copy of an original printing of a Richard Stark book. And owning a copy of The Seventh is a particular joy, because of the Parker novels I've read thus far (I'm on the fourteenth, 1971's Slayground at the moment), The Seventh may well be my favourite.

So, to kick off a week – or even a fortnight; we'll see how things pan out – in which I'll have a number of posts on various Donald E. Westlake paperbacks, let's have a look at that copy of The Seventh, and the artist responsible for its cover. And the first thing to note is that, unlike most (all?) of the covers Harry Bennett drew and painted for those first eight Parker novels, on The Seventh we get two illustrations for the price of one. Because as well as that colour piece on the front cover – which I guess must be Bennett's interpretation of the nameless thorn in Parker's side, accompanied by the unfortunate Ellie – we also get an expressive line drawing on the back cover, depicting Parker and his six doomed cohorts from the football stadium score (plus Ellie again, presumably). I actually prefer this back cover drawing to the one on the front; there's an almost  European sensibility to the linework, as if the drawing could be a panel lifted from a bande dessinee. That casual distortion is a hallmark of a lot of Bennett's work, although he did draw and paint book covers in a number of styles.

One thing I mentioned in that McGinnis post was that Bennett's depiction of Parker on his eight covers varies wildly. It's hard to get a sense of how Bennett sees Parker; for example, on the back of The Seventh, presumably that's Parker in the foreground, but it's also the least characterful guy of the bunch. If we go right back to Bennett's first Parker cover, for The Hunter, the only really distinctive thing about Parker there is the size of his hands (which Bennett surely got from Stark/Westlake's memorable description of them near the start of the novel). And if we compare the Parker on The Hunter to the one on the back of The Seventh, well, those are two completely different people. I guess you could make a case for the Parker on the covers of The Outfit (1963) and The Mourner (1964) being the same as the one on The Hunter, but I've got no idea which, if any, of the people sitting in the cab of the truck on the cover of The Score (1964) is Parker, and the incidental Parkers on The Jugger (1965) and The Handle are different guys again.

In fact I think of all Bennett's Parker covers, the one that best captures Parker is the cover to The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), where all we can see of him are his huge hands – almost the same ones as on The Hunter – and dark, steady, piercing eyes. What that cover also does, though, is neatly illustrate the point that, at root, it doesn't really matter how Bennett depicts Parker; these are still extraordinary book covers. Just look at that bird's nest mess of ink and daubs of colour, at the thick black lines that call to mind Max Beckmann more than they do Bennett's book cover contemporaries. Evidently, this is an artist who knows his art history.

Born in South Salem in 1919, Bennett served as a major in the Pacific during World War II, painting the scenes he saw whilst fighting (he also suffered a broken back). He studied fine art at the Institute of Chicago and graphics at the American Academy of Art, and did advertising work for Pepsi and Buick before switching to book covers. But beyond his commercial career, Bennett was becoming an accomplished and respected painter. In 2008 the RiverSea Gallery in Astoria, Oregon held a restrospective exhibition of Bennett's paintings, to act as a farewell to the local artist, who was moving to the east coast. Follow that link and you'll find a few fine examples of his work, along with a profile which reveals that when Bennett arrived in Oregon in 1986 he experienced something of an artistic epiphany, over the next two decades painting hundreds of pictures of the people and places from the local area.

Even before that, however, when Bennett was cranking out covers for gothic romances by Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney – probably the work he's best known for – it was abundantly clear this was no run-of-the-mill cover hack. One need only regard the way the ghostly statuette figures on the cover of The Mourner grasp that bold blue background like fingers scrabbling for purchase, or how Bennett uses abstract blocks of primary colour as a shorthand for street signs on the cover of The Jugger. Clearly, this is a confident, clever artist.

Fine art purists might dismiss Bennett's covers as being merely illustrative, but that's to ignore their formal qualities as pictures. The covers of The Man with the Getaway Face, The Jugger and The Handle stand as works of art, ones which could happily adorn any wall. And even if one were to take them simply as illustrations, they still show a keen mind at work in the choices Bennett makes; that Jugger cover neatly summarises the small town setting of the novel, the urban paraphernalia offset by the good-ol'-boy sheriff. Where many covers, particularly in the crime fiction field, opt for quite literal interpretations of the particular material – a gumshoe, a moll – Bennett, though still figurative in approach, is quite happy to mix near-abstract elements with scenes lifted from the page.

And Bennett is as good now as he ever was. His son, Tom, is also an accomplished artist, and often posts updates about Harry on his shared blog. And as these wonderful drawings show, Bennett's art is still sharp and expressive. It's nice to know that the man who lent his extraordinary talents to those early Parkers and helped define the look and feel of Parker's world in many fans' minds is still out there, doing his thing. Long may he continue.

Lewes Book Bargain: James Bond: The Authorized Biography by John Pearson

Our final Lewes – the East Sussex town etc. etc. – Book Bargain (for now; it's a safe bet that in the near future I'll be buying further books from the various bookshops and charity shops that litter Lewes, for which I can only apologise to my long-suffering girlfriend) is a real oddity:

A UK hardback first edition of James Bond: The Authorized Biography by John Pearson, published by Sidgwick & Jackson Limited in 1973, with a dustjacket designed by the wonderfully named Bartholomew Wilkins and Partners (wot ho). I bought this in the Lewes Antique Centre – the same place I picked up that copy of Richard Price's Samaritan for a quid – where I think it had been lurking for quite some time; I seem to recall glancing at it before. But on this particular trip I decided to nab it.

What's interesting about the book is that it is, at root, a Bond novel. In fact, it could be considered more of a Bond novel – as in belonging to the original Ian Fleming literary canon – than John Gardner's 007 novels, which kicked off eight years later in 1981 with Licence Renewed, and which followed a necessarily altered continuity to the Fleming novels, updating Bond and his colleagues and accoutrements for the modern age. Whereas, like Kingsley Amis' 1968 Bond novel Colonel Sun (written under the pseudonym Robert Markham), The Authorized Biography is very much about Fleming's original James Bond, featuring a 007 who's aged in line with the years that accumulated over the course of Fleming's – who died in 1964 – and then Amis' Bond books. Indeed, from that perspective, The Authorized Biography and Colonel Sun are the only post-Fleming Bond novels that could be considered canon, although you could make a strong case for Charlie Higson's 1930s-set Young Bond books.

All of which no doubt sounds terribly nerdy and dull to most people, but is the kind of thing that keeps Bond fanatics up at night. I'm not quite that nerdy about Bond, but I do find this sort of thing fascinating... which would therefore, by my own reckoning, make me quite dull. Hmph. Also, I've been ever so slightly insomniac since That Night, so fretting about the canonical nature of a James Bond book in the wee small hours doesn't actually seem that strange to me.

Anyway, The Authorized Biography is, as I say, a novel, rather than simply a fictionalized biography. It's written in the first person, and is ostensibly John Pearson's account of his search for and encounters with James Bond – as in the real, living, breathing James Bond, who does actually exist and is on permanent sick leave in Bermuda. What follows is an account of Bond's life, with stories from his school days, his wartime experiences, the times between missions, and so on. It's also revealed that Fleming's novels were written to convince SMERSH that Bond was only a fictional character, which is an intriguing but bizarre notion.

Notably, the book is authorised by Glidrose, Fleming's publishing company (inside it's copyright both Glidrose and Pearson), which lends the canon argument more weight. Pearson was Fleming's assistant at the Sunday Times, where Fleming was foreign manager, and wrote a 1966 biography of Fleming. He's also written a few other novels, mostly based on other people's properties, but he's better known for his true crime books, including a few on East End gangsters the Kray twins (one of these, The Profession of Violence, was the basis for the 1990 film The Krays).

So there you have it. And that's probably yer lot for this week. Next week, if all goes according to plan, Existential Ennui will see the return of one old friend and one fairly new acquaintance: Donald E. Westlake – or more accurately Richard Stark, and perhaps one other Westlake pseudonym too – and Ross Thomas. See you then.

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...

Lewes Book Bargains and Further Thoughts on Design: Samaritan by Richard Price, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Cuts by Malcolm Bradbury

First up, an admission: this is the second version of this post I've had to write. That's because Blogger, as is sometimes its wont, went off the deep end just as I was putting the finishing touches to the original version and deleted the entire draft. Consequently, and despite much furious keyboard bashing and fruitless back-searching, I lost the lot, which was, and continues to be, really, really annoying, particularly as I was rather pleased with that version. Although, now I come to think of it, there might be a proverb about that; something about pride and falling over. I dunno; I'm too furious to contemplate it right now. Anyway, I can only apologise if this post is a bit sub-par – I mean, more sub-par than normal. If it's any consolation, it was written with steam coming out of my fucking ears.

So then. Where were we? Ah yes. As that mouthful of a post title suggests, continuing this somewhat random week of round-ups, catch-ups, and comics archaeology, today I've got three books with absolutely nothing in common other than they were all bought at various venues around Lewes, the East Sussex town in which I live (previous Lewes Book Bargains can be found 'ere, 'ere, 'ere, and 'ere). However, as with yesterday's post about Kate Atkinson, today, along with my by-now traditional and incredibly informative ramblings about novels and authors and the like, I'll also be looking at these three books with my design head on – which is similar to my regular head, except slightly better proportioned and with a more stylish haircut – and formulating a number of highly speculative, shapeless, badly though out points about their covers. Oh you lucky, lucky people, you.

And let's begin with the most recent book bargain:

A UK hardback first edition of Richard Price's Samaritan, published by Bloomsbury in 2003. Price, for those who don't know, is a writer's writer, i.e. the kind of writer other writers admire and aspire to be as good as, or at least approach. David Simon made use of his talents on a number of episodes of The Wire, while the likes of George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane (both also, not entirely coincidentally, former Wire writers: Pelecanos actually got Price involved in the show) owe him a debt. Price's novels are few and far between, just eight stretching across a thirty-five-plus year career, mostly dwelling on the underbelly of urban America, the best known of which probably those that were turned into films – Clockers (1992) and Freedomland (1998). In August this year Price signed a deal with Henry Holt to write a series of straight-up detective novels under a pen name, Jay Morris. I read an article at the time to the effect that Price got so sick of slaving and sweating over worthy and difficult-to-write (but not to read) books that he figured he might as well try something a bit easier instead (and maybe make some crazy bank in the process). And why the hell not.

I have a first edition of his debut novel, The Wanderers (1974), sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, but the fact that I haven't yet read anything by him didn't stop me from snapping up this copy of Samaritan when I came across it hiding on one of the stalls in the Lewes Antique Centre, not least because it was only a quid. The cover design on this one is by former Bloomsbury design director William Webb and it's perfectly fine, as these things go: moody, clean, simple. But it does conform to that image-library/font school of design I was talking about yesterday. Not only that, but its combination of sans-serif typeface and lowering urban scene is also pretty much what you'd expect from a contemporary crime novel cover, although I suspect that may well be intentional. What do I mean by that? Well let's mull that one over, shall we, while we look at the second of today's bargain books:

A UK hardback first edition/first impression of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, published in 2005 by Faber. Now, this isn't the kind of novel I'd normally buy – not that it's any particular kind of novel, as in, it's not, say, a crime novel, or a science fiction novel – rather, it couldn't really be called a genre novel, and as I think we've established by now, it's genre novels – crime, science fiction, etc. – that I tend to go for. Although, having said all that (rather tortuously), Never Let Me Go does actually possess genre elements – in particular SF – concerned, as it is, with clones being bred to act as organ donors. In any case, that aside, Ishiguro is still an author I'm interested in, so when I saw this in the Lewes branch of charity shop Oxfam for less than three quid – ooh, look: I've left the price sticker on the back – I grabbed it, sharpish like.

The cover design here is by London firm Two Associates, and as with the Richard Price book and the way its cover resembles those adorning other contemporary crime novels, the cover of Never Let Me Go is very much what we expect a literary novel to look like. Which is to say, it conforms to our current expectations – formed by countless other books and indeed films, film posters, adverts, and so on – of what a literary novel should look like: a blurry image, an elegant font. And like the Price novel, it almost certainly plays to those expectations. After all, one of the purposes of a book cover is to be attractive to, and therefore to attract, the sort of person who might be interested in that book; to get you, the book-buyer, to pick up and buy that book. So in that sense, playing to the gallery is perfectly understandable: Samaritan looks like a crime novel – looks like novels by the aforementioned Pelecanos, Lehane, and even, say, Ian Rankin, and consequently might well attract anyone interested in crime novels or the works of messers Pelecanos et al; and the Ishiguro conforms to the stereotype of what a so-called literary novel should look like, right down to the faux staining and distressing (this isn't a notably scruffy copy; those scuffs and marks you can see on the jacket are a design choice), and would therefore quite conceivably attract a bookworm of a literary bent.

So are Never Let Me Go and Samaritan examples of good cover design? Or simply effective cover design? And isn't effective cover design the same as good cover design anyway? Let's ponder those posers while we regard our third and final book:

This is a UK hardback first edition of Cuts by Malcolm Bradbury, published by Hutchinson in 1987. Bradbury is one of those authors who seems to have been with me all my life and yet whose novels I've never read a one of (there's a theme developing here...). I think my mum might have had a copy of The History Man – his best known book – at one point, and I distinctly recall seeing his works in Beckenham library when I used to haunt those unhallowed halls in the '70s and '80s. He was an academic as well as a novelist, an authority on modern fiction, penning books on Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster. Cuts is a novella rather than a longer work, and is particularly pertinent at the moment, as it's about budgetary cutbacks, specifically those at a provincial university.

I bought it in the Lewes Flea Market, which isn't usually a terribly rewarding venue books-wise, mostly housing shonky book club editions in amongst its random selection of furniture and knick-knacks. Cuts stood out by dint of its distinctive jacket; the cover painting – and therefore the dustjacket, as the painting virtually is the jacket, and vice versa – is by Tom Phillips, a very well known artist and Royal Academician, so it's necessarily a different kind of jacket to the previous two books. On top of that, it dates from an era before Quark XPress and InDesign and Photoshop and online image libraries and indeed computers being used in the design process at all, really. Which seems strange, I know, but once upon a time that's how things were: when I was on my art foundation course at Ravensboune in 1988, the design students were still focused on quaint things like pens, paper and rulers. Computers just didn't figure in the equation.

So can we make a meaningful comparison between the cover of Cuts and the covers of Never Let Me Go and Samaritan? Of course we bally well can. Technology and methodology march on, but cover design is still cover design. And on a purely window-dressing level, it has to be said that the Price and the Ishiguro are rather prettier than the Bradbury, which is notably awkward, even ugly in comparison. But that is, I'd propose, the only category they do categorically triumph in.

Aesthetically, there's a lot more going on in the Bradbury, which is a cavalcade of textures and colours and types of type and angles and planes and just areas of interest. Furthermore, as we've established, to a greater or lesser degree the Price and the Ishiguro pander to and play to the stereotypical cover expectations befitting their particular sought-after audience. That's potentially an effective marketing device, but it's also a very boring one. The Bradbury, on the other hand, isn't trying to be like anything else (although it does perhaps owe a debt to, for example, Kurt Schwitters), and as a result seems so much fresher than the other two, despite having a good number of years on them. It also does a better job of reflecting the thing that's the most important thing of all: the words inside the book (almost too literally, one might argue). That clapperboard on the cover, for instance, is a direct reference to an element of the plot of Cuts, concerning the editing of a television programme. That, to me, says more about the novel than a photo of a city says about Samaritan or another, blurrier photo of a girl says about Never Let Me Go. (Although, as I say, I haven't read any of these books yet. I could, as ever, and as is often the case, be wrong.)

Of course, there's room for subtlety and suggestion on a book cover, although less so these days. But there's really nothing subtle about conforming to stereotypes or playing to them either. So which of these covers is the better? Honestly, I'm not really sure. I don't actively dislike any of them, and they could all be said to be valiant efforts, one way or another, at getting people to recognise and hopefully buy each book. But I do kind of wish there were a few more book covers being created these days that were as willfully individual as that Cuts dustjacket. There is, after all, more to life than InDesign and image libraries.