Public Service Announcements: Changes to Existential Ennui, and the London Paperback and Pulp Bookfair, Sunday 28 October, 2012

All being well, next week I'll be posting that promised Peter Bryan George piece, and I'll also hopefully be adding to the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page, with two lovely Lewes-bought illustrative wrappers which will edge the total number of covers on the page ever closer to 100. But before all that, and to round off the working week, a couple of announcements...

ITEM 1: You may, or may not, have noticed some minor changes to Existential Ennui this week, namely a slight widening of the blog and a new subtitle. The former I've been meaning to get round to for a while now; computer screens are a lot wider these days, so it seems daft to unnecessarily restrict the width of EE, especially when it makes it easier to position two book covers side by side in a post. The latter is also something I've been mulling for some time; to my mind the old, rather prosaic subtitle of "Crime and spy fiction, SF, book collecting, comics" had become a bit stale, and wasn't properly explaining what Existential Ennui is all about. So instead I've settled on the more narrative, yet still descriptive "The chronicle of an obsessive book collector*: crime, spy, suspense, thrillers, SF, comics". I think it does the job, and hey: it's tailor made for any eventual Existential Ennui blook. Ahem.

ITEM 2: If you'd care to cast your minds back to November of last year, you might recall my having written about the books I bagged at the 2011 London Paperback and Pulp Bookfair. Well I'm pleased to say the event is returning again this year, and will take place on Sunday 28 October at the Park Plaza Hotel, near Victoria Station. For anyone interested in old crime fiction, spy fiction, science fiction, horror and western paperbacks and pulp magazines, it really is an event not to be missed, and I'm reliably informed – by book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, who'll be hawking his splendid wares at the show – that horror editor Stephen Jones, acclaimed artist Les Edwards and fantasy author Adrian Cole will all be in attendance and signing. More importantly than that, however, I'll be there, so if you see this lanky streak of piss wandering about:

come and say hello. Although not in the first hour. I'll be too busy rifling through boxes of paperbacks.

Until next week.

* Since changed to the more alliterative "The chronicle of a compulsive book collector..." Although I reserve the right to change it back again, or indeed change it to something else entirely – "chronic book collector"**, perhaps. I'm mercurial like that.

** And indeed that's what I did change it to. Told you.

Denis McLoughlin Designs: The Big H by Bryan Peters, alias Peter Bryan George (T. V. Boardman, 1961); Book Review

Time for one last (for now...) Denis McLoughlin dust jacket-sporting T. V. Boardman thriller before I move on to other matters. Although as it turns out, those "other matters" will concern the author of this particular book...

The Big H by Bryan Peters, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1961. This is the second of Peters's two published novels, the first being Hong Kong Kill (T. V. Boardman, 1958), which introduced the stars of The Big H, British agent Anthony Brandon and CIA operative Jess Lundstrom. Or rather, it's the second of Peters's two published novels under that particular moniker – because in fact Bryan Peters is a pen name of Peter Bryan George, a Welsh-born writer best known for his 1958 novel Red Alert, which itself was written under another pseudonym: Peter Bryant. Originally titled Two Hours to Doom when Boardman published it in hardback – complete with a spectacular Denis McLoughlin mushroom cloud illustration on the dust jacket – it's an account of "the first two hours of World War III", and was famously turned into a film in 1964 by Stanley Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the screenplay of which George co-wrote.

Nuclear paranoia characterizes much of George's slim body of work, including The Big H, which is ostensibly about a Russian plot to embarrass America by flooding the country with heroin, and finds agent Brandon tasked with posing as a heroin dealer in order to infiltrate the Los Angeles criminal gang at the centre of the conspiracy. Gaining the trust of mob boss Agostino proves trickier than Brandon expected, however, beginning with a card game which recalls James Bond's battle against Le Chiffre in Casino Royale – difference being, Brandon plays to lose, although the net result is essentially the same, i.e. a spot of light torture.

It's a well-constructed Cold War thriller, closer in tone to Desmond Cory's Johnny Fedora novels maybe, or Edward S. Aarons's Sam Durell series than Ian Fleming's Bond books: tough, downbeat and with a dogged, determinedly unglamorous lead. It also has an unusual structure: long chapters are punctuated by shorter segments detailing the interrogation of a Russian spy by US Air Force officers, the significance of which only becomes clear late in the novel. It's that intermittent scene that Denis McLoughlin has chosen to illustrate in striking fashion on the dust jacket, combining it with – what else – a big red "H", prefiguring McLoughlin's type treatment on the wrapper for the 1962 Boardman edition Donald E. Westlake's 361.

McLoughlin's dust jacket for The Big H has now, of course, joined his other wrappers on the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s permanent page (taking the total number of covers thereon up to a tantalising 95). And if you take a look at the back cover:

You can see that Boardman have picked out four books from the same year as The Big H "by new authors, whom we believe will be the best-sellers of the future". Unfortunately Boardman's prediction didn't quite pan out: Larry Harris, a.k.a. Laurence Janifer, did make a name for himself in science fiction, but Eric Bruton isn't terribly well remembered these days, and Harry Olesker, after publishing three novels, embarked on a career in film and television before being killed in a motorcycle accident in 1969. Donald Westlake, however, did, as we're all doubtless well aware, do rather well for himself, The Mercenaries being one of over a hundred books he published in his lifetime.

As for Peter George, he took his own life in 1966, publishing one final novel before he died. And it looks as if I might have secured a very special copy of that book, so I'll be blogging about that very soon indeed, as well as exploring George's life and career a bit more and assembling a full Peter George bibliography – the first time, I believe, one has appeared online...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: Amateur Agent by Christopher Adams, alias Kenneth Hopkins (T. V. Boardman, 1964); Book Review

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

I've just two further T. V. Boardman thrillers to blog about before moving on to other matters – both of which happen to be spy novels hailing from the early 1960s; both of which were written by British authors under non de plumes; and both of which boast dust jackets designed by Denis McLoughlin which will, of course, be making their way onto the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page. Let's take a look at this one first:

Amateur Agent by Christopher Adams, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1964 (British Bloodhound Mystery #467). "Christopher Adams" was an alias of Kenneth Hopkins (1914–1988), an author who published seven crime novels and mysteries under his own name from 1955 – The Girl Who Died (Macdonald) – to 1963 – Campus Corpse (Macdonald) – plus one pseudonymous spy thriller – Amateur Agent. But Hopkins was also a critic, a man of letters and a poet, as a footnote in the third volume of C. S. Lewis's Collected Letters reveals:

[Hopkins] ...was born in Bournemouth, and after leaving school at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a builder's merchant. In 1938 he set out to sell his poems from door to door. He eventually made his way to London where he came to know the anarchist and publisher Charles Lahr and his circle at Lahr's Red Lion Street bookshop. After serving in the Second World War he worked as the literary director of Everybody's, a magazine concerned with social justice. Later he lectured on English literature and taught creative writing at several North American universities. [Hopkins published a book about one of his visits to the States, A Trip to Texas, in 1962.] His autobiography, The Corruption of a Poet, was published in 1954. His championship of the cause of the Powys brothers... reached its zenith with his biographical appreciation, The Powys Brothers (1967). He was an active member of The Powys Society.

Hopkins's background as a poet can certainly be glimpsed in Amateur Agent. A lively location-hopping tale of mistaken identity, wherein Jim Stone, a British car salesman vacationing in Mexico, gets mixed up in a plot to transport military plans to Cuba, the novel comes across as a more violent version of North by Northwest, but some of the descriptive passages are quite striking, especially those set around Teotihuacan. Indeed, Hopkins paints vivid pictures of all of the novel's various locales, and mixes smart-alec banter with jarring scenes of torture and bloodletting, all of which serve to keep one on one's toes throughout. It's a shame the book, like all of Hopkins's novels, has fallen out of print; the Boardman edition was its only outing and it's consequently become quite scarce (AbeBooks lists just three copies at present, one of those lacking a dust jacket).

Still, at least we all get to gaze upon Denis McLoughlin's evocative wrapper for Amateur Agent – which has taken its rightful place in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery – and as a result of this 'ere post there's now a little more information about both the novel and its author available online. And I'll be providing a similar service with the next post too, as we head back to 1961 for a Cold War espionage tale by a novelist who was obsessed with nuclear annihilation...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: The Siamese Coup Affair by Sidney Weintraub (T. V. Boardman Bloodhound Mystery #447, 1963)

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

In the unlikely event that there's anyone out there eagerly awaiting the next instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a while longer yet: for some reason I'm finding the fourth book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, heavy going. Nothing to do with the novel itself – at least, I don't think it is; I suspect I'm just a bit burned out with the intensive reading and note-taking those Ripley posts have ended up requiring. Anyway, the net result is that the next essay probably won't appear until the end of next week at the earliest, so you'll just have to make do with some more Denis McLoughlin-designed T. V. Boardman dust jackets in the meantime.

Speaking of which, let's have a look at the third Boardman Bloodhound I bought off book dealer Jamie Sturgeon:

The Siamese Coup Affair by Sidney Weintraub, published in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1963, #447 in Boardman's American Bloodhound Mystery line. So far as I've been able to establish, this is one of only two novels Weintraub published, the other being Mexican Slay Ride, issued by Abelard-Schuman and Robert Hale the year before in 1962. But though Weintraub seems to have written just the two works of fiction, he has, I believe, and if I've got my facts right – so take the following with a pinch of salt – penned a hell of a lot of non-fiction. Indeed, it's for works like* his 1959 debut Price Theory (*like, but actually not; see comments) and a succession of other books on finance and free trade that he's rather better known, as well as for being a former William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a former member of the US Foreign Service.

Of course, that could be an entirely different Weintraub – except for two things. 1) Weintraub the economist is evidently something of an expert on Mexico, so his having also written a thriller titled Mexican Slay Ride isn't entirely outside the realms of possibility; and 2) the 1964 Catalog of Copyright Entries lists both the novel The Siamese Coup Affair and the non-fiction work Intermediate Price Theory under Weintraub's name.

So, in attempt to discover if Sidney Weintraub the thriller writer and Sidney Weintraub the economist are one and the same, I've taken the fairly radical step of trying to contact Mr. Weintraub. I'm not overly confident that I'll hear anything back, but if I do, I'll be sure to update this post.

UPDATE, 19/3/13: Sidney Weintraub's son, Jeff, kindly emailed me the other day confirming that they are indeed one and the same – and not to be confused with the other Sidney Weintraub. Thanks, Jeff!

Perhaps even more intriguing and curious than all of that, however, is this: while The Siamese Coup Affair was published by T. V. Boardman (apparently its only printing), Weintraub's 1962 (presumed) debut novel, Mexican Slay Ride, was published, as mentioned above, by Abelard-Schuman in the States and Robert Hale in the UK. But in 1961, the year before that, Boardman itself published a novel titled Mexican Slayride (two words rather than three, note), by Boardman mainstay Thomas B. Dewey (actually retitled from its original US Dell appearance as The Golden Hooligan). Moreover, in 1962, the same year as the Weintraub Mexican Slay Ride, Gold Medal in the States published a novel titled – you guessed it – Mexican Slay Ride, this one by Neil MacNeil, alias W. T. Ballard.

Three different novels, all titled Mexican Slay Ride (or Slayride), all appearing in the space of two years: what the hell's that all about? What was the weird fascination with that title? I must admit I'm unfamiliar with either a Mexican slay ride or if it is, as it appears to be, a play on words, a Mexican sleigh ride, although I'm assuming in this context it's nothing to do with any of these practices. Furthermore, whether or not these three novels were an influence on either the American title of this film or the pilot of The A-Team is also beyond my ken, although given that A-Team co-creator and writer Frank Lupo is a keen collector of crime and spy fiction, one never knows. Answers to any of the above on a postcard, please.

Anyway, back to The Siamese Coup Affair. And while Denis McLoughlin's dust jacket for the book isn't one of his more striking efforts, for me it's possessed of a quiet appeal. Certainly it's good enough to join its brethren in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – and I've another couple of McLoughlins waiting to follow in its footsteps. Because while The Siamese Coup Affair is the last of the Boardmans I bought off Jamie Sturgeon, it's not the last of the Boardmans I've acquired of late...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: Epitaph for a Blonde by Ian Mercer (T. V. Boardman Bloodhound Mystery #291, 1960)

On to the second of three T. V. Boardman thrillers I acquired from book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, all of which boast dust jackets designed by the late, great Denis McLoughlin. And this next book is not only one of Boardman's select number of British Bloodhound Mysteries, as opposed to the more common or garden American variety, but it's a spy novel to boot, which again marks it out from Boardman's more traditional crime or suspense fare:

Published in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1960, Epitaph for a Blonde is the third of Ian Mercer's three espionage novels starring James Nathaniel Pettigrew of the British Secret Service, and follows Journey into Darkness and Mission to Majorca (both 1958, and both extremely hard to come by these days). Except, as the dust jacket flap of Epitaph and James Nathaniel Pettigrew's dedicated page on Spy Guys & Gals both point out, by this juncture in the series, Pettigrew is no longer called Pettigrew, but Charles Graham, and is now a retired schoolteacher. Indeed, Spy Guys & Gals even goes so far as to speculate that Epitaph for a Blonde might have originally been "a stand-alone that the publisher forced the author to changing [sic]". Certainly Mercer wrote a number of other standalone spy and crime novels, including The Green Windmill (1945), A Man Gets Into His Tomb (1948) and Curs in Clover (also 1948), as well as, by the looks of it, some travel guides, notably Majorca on £50 (1970; evidently Mercer felt something of an affinity for the Balearic island).

As with B. X. Sanborn's The Doom-Maker, this copy of Epitaph for a Blonde is ex-library, this time hailing from a public library in Newport, Wales which has, I believe, since closed down (the library, not the town or the country; those were definitely still open last I looked). Unfortunately Denis McLoughlin's rather nice dust jacket has suffered the indignity of losing a strip from its top and bottom where the tape affixing it to its library plastic covering has been ripped away. But never mind: it doesn't detract from the lovely artwork too much, and I've duly added it to the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery.

Which is, of course, what I'll also be doing with the next McLoughlin/Boardman book I'll be blogging about – a 1963 political thriller which appears to have been written by a noted economist and former member of the US Foreign Service...

Denis McLoughlin Designs: The Doom-Maker by B. X. Sanborn, alias Bill S. Ballinger (T. V. Boardman Bloodhound Mystery #278, 1959)

There are still two posts to come in the Great Tom Ripley Reread, but to mix things up a bit, and to give me a chance to finish rereading the final two Ripley novels; and since the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page has been stuck at 90 covers for nearly a month; and seeing as I reviewed The Art of Denis McLoughlin last week, I thought I'd showcase some of the T. V. Boardman crime and spy first editions sporting Denis McLoughlin wrappers I've acquired over the past month or so, peppering them in amongst the final two Ripley posts and thus nudging the total number of dust jackets in the Beautiful British Book Jacket gallery a bit closer to the magic 100. And by Christ that was a ridiculously long sentence with which to begin a blog post. So let's get straight to the first of the books in question while there are still a few readers left:

The Doom-Maker by B. X. Sanborn, published in hardback in the UK by T. V. Boardman in 1958, and #278 in Boardman's Bloodhound Mystery series. This copy came from noted book dealer and all round good egg Jamie Sturgeon, who brought it and a couple of the other Boardmans I'll be blogging about along to the last Lewes Book Fair especially for me (along with those signed Colin Forbes books) after I'd browsed through his Boardmans via a selection of photos Jamie emailed to me. I was on the hunt for espionage novels for the most part, of which Boardman published a small quantity in amongst their standard mystery and suspense fare, but The Doom-Maker caught my eye, chiefly because of its terrific dust jacket, which is a fine example of the kind of duo-tone, high contrast cover Denis McLoughlin was creating for Boardman in the late-1950s and 1960s, but also because the title and author intrigued me.

Turns out B. X. Sanborn is a pseudonym of Bill S. Ballinger, a screenwriter and novelist who penned scripts for Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Ironside and published around twenty-five crime and spy thrillers from 1948–1975. All of those novels appear to have fallen out of print, but there's a great website dedicated to Ballinger, boasting a detailed biography and bibliography. The Doom-Maker – which was retitled The Blonde on Borrowed Time for its 1960 US Zenith paperback printing – is narrated by John Perseus, an artist living in a Greenwich Village boarding house who meets the "extraordinary and sinister" Marcolf, a man who "claimed the power of prophecy", shortly after which "death struck three times in the boarding house". As is often the case with the Boardman books one encounters, this copy is ex-library, but since it came a from a public library in south Croydon, not far from where I grew up, I don't mind that at all.

I shan't bang on about the brilliance of Denis McLoughlin again; you can read all about him in that Art of Denis McLoughlin post. Interestingly, however, on this particular wrapper he seems to have been influenced by the dust jacket of the American E. P. Dutton edition (also published in 1959) – or possibly vice versa; I haven't been able to determine which cover artist saw which artist's cover first. Either way, evidently one of them did; the two jackets are just too similar for it to have been happenstance:

For me, McLoughlin's is the superior effort: I love the appropriately jagged typography; the subtle highlights on Marcolf's face, the hint of devilish horns in his hair and the way he occupies almost half the cover, making him more imposing; and the two planes of the cityscape in the background, which speak to McLoughlin's background as a cartoonist. But I'd be intrigued to learn if McLoughlin did indeed take inspiration from the US cover – or if the reverse is true. (Update, 2/10/12: Jamie Sturgeon just told me that the Dutton edition was published in March 1959 while the Boardman edition was published in October, which suggests that it was McLoughlin who was the one who was influenced.) 

The Doom-Maker has now joined the other McLoughlin covers in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery – and it'll be followed in fairly swift succession by another striking restricted palette McLoughlin dust jacket, this one wrapping a 1960 spy thriller...