Brighton Bookshop Bargain: An Expensive Place to Die (Secret File #5) by Len Deighton (Jonathan Cape First Edition, 1967, Raymond Hawkey Cover)

After a couple of posts on a couple of Higginses, let's move on to a short series of posts on Len Deighton's Secret Files novels, which feature the unnamed (in the novels) British spy more widely known – thanks to their various Michael Caine-starring movie adaptations – as Harry Palmer. I touched on these tangentially when I blogged about 1976's Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy, which isn't, in fact – and as Rob Mallows from the Deighton Dossier website confirmed in the comments of that post – a "Harry Palmer" novel. But the three first editions I'll be showcasing almost certainly are – and I'll be showing them in reverse order of publication, beginning with this:

A UK hardback first edition/first impression of An Expensive Place to Die, published by Jonathan Cape in 1967. This is the fifth, and indeed final, novel to feature Deighton's unnamed spy, and sees him sent to deliver NATO files to a Chinese General. The book's dedicated page on the Deighton Dossier site is as good a place as any to find out more about it, and if you head over and read to the end of that entry you'll notice that the first edition featured a laid-in file of top secret documents. Unfortunately, the file in my copy has gone AWOL – but then the book was fairly cheap, bought in Colin Page Antiquarian Books in Brighton. Still, if anyone has a spare file they don't need...

As with many of Len Deighton's books, the dustjacket was designed by Raymond Hawkey (credited on the jacket front flap with "Continuum 2"), who I think I last blogged about in a short series of posts in February. As I noted back then, Hawkey usually worked with a photographer to achieve his vision, arranging various props in intriguing configurations, often including a gun. The photographer for the Expensive Place to Die jacket was Adrian Flowers, who I blogged about in the aforementioned post on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy. However I've since come across this article, which revisits Flowers's chapter in Deighton's The London Dossier, a 1967 guide book featuring reports on "swinging" London by various authorities on the subject. And it's also worth noting that the National Portrait Gallery in London holds in its collection a couple of Flowers portraits.

But it's not simply the jackets of the first editions of Len Deighton's unnamed spy novels that are worth taking a moment to admire: the elegant design extends to other aspects of the books, too – which isn't so surprising when you consider that Deighton was a designer himself. The inserted (or absent, in the case of my copy) secret file aside, An Expensive Place to Die perhaps isn't the best example of this; the endpapers are quite attractive:

But the case isn't especially remarkable. But as we'll see in the next post, others of the first editions are rather more elaborate in their overall design...

Charing Cross Catch: A City on a Hill by George V. Higgins (Alfred A. Knopf First Edition, 1975)

From two Higgins novels – one by Jack, one by George V. – to another Higgins novel, which in this instance is by George V. rather than Jack:

This is the American hardback first edition of A City on a Hill, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. I bought this book only very recently – less than a week ago, in fact, on a sojourn to that there London. And to prove it, here's a picture of me riffling through some books outside one of the bookshops in Cecil Court:

Where, incidentally, the shop which used to house the late lamented Nigel Williams Rare Books is now inhabited by crime specialists Goldsboro Books, who've moved down from slightly further along the Court. But anyway, this copy of A City on a Hill didn't come from a Cecil Court shop; rather it came from the basement of Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road, a couple of minutes' walk from Cecil Court. The dustjacket, as you can see, is rather tatty (that missing piece at the top on the front was present when I bought it, but has since floated off somewhere), and it appears to be ex-library:

But considering I only paid two quid for the thing, I can't really complain. A City on a Hill was George V. Higgins's fourth novel, following The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), The Digger's Game (1973) and Cogan's Trade (1974), and it marked a change of direction for the former journalist/Assistant D.A. Whereas his previous novels were set in the Boston underworld, A City on a Hill moved the action to the political arena of Washington, D.C. – with mixed results, if this contemporaneous New York Times review is to be believed. Take a gander at the dustjacket flaps blurb if you'd like to know a bit more about the novel:

If you click on the back flap you should be able to see that the jacket was designed by Paul Bacon, who, as luck would have it, I've blogged about before, in this post on James Jones's The Merry Month of May. Bacon is best known for his record sleeves for Blue Note and Riverside, but in book design he was the originator of the "big book look", whereby title and author name were featured very big on the front cover. His cover for A City on a Hill isn't a prime example of that style, but I do have another book waiting in the wings with a jacket designed by him – the novel that did, in fact, make his name as a book cover designer.

That's not the next post, however. The next post – indeed the next few posts – will be on Len Deighton's series of novels starring his unnamed British spy – all of which feature jackets designed by the legend that is Raymond Hawkey...

Sydenham Scores; Higgins x 2: Jack and George V., Solo and Victories (Collins / Andre Deutsch First Editions)

So, the random book blogging that's been going on round these here parts for the past week – basically playing catch-up on assorted unrelated books I've bought over the last month or three (with a Notes from the Small Press throw in for a bit of variety) – will take a turn for the slightly less random this week. I'll still be catching up on stuff I've purchased, but these books will be slightly more linked – largely by author name, but also by dustjacket designer. Three of 'em were written by Len Deighton, and all three of those books boast jackets designed by Raymond Hawkey; and the other three were written by a certain Mr. Higgins... although not, as we shall see, the same Mr. Higgins...

That said, while this first post does indeed deal with two novels written by two different men named Higgins, in an odd coincidence both books feature dustjackets created by the same designer... and both were bought in the same charity shop...

What we have here are British hardback first editions of Solo by Jack Higgins – published by William Collins in 1980 – and Victories by George V. Higgins, which was published by Andre Deutsch in 1991. I picked these two books up in the south London town of Sydenham, on the same excursion a few months back when I bought Len Deighton's Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy and Mark Gatiss's Black Butterfly. And despite being published over ten years apart and presumably (although not necessarily) arriving at the charity shop from different donors, both books are wrapped in dustjackets designed by Donald – or Don, as Victories has it – Macpherson. I haven't been able to find out much about him, but his illustrations appeared on at least three other Jack Higgins covers – 1981's Luciano's Luck, 1982's Touch the Devil and 1985's Confessional (those last two starring Liam Devlin from perhaps Higgins's most famous novel, The Eagle Has Landed) – as well as on the cover of Derek Lambert's The Judas Code (Hamilton, 1983) and, in the form of maps, inside the UK first edition of Paul Theroux's The Kingdom by the Sea (also Hamilton, 1983).

Jack Higgins – real name Harry Patterson – hasn't cropped up on Existential Ennui before, but he is an author I've been meaning to try at some point, so unless and until a first edition of The Eagle Has Landed turns up in my immediate vicinity, Solo strikes me as a good a place to start as any. Mind you, the plot sounds slightly bizarre. It features a concert pianist named Mikali who also happens to be a ruthless assassin. Fleeing from the police after murdering a prominent Zionist, Mikali runs over and kills a young girl – who just happens to be the daughter of Asa Morgan, a colonel in Northern Ireland and something of an efficient killer himself. As the dustjacket flap blurb puts it (offering its own unique spin on a well-known paradox): "When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, trouble usually ensues. When Mikali met Asa Morgan there could only be one solution. Death."

George V. Higgins, on the other hand, has appeared on this blog before, although I must admit I still haven't read the book I blogged about back then: his debut – and best-known – novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Victories is a companion novel to his 1989 book Trust, and is a political tale set in Vermont in 1968. I'm not sure I'll get round to reading it anytime soon – for one thing I've got The Friends of Eddie Coyle to get through first – but this contemporaneous New York Times review is pretty positive. And it's to George V. that we return in the next post, with another politically inclined novel from rather earlier in his career...

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

For this tenth instalment in my mini-comix archaeology series Notes from the Small Press – links to the previous nine posts in the series at the end of this one – I thought I'd take a look at some of the small press comics produced by Bob Lynch in the 1980s. Lynch is another of those British cartoonists linked to the Fast Fiction scene of the '80s and '90s; his self-produced comics could be found for sale on the Fast Fiction table at the Westminster Comic Mart, and he also contributed regularly to the Fast Fiction anthology – not to mention other anthologies like Harley Richardson's Ugly Mug.

Indeed it was in Fast Fiction issue #18, February 1986, where I believe I first saw Bob Lynch's work (Fast Fiction editor Ed Pinsent's website seems to suggest that Lynch's strips started appearing as early as #16, but unfortunately my Fast Fiction collection has a few gaps in it) – on the cover for a start, which you can see on the right there, but also in a story inside titled "Behold the Hamster". Lynch's confident, cartoony strip stood out even in such esteemed company as Glenn Dakin, Steve Way and the aforementioned Mr. Pinsent; a lot of that was to do with how the other creators in that issue were of a similar sensibility – what we'd recognise today as "art comix", for want of a better term – whereas Lynch employed a bold, Brit humour-comics style. But it was also the way Lynch launched you into a fully-realised, hermetically sealed madcap world, boasting characters and plots he'd clearly been developing for a while.

"Behold the Hamster" was in fact only the first part of a four-part story which continued through issues #19, #20 and #22 of Fast Fiction (#21 featured a standalone Lynch tale about a chemically mutated "rhymic" slug named Samantha), and starred Lynch's regular lead Sav Sadness. Sav is a kind of everyman who lives in a world where giant robots, space travel and bizarre scientific experiments exist alongside suburban mundanity, and where household appliances can talk and have names. In a recap at the start of the strip, we learn that Sav and his wife Juline's son, Dim, was bitten by a radioactive scientist, swelling Dim's brain "until his intellect was twice the power of Einstein's", before he eventually went supernova and became a nebula cloud floating above the city. Meanwhile, back in the present day, a rogue scientist resurrects a recently deceased hamster – called Helen, of course – into the body of which Dim's nebulous mind gets transplanted by lightning.

All of which will give you some idea of the lunatic nature of Lynch's storylines. There's more to them than mere craziness, however; there's a self-awareness that runs though everything Lynch does, manifesting in a meta approach where characters are often cognizant of starring in a comic – breaking the fourth wall to address the reader or comment on events in adjacent panels – either preceding or following. In the second episode of "Behold the Hamster", Helen/Dim even reads the previous issue of Fast Fiction to find out how she/he ended up in this situation (thus providing a handy recap into the bargain).

Lynch's cartooning perhaps reached its apotheosis in one of his full-length A4 comics, Sav Sadness in: Sadness in Space (1988). He'd self-published another similar-length A5 comic before this one – The Whirlpool of Disaster, subsequently revised and repackaged in an A4 edition in 1989 – but Sadness in Space saw him at the height of his powers. The story begins with Sav's appliances – Ronny the Radio, Sharon the Shower, etc. – rebelling over Sav's idle existence, before a confluence of coincidences sends our hero into space, where he gets mixed up in an Alien pastiche involving an extraterrestrial glove puppet. It's a gloriously sustained piece of nonsense, stuffed full of terrible jokes and logic-defying non sequiturs, and remains as fresh and energetic today as it was twenty years ago.

Lynch quit making comics sometime in the 1990s; I don't know what he's up to these days but he does have a Flickr photostream containing all manner of photographs and doodles. It also includes the complete Sadness in Space and Behold the Hamster stories, as well as what looks like all of his other comics work, too. So rather than simply poring over my badly reproduced excerpts, you can go and read the full comics yourself – something I'd obviously heartily recommend. When so much of the work from that vibrant and under-appreciated '80s/'90s era of British small press comics-making is seemingly lost forever, it's nice that, for a change, an important small press comics creator has all of his material available online. And you never know: if enough people visit his photostream, perhaps Bob Lynch might be inclined to produce some new comics. Here's hoping.

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 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 Grist

Eastbourne Buy: The Most Dangerous Game by Gavin Lyall (US First Edition, Scribner's, 1963); William Berry Cover

It can't have escaped your attention that there's a right royal wedding taking place today, but let me reassure you that this post has nothing to do with the union between Kate and Wills... Except, if you're really desperate for a tenuous link, that with an estimated two billion watching the event on telly around the world, it could be said the (now-married, in fact) couple have become a highly successful British export... and the author I'm blogging about today was also, in his day, a highly successful British export. (No? Oh well, please yourself.)

That author is Gavin Lyall, a UK thriller writer who I've covered numerous times on this 'ere blog, most recently in a review of his 1964 sophomore novel The Most Dangerous Game. And it's to that same Scandinavia-set aviation actioner I'm returning today, in an edition that actually predates the British first I wrote about in that previous post. How can it possibly predate the British first, I hear you cry? Well let's find out.

This is the American first edition of The Most Dangerous Game, published in hardback by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1963 – a year before the UK first edition. Indeed, if we take a look at the copyright page:

We can be even more precise about the publication date. See the "A-9.63 [H]"? The "A" denotes a first printing, as was standard with Scribner's books around this period, while the "9.63" denotes the month and year – in other words, September 1963 (not sure what the "H" denotes, though). So this US first edition/first printing was published before the '64 Hodder & Stoughton UK first. As to how that came to be the case, during this initial phase of his career Lyall was, as I mentioned up top, very successful overseas, especially in America, where his debut novel, The Wrong Side of the Sky, did so well for Scribner's that they managed to secure first world publication rights to his second – i.e. The Most Dangerous Game. Thus this American Scribner's edition is in effect the true first of the novel.

I bought this copy in Camilla's secondhand bookshop in Eastbourne (hence the "Eastbourne Buy" in the post title), during my birthday day out last month – just one of a pile of books I bought that day (all of which I will eventually blog about, you lucky, lucky bastards). I'd seen it there before but decided against buying it on the previous trip because I wanted a UK first – not realising what I now know about the US being the true first. But on this occasion I couldn't resist it; quite apart from anything else I really like that moody blue dustjacket, which was designed (read: illustrated) by William Berry, a Texan artist who worked as an illustrator and painter in New York in the 1960s. And it is, after all, a cracking novel – pop along to my other post on it if you want to read what I made of it.

So then, what shall we have next in this series of random book blogging posts? Excellent question. Hmm. Y'know, I really have no idea what I'll be posting next. Ooh, tell you what we haven't had for a while, though: a Notes from the Small Press. Let's see if I can't rustle one of those up for the weekend...

Westlake Score: The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby Paperback, 1988); a Lewes Book Bargain

For this latest random book blogging post, let's have something we haven't had for a while on Existential Ennui: a Westlake Score. But it's not just a Westlake Score. Oh no. It's also a Lewes Book Bargain...

This British paperback edition of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's ninth Parker novel, The Rare Coin Score, was published by Allison & Busby in 1988. I bought it in the Lewes branch of charity shop Oxfam the other day (witness the Oxfam price sticker still affixed to the back), which makes it the one and only Richard Stark novel I've ever seen for sale anywhere in Lewes (I've spotted at least one other non-pseudonymous Westlake paperback for sale – a Penguin edition of either Killy or 361, I think it was). At least, up to now, anyway: I donated a couple of unwanted Stark books to charity at the weekend, so there might be one or two ex-library editions still floating about.

Those apart, though, it's safe to say Richard Stark doesn't generally feature in Lewes's various bookshops and charity shops, so of course I snapped up this edition of The Rare Coin Score when I saw it, even though I already own an Allison & Busby hardback of the same novel. But before you berate me for depriving some other Lewesian of the pleasure of the novel (and bearing in mind that I did, as I say, donate some Starks myself), let me just point out that this paperback is one I haven't seen before. Trent at Violent World of Parker doesn't appear to have it in his "known printings" cover gallery for the novel (feel free to grab the images from this post, Trent), and I don't recall ever seeing the cover online before. So by purchasing it and then blogging about it, I am, in a way, performing a service for the wider Parker community. In other words, Lewes's loss is the Parker obsessives' gain.

As with almost all of the Allison & Busby editions of the Parker novels, the cover on this one was designed by Mick Keates. There were, as we've already established, three distinct phases of cover design during Allison & Busby's tenure as the British publisher of the Parkers (not counting the final one for Point Blank alone): from 1984-1986 there was the bold typographical approach of the initial eight Parker novels published by A&B; from '86-'88 there was the "torn" masthead and photo/film still style seen on paperbacks-of-hardbacks like Point Blank and straight-into-hardbacks like The Green Eagle Score; and from 1990-1991 there was that same torn masthead but incorporating illustrations by Stephen Hall. This paperback of The Rare Coin Score of course falls into the second phase; the fuzzed photo on the front looks familiar, but there's no credit, so I can't quite place it I'm afraid.

You can read my brief appreciation of the novel itself here, and there's another pithy overview of it on the Reviews of Unusual Size blog. But next here on Existential Ennui, I'll have one of the books I bought on my birthday a month ago: an intriguing edition of a Gavin Lyall novel I only reviewed at the start of March...