New Arrival: Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre (Signed First Edition)

OK, I crumbled. For a month now, since its publication in the middle of September, I've been seeing hardback first editions of Le Carre's latest, Our Kind of Traitor, in the local bookshops. Except none of those first editions, not even on the day of publication, were first impressions: by the time the book arrived down here in Lewes it was already on its third printing. So for weeks, the new Le Carre has sat on the shelves of WHSmith's and British Bookshops, calling to me with its buffed copper dustjacket, taunting me with its tarty half-price offers, but always ultimately disappointing me whenever I picked up a copy and discovered the dreaded numeral '3' on the copyright page.

Finally, I could take no more. I caved, and bought this online:

A first edition, first impression, with the magic number '1' in the indicia. But not only that. There's also this:

Yes, it's a signed edition. I didn't realise Le Carre signed books as Le Carre, which is of course a pen name (his real name is David Cornwell). But apparently he does. Anyway, luckily I managed to find a copy from an Amazon Marketplace dealer – the same fellow behind the Firsts in Print website, I think – that only set me back the full price of the book, which, considering signed true firsts are going for all sorts of daft prices on eBay, could've been a lot worse. And even though Our Kind of Traitor falls firmly under Roly's broad brush assessment of later Le Carre, it's still a new Le Carre, and when I've been on such a Le Carre kick of late, it seems to churlish not to get his new one. So I have.

The Mac's Place Quartet: Cast a Yellow Shadow by Ross Thomas / Steve McQueen and The Cold War Swap

And so Existential Ennui's rolling tribute to underappreciated author Ross Thomas – previous posts can be found here, here, and here – continues with this:

A 1968 UK first edition hardback of Cast a Yellow Shadow, published by Hodder & Stoughton, with a dustjacket design by Baker/Broom/Edwards. This is Thomas' second novel, published in the States by Morrow in 1967, a year after his debut, The Cold War Swap (a.k.a. Spy in the Vodka). It's also the second book to feature bar owner Mac McCorkle and his business partner – and occasional secret agent for the US government – Mike Padillo. This time out, the action relocates from Bonn, West Germany, to Washington, DC, where Mac has opened up a new establishment – still called Mac's Place – and where Padillo makes a reappearance following his disappearance at the end of The Cold War Swap. However, he's been stabbed, and Mac soon finds his own wife has been kidnapped and is being held by officials of an African nation who want Padillo to assassinate their Prime Minister.

There aren't too many copies of this UK edition for sale online, just two or three from the UK, a couple from the States, and then a bunch from South Africa and Australia, which is common with otherwise scarce British hardback first editions from the '60s and '70s: there are large numbers of expats in both those countries, many of whom would have taken their books with them when they emigrated, books that have since ended up in second hand bookshops. Y'know, I've always wanted to go to Australia. I've got relations out there. Perhaps some kind of combined familial visit/bookshop tour might be in order...

There's an interesting bit of blurb on the back cover of this Hodder edition of Cast a Yellow Shadow, in between the stuff about awards and press quotes for Thomas' previous book, which states, "now being filmed as The Cold War Swap starring Steve McQueen". That got me intrigued: obviously that movie never saw light of day, but the fact that the blurb states it was actually being filmed at the time suggests it might have got some way along the production process. So I did some digging, and while I couldn't find out how far along it got, I did find an interview with Ross Thomas where he said that Steve McQueen was indeed interested in starring in a movie of The Cold War Swap, but he couldn't decide whether to play McCorkle or Padillo. In the end he decided to play both characters in one, which is possibly where the project faltered. If anybody has any more info on this abortive adaptation, the comments section below awaits your input...

Notes from the Small Press 3: Small Pets, Starring Mardou, Ted May, Phil Barrett, and More

For this third instalment of Notes from the Small Press – which, for latecomers, is a series of posts on small press comics I have known – we head to 2005, and an anthology that, much like the Fast Fiction Presents: The Elephant of Surprise comic featured in the first Notes, acts as a useful snapshot of a particular moment in British mini comix.

Small Pets was an anthology put together by UK cartoonist Mardou for the 2005 Web and Mini Comix Thing, a once-a-year, one-day, London-based small press event run by Patrick Findlay (which, I think, he's now knocked on the head). I have to declare an interest here: I wrote the foreword to the comic, in my then-capacity as senior editor for Titan Books, although I didn't agree to write it (or indeed this here blog post) out of any sense of egotism (well, no more than usual) or nepotism (Mardou was, and still is, a pal). Rather, it was plain to see at the time that Small Pets was stuffed full of brilliant comics and creators, and I was chuffed to be associated – if only in a tiny way – with such a talented bunch of writers and artists. The table of contents will give you an idea of the embarrassment of riches on offer:

 

As with The Elephant of Surprise, Small Pets featured contributions from most, if not all, of the leading lights on the UK small press scene at the time, plus a couple of guest Americans and an Irishman. And as with The Elephant, it just so happened that all of those cartoonists were simultaneously hitting their creative stride. Irish comics creator Phil Barrett contributed two stories of everyday surrealism, with both"Wee Creatures" and "Small Changes" dropping whimsical elements – mysterious teddy/snake hybrids in a kid's bedroom; an outlandishly oversized man making his way in the world – into ordinary situations. As a gloriously base counterpoint to Barrett's more grounded work, Jon Chandler's flatulent "Two Fables" gets two pages out of passing wind.

Ellen Lindner's elegant line and exuberant scripting are on full display in her rumination on wage slavery, "Coming Out of a Coma", while Jeremy Dennis' two stories are fine examples of her affecting autobiographical comics.

Both Lindner and Dennis are also co-conspirators with Mardou in the occasional Whores of Mensa anthology, another splendid example of small press togetherness. And speaking of Mardou, her contribution to Small Pets (aside from editing the whole shebang, of course), "A John So Small", is a brilliantly wonky take on the Oldest Profession, featuring a crossed-wires sex pest who gets off on literary little people. Mardou's story is followed, oddly enough, by one from her future husband, Ted May, whose "Longbox" is a prime example of his off-kilter Kirby-meets-underground-comix stylings.

And those are only a few examples from a cast list that also includes Richard Cowdry, John Allison, Sean Azzopardi, and loads more besides. Looking back on Small Pets from a few years' remove, it really is remarkable how many great cartoonists Mardou managed to gather together, and the resulting comic has lost none of its energy. There's a palpable excitement rippling through the pages, as if all concerned knew this would turn out to be something special. Perhaps they all thought nothing of the sort, but in any case I stand by my slightly hyperbolic introduction: I think Small Pets really did represent a new Fast Fiction-style golden age of UK small press comics, one of those all too infrequent nexus points where a disparate group of artists simultaneously reach a creative peak and everything seems possible.

Notes from the Small Press 1: Fast Fiction Presents the Elephant of Surprise

Notes from the Small Press 2: Monitor's Human Reward by Chris Reynolds

Notes from the Small Press 4: Anais in Paris by Mardou

Notes from the Small Press 5: The Curiously Parochial Comics of John Bagnall

Notes from the Small Press 6: Ed Pinsent's Illegal Batman and Jeffrey Brown's Wolverine: Dying Time

Notes from the Small Press 7: The Comix Reader #1

Notes from the Small Press 8: A Help! Shark Comics Gallery

Notes from the Small Press 9: Some Gristavision Comics by Merv Girst

Notes from the Small Press 10: Some Sav Sadness Comics by Bob Lynch  

Spoke too soon:

She's just finished:

A day off work well spent there, I feel.

My Friend Tim Went to New York Comic Con and All He Got Me Was This Lousy Signed Limited Edition of Darwyn Cooke's Parker: The Outfit

Actually that's not all he got me; he also gave me a thousand-piece Elephantmen/Hipflask jigsaw puzzle, which I then gave to Rachel, who has been happily doing it ever since:

Did I say "happily"? I meant "obsessively, thinking about it constantly, devoting every waking hour to it to the exclusion of pretty much anything else". Bless. The puzzle's a lot further along than that picture now; I reckon she'll be done by the weekend. But anyway, the main thing Tim got me from New York Comic Con – which took place a couple of weeks back in (and the clue's in the title here) New York – was a copy of the limited edition of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Parker: The Outfit, featuring a signed tipped-in drawing:

Tim offered to swap this copy of The Outfit, which he got from Mr. Cooke himself, for the regular copy I'd already bought (and reviewed). Which is a thoroughly lovely thing for him to do, and for which I'm incredibly grateful. So now I have a signed limited edition of Parker: The Outfit from NYCC to go along with the signed limited edition of Parker: The Hunter I got from the ace London comic shop Gosh:

Who's a lucky boy, then?

A Meandering Review of the Novel Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Well I fair plowed through this one. Considering Case Histories clocks in at around 300 pages and I only started reading it Wednesday last week, polishing it off by Monday isn't bad at all. It's understandable though: on this evidence, Kate Atkinson is a really good, compelling writer. I'm not going to post a proper summary/analysis here – I'm sure there's plenty of that online already – but for posterity, and for my own reference, some stray thoughts:

I loved all of the characters in Case Histories. Character is what Atkinson is all about. The various strands of the story proceed in fits and starts, rubbing up against each other and interweaving, but they're always related from the perspective of a particular character. Not in the first person, mind: Atkinson writes here in the omniscient third person. But she does get inside the heads of her characters brilliantly, so that a lot of the events in the book are related by people looking back on those events and attempting to interpret them, or experiencing them now and trying to interpret them as they go along, with all the intellectual and emotional muddle that entails.

Atkinson's secret is, she writes how people think. So, say, Theo, whose daughter was killed ten years ago (one of the case histories of the title), might be doing one thing but thinking another, or rather doing one thing that sets him thinking about another. Atkinson follows that thought process, sometimes revealing clues along the way, or at least hinting at them, sometimes just filling in background. At one point, private investigator Jackson Brodie – our ostensible hero, although the likes of bereaved sisters Amelia and Julia get just as much page time – visits Amelia and Julia's other surviving sister, Sylvia, in a convent. Sylvia has taken the name Sister Michael, which sets Jackson off ruminating on why high street store Marks & Spencer use St Michael as the name for their own-brand goods. It's the kind of inconsequential connection one's mind makes all the time, the sort of mental sidestep that can lead to inspiration or, just as likely, an interesting but ultimately useless cul-de-sac. Both eventualities are in abundance in Case Histories.

Towards the end of the novel, unexpectedly it becomes really funny, so much so that I laughed out loud a couple of times. Jackson in particular comes into his own in the second half of the book: he's increasingly put-upon and disaster-prone, lurching from humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife and her new partner, to being mugged (or not, as the case may be), to having his house blown up – a turn of events that stopped me in my tracks it was so unexpected – much of which results in repeated trips to the hospital.

The final revelations of the three main case histories don't come as much of a shock; I'd guessed most of them by that point anyway. But that doesn't matter: as ever, it's the journey that's important, and Case Histories is a winding, complicated excursion in the company of a disparate bunch of messed-up people who you nevertheless really wouldn't mind hanging out with again.