Richard Stark's Parker Novels: The Allison & Busby Paperbacks of Deadly Edge, The Sour Lemon Score and Slayground, and the Hunt for Cover Artist Stephen Hall

My friends, let us begin the week with a tale of abject failure.

A couple of weeks ago I demonstrated how UK publisher Allison & Busby's editions of Donald 'Richard Stark' Westlake's Parker novels developed over twenty-five-plus years, using Point Blank as a guide. In that post I mentioned that in the early 1990s Allison & Busby introduced one other short-lived style of cover design – or rather, illustration – one that was never deployed for Point Blank, and that I'd be returning to that design in a separate post. This is that post.

So far as I've been able to establish, only three of the Allison & Busby Parkers ever had this type of cover (four if you count the 1997 Omnibus volume 1, but that just reuses one of the three other covers, so we won't), which took the Mick Keates 'torn logo' design of the second wave of A&B editions and incorporated new paintings/illustrations. And it's those illustrations that I want to concentrate on here.

The three novels in question are the A&B paperback editions of Deadly Edge (1990):

The Sour Lemon Score (1991):

and Slayground (also 1991):

Those last two are recent-ish Westlake Scores, which I nabbed on eBay pretty much so I could write this post. Again I say to you, dear reader: the sacrifices I make... Anyway, all three covers sport illustrations by Stephen Hall, and while I wasn't terribly keen on them when I first saw them online many moons ago, I've since grown to appreciate them – or two of them anyway. The one for The Sour Lemon Score I'm still not sold on – it looks dashed-off compared to the others – but the ones for Deadly Edge and Slayground are intriguing mixed media efforts. Slayground in particular seems to incorporate elements of collage, lending the picture a nice clashing energy.

So I thought I'd do some digging, see what I could find out about the artist. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that identifying the correct Stephen Hall wouldn't be as straightforward as I'd hoped. There were lots of links for artists named Stephen – and Steve – Hall, but none seemed quite right, and certainly none of them made any mention of creating covers for either Allison & Busby or Richard Stark novels.

Eventually, after a hell of a lot of googling, I narrowed the field down to two possibilities – both rather remote, but worth exploring. One – Stephen Hall – was a New York-based painter who'd moved to the US from Scotland in 1978, and whose work had featured on a number of books, including many crime novels. The other – Stephen Hall, or Randall Stephen Hall – was a children's book illustrator and storyteller from Northern Ireland. Neither quite fit the bill, but artists' styles do change, so either one could conceivably be the right man.

There was, however, no way of finding out without contacting them directly. So that's what I did. I emailed the NY-based Stephen Hall first, explaining the nature of my quest, and not really expecting to hear back. But I did get a reply, that same day. Stephen confirmed that he had illustrated many book covers during that period of the early 1990s, among them crime and mystery works. He didn't think that he'd worked on these particular Stark novels, but he said to send along cover scans and he'd be able to say definitively yes or no. Which I duly did... and received a definitive 'no'.

Bugger.

Disappointed but undeterred, I moved on to the Northern Ireland-based Stephen Hall, and emailed him. Once again I received a swift reply... and once again it was in the negative. Drat. Stephen did, however, note that it was an interesting quest I was on, and suggested I try another Stephen Hall, an artist with an illustration background, originally from Scotland, now living and working in New York... Yeah, you know where this is going. I replied that unfortunately I'd already tried that Stephen Hall... and that's where my quest ended. None of the other Stephen Halls I turned up in my search looked to be likely candidates. The only other hint I have to go on is a distant notion that a very similar illustrator worked for music weekly NME in the early 1990s, but there I might just be projecting (there's an NME press blurb on the cover of Deadly Edge).

My only recourse now is to post this tale of woe and hope that somehow the correct Stephen Hall stumbles across it. So if you're out there, Stephen, make yourself known. Be great to get some background on both you and the creation of these covers...

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

Actually, in fairness, this latest instalment in this series of posts about small press comics should really be titled Notes from the Rather Large Press. Because The Comix Reader, the first issue of which landed in shops at the tail end of 2010, had a print run of 9,000. And not only that, it's a good fifteen inches tall and nearly twelve wide. That's pretty big in my book.

The brainchild of Richard Cowdry, the man behind intermittent anthology The Bedsit Journal, The Comix Reader is a bold attempt to bring the kinds of left field, underground comics found in small press titles to a wider audience. As such, and without even addressing whether it's any good or not, it's to be applauded, standing, perhaps even with some cheering mixed in. Cowdry and co. have taken a big punt here – he and the other comics creators herein financed The Comix Reader out of their own pockets – and I hope it pays off for them, all the more so because not only is it a brave thing to be doing in The Current Climate – indeed Any Climate so far as the notoriously cautious and conservative comics audience goes – but the stuff between the covers – and on the cover – is really rather good.

Cowdry's editorial approach is to give each artist a page on which to do whatever they please, in full colour – or black and white if they so choose – so the comic strips vary wildly. Even so, there are themes and styles that can be identified.

Some of the cartoonists demonstrate a familiarity and an affinity with British boys' comics, specifically humour titles like The Beano and The Dandy. (I'm sure the fact that The Comix Reader is printed on newsprint enhances that perception.) Cowdry himself is very much in that school, except he warps that British tradition through his observational approach and psychological and emotional quirks and preoccupations – his two pages of four-panel strips runs the gamut from self-obsession to social faux pas. Alongside him stand the likes of Lawrence Elwick and Paul O'Connell (with a nice bit of Harold Lloyd-style slapstick), Hurk, Alex Potts, and Paul Brown. Saban Kazim's "Just Go Straight" on the back cover may owe something to that tradition too, but either way his extended slice-of-life gag, starring a maniacal kebab shop owner, made me smile.

More recognizable as art comix are Tobias Tak, Kat Kon, Gareth Brookes – whose beautiful illustrative page features poetry-spouting dickiebirds, done in a style that reminded me of Anders Nilsen – and alt. comix queen Ellen Lindner, whose sublime, spot-on "Festival Fashion Throwdown" pits cosplay nerdfest MCM Expo attendees against uber-cool indie types from seaside holiday camp festival All Tomorrow's Parties. Alongside, or perhaps outside(r), those, are Tim Levin, Jimi Gherkin and Peter Lally, all of whom, either in approach or temperament, wander far enough away from the norm to make themselves notable.

And there's still more besides. I really liked Bird's comic about impending death by comet, a beguiling mixture of Mr Ben/children's storybook-style drawing and unexpected introspection. I also liked Steve Tillotsen's elliptical trip to the zoo, as undertaken by a Neon Genesis Evangelion Angel and a man-cat – shades of Trondheim in that one, I reckon.

Quite honestly, there wasn't much I didn't like in The Comix Reader. It is, at £1, bloody good value for money. And as well as being, as I said near the beginning of this post, an experiment well worth supporting, it's also, like Fast Fiction Presents: The Elephant of Surprise and Small Pets before it, a useful snapshot of the UK small press scene at the moment. There really is no reason not to pick it up next time you're in a comic shop. So do.

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 3: Small Pets

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 8: A Help! Shark Comics Gallery 

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

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

From the Lewes Book Fair: Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown True First Editions)

And so we heave a sigh of relief as we reach the final missive in this heretofore seemingly endless series of posts about the Lewes Book Fair, which by now feels not so much recent as decidedly dim and distant. But no matter, cos after this, we is done. And to provide a suitably happy finish – or should that be an unsuitably happy finish, given the dark nature of the novels in question (or maybe a suitably unhappy finish? An unsuitably, unhappy finish? Oh whatever) – we have not one book, but two:

A UK hardback first edition/first printing of Mark Billingham's Sleepyhead, published by Little, Brown in 2001, and:

A UK hardback first edition/first printing of Billingham's Scaredy Cat, published again by Little, Brown, this time in 2002. I've been meaning to give Billingham a go since we included Sleepyhead in 500 Essential Cult Books, so when I saw these going fairly cheap at the Fair, I figured I might as well grab 'em. They are, of course, Billingham's first and second novels, both featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, recently played by David Morrissey in the Sky One telly show Thorne. Which, true to form, I missed completely. But no matter, because now I can read the novels instead. (UPDATE: I've since seen the TV show, too; you can read my reviews here and here, and see a brief comment from Mr. Billingham himself here.)

It's well known that, aside from being a crime fiction author, Billingham is also a stand-up comedian and comedy writer. But what I didn't know, and which to me is much, much more interesting, is that he's also an avid collector of first editions, in particular of crime fiction (as revealed in this Shots magazine interview). And true firsts at that, i.e. the first edition and first printing of a book in the country of origin (hence that sly reference in brackets in the title of this post). So he's a fellow book nerd – albeit one who's graduated to being an author himself. He'd hopefully appreciate my Dennis Lehane signed true firsts, then. And I bet this blurb on the back flap of Scaredy Cat from George Pelecanos gave him a buzz (perhaps even a happy finish...): "Mark Billingham has brought a rare and welcome blend of humanity, dimension, and excitement to the genre and earned an instant seat at the top table of crime novelists."

There are no dustjacket design credits on either Sleepyhead or Scaredy Cat, but the cover photo on the former is credited to James Harris, who, if I've got the right man, lists among his clients Faber & Faber, Penguin, Mute Records, The Guardian and the V&A.

From the Lewes Book Fair: The John Wyndham Omnibus feat. The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids (Michael Joseph, 1964)

Are we bored of these posts about the books I bought at the recent Lewes Book Fair yet? Well, tough. And anyway, we're nearly done now: there's only one more to come after this one. And anyway, er, again, I've been saving the best till last. Or maybe second-to-last, because I think this next one is my favourite Fair find:

It's a UK hardback first edition/first impression of the very first (that's a lot of firsts; ooh, look, there's another one) John Wyndham Omnibus, published in 1964 by Michael Joseph. As you can see from the front cover, it comprises Wyndham's first (oh enough with the firsts already) three novels – or rather, the first (sigh) three under that particular name; he had four novels published variously under the names John Beynon and John Beynon Harris before that (Wyndham's full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris – there's an excellent piece on his early writing here). The copyright line inside the Omnibus has the dates 1951 (which would be The Day of the Triffids), 1953 (The Kraken Wakes), 1955 (The Chrysalids) and 1964 (the Omnibus itself).

I have read The Day of the Triffids, and the later The Midwich Cuckoos, both of which are darn fine novels. I also have a fondness for the 1981 BBC Television adaptation of The Day of the Triffids – although the 2009 version should be avoided at all costs. But I've always wanted to read The Kraken Wakes in particular, and first (now, come on, let's not start that nonsense again) editions of that being a little pricey, this Omnibus, which cost me fifteen quid at the Fair (less than half what you'd pay online), and which is in cracking condition, will do just fine. Not least because I really like the dustjacket on it, which was designed by Eric Ayers, who also designed covers for the Weidenfeld & Nicolson first (gah!) UK edition of Nabokov's Lolita (scroll down in that link to see the correct cover) and for Buster Lloyd-Jones's The Animals Came in One by One. And not only that, but he designed the typography for the 1970 David Hockney-illustrated edition of Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm.

So there you go. That leaves just one more post to come in this Lewes Book Fair series. Although that post will actually feature two books...

From the Lewes Book Fair: Deadline by Thomas B. Dewey (T.V. Boardman / Denis McLoughlin Dustjacket)

For this third post on the books I bagged at Saturday's Lewes Book Fair, we have a novel that, like the Dennis Wheatley one featured in the previous post (which, incidentally, now has a comment on it from Wallace Stroby directing interested parties to some ace BBC audio and video pieces on Wheatley), I bought for two quid:

It's the UK hardback first edition of Thomas B. Dewey's Deadline, published by T.V. Boardman in 1967 (originally published in the States by Simon & Schuster in 1966). An American author of hard-boiled crime fiction, Dewey isn't widely remembered today, but he wrote around forty novels over the course of his career, comprising two series and a bunch of standalone works. One of those series stars a private eye named Pete Schofield; the Rough Edges blog has a post on that series here. The other series features another P.I., simply called Mac; the Vintage Hardboiled Reads blog has a post about that series, to which Deadline belongs, here. But for a more complete guide to Dewey, allow me to send you to this Killer Covers essay, which contains all sorts of titbits about the man, and which saves me the effort of doing any more of my own research. Thank you, Killer Covers blog. God I love the internet.

In that Killer Covers post, J. Kingston Pierce picks out Deadline as one of the better Mac stories. It's the twelfth book in the series; the blurb in the book tells us:

Peter Davidian sits in the state prison, awaiting execution for the mutilation murder of a young small-town girl. Because of the horrifying nature of the crime all appeals have failed. Mac, the Chicago private eye, is hired by a group of do-gooders in a last desperate effort to save the boy from the chair. He goes to the small town where he finds no clues, no leads, no help. What he does find is a hostile town, a town that wants blood.

Sounds good to me.

T.V. Boardman didn't publish all of the Mac novels in the UK, but they did publish a good number of them (along with other Dewey novels), all with dustjackets designed by the great Denis McLoughlin, who's cropped up a few times on Existential Ennui. His cover for Deadline is one of the more provocative of his I've seen, and unusually is essentially photographic in nature; McLoughlin did sometimes incorporate photographs into his illustrations, as with his jacket for Donald E. Westlake's The Busy Body, but I've never come across one that's basically just a photo with type. By the looks of it the photo of the girl's strung-up legs was clipped from another source then pasted into the design. Wonder where it came from originally...?

From the Lewes Book Fair: The Prisoner in the Mask by Dennis Wheatley (Hutchinson First Edition)

Next in this series of posts on the books that I did buy at Saturday's Lewes Book Fair, we have this:

A 1957 UK hardback first edition of The Prisoner in the Mask by Dennis Wheatley, published by Hutchinson. I picked this up for a few reasons. For one, I really liked the dustjacket, which is by an artist called Sax, about whom I know next to nothing, other than he painted a number of covers for Wheatley's novels and that he did a lot of work for Hammond; there's a partial list of his covers here. Sax also created the rather smashing endpapers for The Prisoner in the Mask – the kind of elaborate ends you just don't get on novels anymore:

For another, Wheatley is one of those thriller writers who's fallen out of fashion but whose novels you see everywhere if you're any kind of second hand book hound. He was phenomenally successful in his day, selling in the multiples of millions, his novels ranging from historical thrillers to contemporary suspense and the occult (his most famous books is probably The Devil Rides Out). The press blurbs on the back flap of The Prisoner in the Mask – which is part of his historical series starring the Duc de Richleau; it's actually a prequel featuring the young Duke – are a testament to the high regard he was held in:

"The prince of thriller-writers" – Times Literary Supplement
"Public thriller-writer No. 1" – Observer
"The most successful adventure-writer of our time" – Daily Mail

He was also a fascinating man, as this profile on the Dennis Wheatley Website reveals (that site also has an extensive bibliography). Apart from anything else he was responsible for introducing the population of Britain to many aspects of the occult – or at least his interpretation of them: the Fortean Times has a lengthy article about his influence.

And my final reason for buying the book was, it was so bloody cheap. Two quid for a first edition was, frankly, irresistible – that's less than you'd pay for postage on a book ordered off the internet. The Lewes Book Fair (indeed all book fairs) always has a selection of stalls selling dead cheap books, which is yet another reason why book fairs are worth popping along to. Often the books are jumbled up on shelves, so you have to sift through a lot of crap to find the gold, but it can be worth it; I found a similarly-priced Ross Thomas first edition at the previous Lewes Book Fair. And the next book I'll be blogging about from Saturday's Fair was just as much of a bargain...