The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas: a Review (Simon and Schuster / Hamish Hamilton, 1979)

From a factual – if idiosyncratic and self-serving – account of the early years of World War II, to a decidedly fictional take on the year following the end of the conflict, written by an American author who's now a firm favourite here on Existential Ennui:

Ross Thomas's The Eighth Dwarf was first published in hardback in 1979 by Simon & Schuster in the US and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, the Beverley le Barrow-designed dustjacket of which you can see above. Following hot on the heels of the brilliant Chinaman's Chance (1978), it features yet another of Thomas's in-it-for-the-money antiheroes, this time in the shape of Minor Jackson, an ex-OSS operative now out to make a fast buck any way he can. Mid-thirties, prematurely greyed and currently residing in California, Minor enters into an uneasy partnership with a Romanian dwarf named Nicolae Ploscaru in order to locate the son of a German Jewish expat, Kurt Oppenheimer – for a substantial fee. Trouble is, Oppenheimer has become a one-man killing machine, and is currently hunting Nazi war criminals across Germany.

The year is 1946, and moves are afoot in the States for a new intelligence agency. One of the architects of this new agency is Robert Henry Orr, Jackson's former OSS boss; Orr is also interested in Oppenheimer's uniquely murderous talents, so he assists Minor in getting to Germany. But America isn't the only nation keen to capture young Kurt: the Brits are also sniffing around him, in the shape of Major Gilbert Baker-Bates, and the Russians have sent an emissary into Germany too, an ex-concentration camp inmate named Bodden. As each of these parties zeroes in on the seemingly unhinged Oppenheimer, the bodies start piling up, and the chances of Minor escaping with his skin intact, let alone with any money, become increasingly remote.

As with all of the Ross Thomas novels I've read thus far, The Eighth Dwarf's strength lies in its cast of colourful characters, although in this instance it's the supporting players who really stand out. Minor himself is suitably insouciant, but although Thomas sketches in some background for him – notably a disapproving father – there's little to him beyond his nonchalant attitude. Much more interesting are the wry, practical Bodden, the exasperated Lieutenant Meyer, who's tasked with keeping tabs on Jackson, and Kurt Oppenheimer, whose psychosis builds throughout the book. And then there's Ploscaru, or "the wicked dwarf" as he's known in the intelligence community. Ploscaru remains a remote figure throughout, but with his devious, untrustworthy nature and animal cunning, he shines whenever he makes an appearance.

Mind you, all of that's not to disparage the plot, which, while not as Byzantine as others of Thomas's books, still ducks and weaves effectively, ratcheting up the tension as the net closes in on Oppenheimer. The denouement is satisfyingly ironic too, featuring an international auction (of all things) which neatly punctures the whole enterprise. There's also room for a sequel, but unlike Chinaman's Chance, which warranted two follow-up novels, The Eighth Dwarf was destined never to be developed further, although Minor Jackson and Nicolae Ploscaru do warrant a mention in Thomas's final novel, 1994's Ah, Treachery!

Speaking of Chinaman's Chance, I've got one last post to come in this short World War II-themed series – a Ross Thomas bonus post in which I'll be taking a look at both Chinaman's Chance and The Eighth Dwarf, in two intriguing interconnected later editions...

Lewes Book Bargain: The Second World War Volume 1: The Gathering Storm by Winston S. Churchill (Cassell, 1948)

Continuing this short series of World War II-themed posts, we move on from Len Deighton's 1941-set alternate history, to an account of that period's actual history – albeit a highly personal one – written by a man who had a better vantage point than almost anyone else on those momentous events:

Winston Churchill's The Second World War Volume 1: The Gathering Storm was first published in hardback in the UK by Cassell in 1948. I spotted this first edition/first impression in a Lewes charity shop on Monday, and since this week's posts are largely WWII-focused, it seemed a serendipitous Lewes Book Bargain indeed. Mind you, it's a weighty old tome, clocking in at 640 pages, so Lord knows when I'll get round to reading it.

There's a fascinating critique of The Gathering Storm on the BBC website by Professor John Charmley, which begins with one of Churchill's oft-quoted utterances. "History will judge us kindly," the then-Prime Minister told Roosevelt and Stalin in 1943, "because I shall write the history." And so he did, continuing his mammoth endeavour across a further five volumes, as projected on the dustjacket front flap of the Cassell first of The Gathering Storm, although the eventual number was at that point TBC. "It is planned," runs the blurb, "that the complete memoirs should occupy five or six volumes... though the final total depends on how the work unfolds under Mr. Churchill's hand". Any more than six of these doorstops and Britain's bombed-out homeless could've built houses out of the buggers to "occupy".

Quite apart from the issues of accuracy Professor Charmley raises in his BBC article, it seems even Churchill's deathless prose wasn't immune to those rather more mundane mistakes which bedevil every writer, namely the odd typo – some of them very odd indeed. There's a tipped-in "Author's Note" at the start of the book:

directing readers to the "Errata and Corrigenda" at the back, which corrects various dates, punctuation and what have you. But that page of corrections also has a tipped-in sheet attached with additional errata, and one of those in particular is a real howler:

"Page 56, line 13: For 'poop' read 'prop'." Ouch. Now there's a typo to give copyeditors the heebie-jeebies...

Moving on, and next we travel to 1946, for a Ross Thomas postwar Germany-set tale of unhinged assassination, diminutive espionage and insouciant skullduggery...

SS-GB by Len Deighton: a Review of a British First Edition (Jonathan Cape, 1978)

Let's embark on another series of themed posts. And the theme this time is the Second World War – or thereabouts. I've got reviews of two novels set in the aftermath of World War II – one by Len Deighton, the other by Ross Thomas – plus a non-fiction account of the early years of WWII, and some additional Ross Thomas business besides.

But let's begin with Len Deighton, and a novel that, while it depicts a post-World War II London, this isn't the city or the era with which we're all familiar...

SS-GB was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 1978, under an iconic dustjacket designed, of course, by Raymond Hawkey, and featuring a brilliant fake photo on the back cover of SS troops marching down Whitehall. I bought this first edition in Dim and Distant, Heathfield, East Sussex, having seen another first edition in the science fiction exhibition "Out of This World" at the British Library (archivers of this very blog) over the summer. I was already well aware of Deighton's spy novels – indeed I've blogged about them more than once – but SS-GB is a rather different proposition: an alternate history tale set in a 1941 London where Britain has been defeated by Germany.

Written in the third person, our ostensible lead is Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, a Scotland Yard policeman investigating an apparent murder. It's November 1941, nine months on from Britain's surrender to Hitler's Germany, and a Blitzed-out, fog-bound London is suffering under the yolk of Nazi rule. Archer now reports to General Fritz Kellerman, the SS Gruppenführer in charge of London's police force; it's an uncomfortably collusionary position for Archer to be in – especially as his second-in-command and closest friend, Detective Sergeant Harry Woods, has links to the Resistance – but one he rationalises by reasoning that an occupied Britain still needs law and order. Before long, however, Archer's murder investigation is complicated by the arrival of another SS officer, Standartenführer Oskar Huth, who seconds Archer to a parallel but related hunt for missing atomic bomb blueprints...

SS-GB wasn't the first novel to conjecture an alternate history where the Nazis won the war; Sarban's The Sound of His Horn and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle preceded it in, respectively, 1952 and 1962. However, Sarban's tale is a futuristic "what if" set 102 years after World War II, while Dick's novel is set in the year it was published. The closest novel to SS-GB, then, is probably Robert Harris's excellent Fatherland, published fourteen years after Deighton's book in 1992. But although SS-GB shares with Fatherland superficial suspense-cum-crime-thriller trappings, Harris's novel depicts Germany in 1964, whereas Deighton's deals with a scenario both closer to home – at least for me, as a former Londoner – and closer to the conflict itself.

Deighton paints a vivid picture of a London stricken by poverty and starvation, enduring endless checkpoints, mass arrests and summary executions, and afflicted by a gradual, systematic ostracisation and dehumanisation of Jews. That last degradation is only really touched upon, but the glimpses Deighton affords of the plight of the city's Jewish denizens – the enforced wearing of those yellow stars; designated benches in London Zoo – are all the more powerful for their incidental nature. As the Nazis tighten their grip on the country, it's evident Britain is becoming a hellish place, but Deighton doesn't sensationalize this downward spiral; rather, his deadened prose effectively conveys the humdrum but increasingly hopeless existence of Londoners and, by extension, the wider population.

That said, there are sequences of heightened tension, in particular a horrific explosion at the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery and a climactic desperate scramble on the south coast. What misfires there are in the novel are minor; there's some awkward switching of character viewpoints in some scenes, and the decent but dull Douglas Archer isn't a terribly interesting lead. But he's offset by a colourful supporting cast, notably Kellerman and Huth, the latter of whom gets most of the best dialogue and becomes strangely sympathetic towards the end (at least, as sympathetic as an SS officer can be). Deighton is especially good on the internecine low-level warfare between the various branches of the Nazi military and secret police, and Kellerman's and Huth's devious machinations against one another prove deliciously compelling.

SS-GB is terrifyingly plausible, drawing on Deighton's scholarly knowledge of the Second World War and featuring cameos from everyone from Heinrich Himmler to King George VI. One man who doesn't feature, however – except in the briefest of mentions – is the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Churchill, though, is the author of the next book I'll be showcasing in this WWII-themed series of posts, with a first edition of a non-fiction work I picked up only yesterday in a Lewes charity shop...

Richard Stark's Parker Novels: the 1973 British Gold Lion Editions of The Split, The Green Eagle Score and The Sour Lemon Score

(NB: a version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

Always nice to start the week with a massive pistol, I find.

Now, chances are, you won't have seen this particular Parker cover before. It's a hardback-with-dustjacket, it dates from 1973, and it's one of three Parker novels issued by the same publisher in that year which, together, rank among the most elusive – and expensive – editions of any of Donald E. "Richard Stark" Westlake's books.

Allow me to elucidate.

Last week I blogged about a 1986 Allison & Busby hardback edition of The Jugger, in which post I explained that, for anyone wishing to collect Richard Stark's Parker novels in hardback (a foolhardy endeavour, believe me, but there are people unhinged enough to wish to do so), the British Allison & Busby editions represent almost the only way to obtain hardcovers of the initial twelve Parkers – from The Hunter/Point Blank to The Sour Lemon Score – all of which have otherwise only been issued as paperbacks. The key word there being "almost". Because three of those twelve Parkers were published in hardback long before Allison & Busby got their mitts on them – again by a British publisher. And that publisher was Gold Lion Books.

I've not been able to establish much about Gold Lion Books, but I gather they were a London-based outfit who, so far as I can determine, operated from 1972 to 1975. Their modus operandi was reissuing American paperbacks as hardbacks: they began in 1972 by publishing Westerns from authors like W. C. Tuttle, Stetson Cody and Robert MacLeod, before branching out into crime and spy thrillers the following year with Richard S. Prather, Dan J. Marlowe and Edward S. Aarons, as well as Richard Stark. Gold Lion's approach to publishing these authors was somewhat erratic – although not atypical for the period – resulting in seemingly random instalments from the writers' various ongoing series being issued, notably Marlowe's Earl Drake novels (which have been compared to the Parker books) and Aarons's Sam Durell series.

The same fate befell Richard Stark's Parker series. To my knowledge, Gold Lion only published three of the Parkers. The 1973 photographic cover to The Split (a.k.a. The Seventh; Parker #7, 1966) you can see up top, but the other two Stark novels Gold Lion published that year were Parkers #10 and 12, i.e. The Green Eagle Score (1967) and The Sour Lemon Score (1969). And those sported illustrated dustjackets, which look like this:

I can't tell you who the illustrators were on these – Jamie Sturgeon, who kindly gave me permission to reproduce the covers from his Flickr stream, scanned a fellow collector's copies, but he didn't believe the art was credited anyway – but they're not bad at all (I particularly like The Sour Lemon Score one). However, all three Gold Lion editions are extremely hard to come by: AbeBooks does currently have at least one of each of them listed worldwide, but most are on sale for around £150 each, with the single copy of The Green Eagle Score on AbeBooks going for over £300. (I did once see a copy sell on eBay for just under £100, but even that was too rich for my blood.)

Suffice to say, then, that the Gold Lion editions of these three Parker novels are pretty bloody scarce, and pretty bloody pricey. But thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Sturgeon, at least their little-seen covers are now freely available on Existential Ennui (and The Violent World of Parker) for us all to gaze upon...*

Next up: a review of a Len Deighton novel set in the aftermath of World War II... except, this is a WWII that finished rather earlier than the actual conflict...

Update 6/8/16: Five years on, that very same Mr. Sturgeon sold me those very same copies...

Westlake Score: The Jugger (Parker #6) by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake); Allison & Busby Hardback, 1986

(NB: a version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

This latest Westlake Score – which, for those who've evidently been dozing or "goofing off" at the back of the class, are posts in which I detail newly acquired editions of various of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's novels – may not look like much to you, chief, but to me it represents another step on the path towards owning every one of Richard Stark's Parker novels in hardback.

Published in 1986, this is the Allison & Busby hardback edition of The Jugger – the sixth Parker novel, originally published in the US in 1965. To recap: in the 1980s, British publisher Allison & Busby reissued almost all of the initial thirteen Parker novels – from Point Blank (a.k.a. The Hunter) to Slayground – in hardback, the first time that many of those novels had been made available in that format. (A&B also published Deadly Edge – Parker #13 – in 1990, but only as a paperback.) For book collectors, then, the Allison & Busby editions afford almost the only opportunity to own those twelve Parkers as hardcovers. Almost... but not quite. I'll return to that in a moment.

Of course, this is something that only really matters to book collectors – for whom hardbacks are always preferable to paperbacks – but matter it does (to us), and consequently a good number of the A&B hardcovers have become quite scarce and rather valuable. For instance, I had to order this copy of The Jugger from New Zealand – from the lovely folks at Codexco, Christchurch, an undertaking which gained an additional wrinkle with the recent earthquake there – while AbeBooks currently lists just two other copies of this edition, the cheapest of those being fifty quid. Mind you, the A&B editions are an imperfect solution to a collecting conundrum: about half of the Parkers they reissued were printed on inferior paper stock, which has since browned, and all of them are littered with typos. (Allison & Busby were once described to me by a secondhand bookseller as "a cowboy outfit".) The dustjacket designs are an acquired taste, too; most were designed by Mick Keates, and while I do like the first wave of jackets he created, with their bold typography, the second wave – which included The Jugger – I'm less keen on.

Even so, the Allison & Busby Parkers are much in-demand by collectors, and always command good prices when they (infrequently) appear on eBay. However, at least as regards a scant few of those thirteen Parker novels, there is another option for collectors. Because some of those Parkers were published as hardbacks a good decade or so prior to the Allison & Busby editions. They're incredibly scarce, and little-seen... but in my next Violent World of Parker/Existential Ennui cross-post, I'll be showcasing all three of them.

Meanwhile, on the non-Westlake/Stark front, next week I'll hopefully have a couple of reviews for you, both of them novels set – although published sometime after, in 1978 and 1979 – around World War II. One of those books is by Len Deighton, and the other sees the return to Existential Ennui of our good friend, Ross Thomas...

Lewes Book Bargain: a First Edition of Piers Morgan's The Insider (Ebury Press, 2005), a Review Thereof, and an Alan Clark Connection

This final post in a series on politically-themed diaries – a series that, judging by the paltry number of hits thus far registered on each of the two previous posts, has been as indifferently received as the political party conference season which inspired it – concerns a volume which has more to do with tabloid journalism than with the inner workings of state or government. But newspapers and politics are inextricably intertwined, and the author of these diaries enjoyed almost unparalleled access to the men and women at the top of Britain's governmental tree, among them the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Plus, the ostensible subject of the last two posts, Tory politician Alan Clark, crops up in the diaries too...

Piers Morgan's The Insider was first published in hardback in the UK in 2005 by Ebury Press, under a dustjacket designed by Two Associates, featuring photographs of Morgan with the great, the good, the not-so-good, and, er, the Queen. I bought this copy just the other day in a Lewes charity shop, but I read it a few years ago in paperback, and it is, you'll doubtless be surprised to learn, a thoroughly revealing account of what it's like to be a tabloid newspaper editor in Britain.

These days Morgan is best known – especially to Americans – as a judge on America's Got Talent and the host of Piers Morgan Tonight, but from 1994 to 2004 he was editor of the (now defunct) News of the World and then the Daily Mirror. The Insider comprises his diaries from this period, and it's an extraordinary account. Morgan isn't the most stylish of writers, and his tendency to name drop can become wearisome, but as an insight into what a tabloid editor does, The Insider takes some beating. Morgan reports the countless conversations he had with Tony Blair (and Cherie Blair) and many other senior political figures, all of whom courted him and solicited his opinion on a variety of matters. New Labour's (understandable) obsession with the press permeates the book, while Blair alone warrants a column-and-a-half's worth of entries in the index.

It's all fascinating stuff, and even the celebrity side of Morgan's job has taken on an extra significance in the wake of the phone hacking scandal. I must admit I haven't read Morgan's follow-up, Don't You Know Who I Am?, as his post-newspaper career is of rather less interest to me, but The Insider is a cracking read and no mistake.

I mentioned in the previous post that I'd be returning to "the Coven", the mother and her two daughters Alan Clark had an affair with, because that particular extramarital dalliance also crops up in The Insider. The News of the World had been trying to establish the identities of the Coven ever since Clark's first volume of Diaries had been published in 1993, and on Sunday 29 May, 1994, under Morgan's editorship, the newspaper finally exposed them, naming judge's wife Valerie Harkness and her two daughters. Far from becoming enemies, however, Morgan and Clark subsequently became fairly friendly. Later that same year the two met at the Conservative Party Conference (which rolls around again next week, bringing us full circle) and retired to the bar, where Clark demanded tens of thousands of pounds for the "distress" the NOTW's story had caused him and his wife.

"Look, Alan," replied Morgan, "that's a bit on the pricey side to be honest. I've got a better idea. You give me fifty thousand and we won't disclose the other nine women who've come forward to say they had affairs with you."

Clark snorted, then leaned closer: "Nine women . . . God – what were their names?"

And on that disgraceful note, it's time to move on from the political diaries (cue ecstatic cheering...), and return to the crime fiction, with a Westlake Score...