Elmore Leonard's Dutch Treat: The Hunted, Swag, Mr. Majestyk (Viking Omnibus, 1987)

It's kind of fitting that my first proper post in six weeks (for reasons outlined here) should be on Elmore Leonard, since Leonard is who I've been reading pretty much exclusively for the past few months (and who I may well continue to read pretty much exclusively for the remainder of the year, I'm enjoying him so much; we shall see). Fortuitous too: this week's instalment of Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books is devoted to Elmore Leonard, so my being on a Leonard kick has worked out rather nicely. I could've picked any one of the five Leonard novels I've read (or reread in one instance) recently and happily banged out a few hundred words without having to give it too much thought (in a good way: all of those novels have been great, although in truth I've yet to read a duff Leonard); but seeing as this is sort of a special occasion, I thought I'd take a look at this book:

Elmore Leonard's Dutch Treat ("Dutch" being Leonard's nickname), which is in fact three books; it's an omnibus comprising three of Leonard's novels from the 1970s: Mr. Majestyk (1974), Swag (1976) and The Hunted (1977). First published in this configuration by Arbor House in the US in 1985, the copy seen here is the notably scarce UK Viking edition from 1987 – a review copy, as it happens, as evidenced by the review slip accompanying the book:

While in the States Dutch Treat represented the hardback debut of two of the three novels (Mr. Majestyk and The Hunted, both of which were published as paperback originals), in the UK it represented the hardback debut of one of them (Swag; The Hunted was issued in hardcover by Secker & Warburg in 1978) and the first British publication overall of Mr. Majestyk. I've already reviewed Mr. Majestyk, so I'll skip daintily over that one and turn instead to The Hunted and Swag, the former of which is as lean and gripping a manhunt thriller as you could wish for, the latter a splendid example of the kind of low rent larceny Leonard specializes in.

Leonard brings his distinctive storytelling "voice" to both, but they're quite different novels, each boasting their own unique spin on well worn set-ups. While The Hunted is on the surface a straightforward man-on-the-run tale, it's the story's locale which lends it its additional edge: Israel, with its history of conflict (the scars visible now and then in the narrative) and constricted geography. It's a tiny country, almost impossible to hide in, which makes it perfect for a game of cat and mouse between a trio of hitmen and a Federal witness businessman and his new Marine buddy. The appeal of Swag (also known as Ryan's Rules), on the other hand, rests chiefly on the bickering relationship between criminals Frank Ryan and Ernest Stickley, Jr, alias Stick, who team up and embark on a string of hold-ups, following Frank's ten rules for success and happiness. But it's also a convincing, credible account of what life must be like for a middle rung recidivist – making enough to lead a fairly comfortable existence but knowing that at some point the party has to end – more than likely in a jail cell.

Something else Swag has, at least if you're familiar with Leonard's work, is a sense of a shared universe for the characters who populate the author's novels and stories. Frank shares a surname with Jack Ryan, of The Big Bounce and Unknown Man No. 89, a fact made explicit when a character in Swag remarks that he used to do some breaking and entering with Jack. Meanwhile Stick would go on to star in his own eponymous Leonard novel – and I'll be taking a look at that book, as well as some of the other Leonards I've read of late, before too long.

Obligatory Baby and Book Blog Post

Just a quick one – free time being at something of a premium at present – to introduce Edith Emmeline* – Edie if you're in a hurry (which I invariably am these days, appearances to the contrary) – born at 12.27pm on Sunday 19 May. Mum and baby are both doing well (there were various complications but I shan't bore you with the details) and all three of us are slowly adjusting to life as a family. As you can see, I'm getting in whatever reading I can; not as much as I was pre-birth, obviously, but enough to keep me sane. I've been on an Elmore Leonard kick of late – you might be able to make out that I'm (re)reading Get Shorty in that photo – so I hope to have a post up for Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books Leonard special in a few weeks' time (if not, I guess Patti can always link this post). If I get the chance I'll be running some eBay auctions for a bunch of Richard Stark/Parker books pretty soon, so I'll let you know about those if I do, but other than that, I'll have to take it as it comes as regards a return to what will almost certainly be semi-regular – or, more likely, highly irregular – book blogging. More soon...

* The fact that the initials of Edie's first and middle names reflect those of Existential Ennui is, of course, entirely coincidental...

Peter Rabe's From Here to Maternity (Muller, 1955) Heralds an Existential Ennui Hiatus

NB: Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

If there's been a fin-de-siecle feel to my posting of late – tying up long-running series, completing a particular book collection, drawing a (pencil) line under Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s – there's a very definite reason for that, to do with this book:

From Here to Maternity, by Peter Rabe, published in hardback by Frederick Muller in 1955. Rabe is an author I've written about repeatedly, most recently in this series of posts on what Donald E. Westlake reckoned to Rabe's remarkable cult crime fiction. But before Rabe started penning crime thriller originals for (chiefly) Gold Medal, he wrote – and drew, a skill he reportedly picked up working in advertising – From Here to Maternity, a cute if occasionally opaque (in that curious Rabe manner) account of his first wife's pregnancy which began life as an article in McCall's Magazine (the book, not the pregnancy... although I guess the two may well have gone hand in hand).

As the brighter sparks among you will have guessed, the reason the book is pertinent both to me and to Existential Ennui is that my long-suffering girlfriend, Rachel, is currently very heavily pregnant with our first child – so heavily pregnant, in fact, that the due date is tomorrow. Which, if the kid's anything like me – and it is to be fervently hoped (or possibly feared) that that should be the case, else I'll be having words with the milkman (and we don't even have a milkman) – means that she – for she is a she (we think) – will probably turn up in a fortnight's time. But that's immaterial. In practical terms, it's unlikely – although not completely out of the question – that I'll be able to devote any time to blogging even if Baby Louis(e) XIV, "The Sun Princess" elects to spend another few weeks in her mother's womb.

And even if I do manage to squeeze in a post before her royal arrival, looking further ahead, what all this will mean for Existential Ennui post-birth is anyone's guess. Certainly there'll be a hiatus, of an indeterminate length; probably there'll be a gushing missive comprising photos of Firstborn suitably arranged in some kind of ridiculous books-related fashion; hopefully, at some point, there'll be a resumption of books blogging proper, albeit no doubt necessarily scaled back. Who the hell knows though. It's an unpredictable business, this having kids thing. So wish me luck, chums. I shall, I trust, return.

Flush as May by P. M. Hubbard (Michael Joseph, 1963) Joins Beautiful British Book Jackets

This will be my last addition to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, at least for a little while; I do have some other wrappers I'm still planning to add, but probably not till later in the year. Let's draw a (pencil) line under the page, then, with rather a suitable book given that it's now the month of May:

Flush as May, by P. M. Hubbard. The splendid dust jacket design is by Kenneth Farnhill, an artist already represented in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery by another Hubbard wrapper – for the author's second novel, Picture of Millie (1964) – and by three Agatha Christie wrappers (follow that second link to read a comment by Farnhill's granddaughter, Kate). This is the British first edition, second impression, published by Michael Joseph in April 1963, three months after the first impression. Like many of Hubbard's early novels it's quite uncommon in any kind of first; I won this copy on eBay, beating, I later learned, fellow Hubbard enthusiast John from Pretty Sinister Books by a few pence (sorry John!). It's an ex-library copy, but complete and in very good condition, still sporting the Cambridge Union Society library sign-out sheet:

Hubbard's debut novel, published when he was in his early fifties, Flush as May is set in and around the (fictional) rural community of Lodstone, where the heroine, Margaret Canting, comes across a body whilst out walking one May morning. Reporting her discovery to the village constable, Margaret is alarmed to find when she revisits the scene that the body has vanished, and thereafter recruits the aid of her soon-to-be lover, Jacob Garrod, in getting to the bottom of this case of the disappearing corpse.

It's a conventional murder mystery opening that leads in large part to a conventional murder mystery plot, but there are inklings of the darker Hubbard to come. Early in the book Hubbard writes of the "menace that hung in the fields and streets of Lodstone", and there's a woozy, possibly drug-induced feel to a scene where Garrod gatecrashes a pub get-together on market day, embodied by a magnetic woman who "was like Life-in-Death". The secret that lies at the heart of this curious community is explicitly spelled out late in the novel, and it's here, in the closing stages, as Margaret embarks on an eerie cross-country trek from the churchyard at Lodstone to the Beacon on the downs over neighbouring Ebury, that Hubbard's writing is at its strongest, recalling – or, more accurately, hinting at, given that it precedes those later novels – some of the heightened intensity of A Hive of Glass or A Thirsty Evil.

There's a perceptive review of Flush as May over on the Записки реликтовой рыбы blog, detailing in an admirably clear-eyed fashion why the novel is really only for Hubbard completists. I'm not sure I have much more to add to that, beyond saying that in my limited experience of Hubbard – I've only read six of his eighteen novels thus far – it's perhaps worth noting that the books that seem to work the best, that exert the greatest power, are those that, like the aforementioned A Hive of Glass or A Thirsty Evil, are narrated in the first person; whereas those written in the third person – Flush as May, Picture of Millie – are weaker, suffering from an overabundance of expository dialogue. I'm sure that's a horrible generalisation, however; Hubbard aficionados should feel free to correct me in the comments.

Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (alias Doctor Who and the Daleks) by David Whitaker (Armada, 1965/Target, 1973)

NB: Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books, 3/5/13.

A couple of years ago I posted a rambling essay on the Doctor Who Target novelisations – my memories of them, how they helped drive and shape my formative reading as a child, how they were my first and in some cases only exposure to many Doctor Who stories, and how chancing upon a stack of them in a Lewes secondhand bookshop led in a roundabout fashion to Existential Ennui becoming a (prolix) books blog. Shortly after that the BBC began reissuing some of the earliest Target paperbacks, with new introductions by, among others, Russell T. Davies, Charlie Higson and Target Who stalwart Terrance Dicks. Perhaps the biggest draw, though, was Neil Gaiman's intro for the new edition of this:

The very first Doctor Who novelisation, Doctor Who and the Daleks, by Who screenwriter David Whitaker. The copy seen here is the original Target edition, published in 1973, which I came across the other week in a Brighton junk shop; it's essentially the same as the 2011 BBC edition, with the same Chris Achilleos cover, although obviously minus the Neil Gaiman intro. But as Neil notes in that later intro, the Target paperback wasn't the first edition of the book; it was originally published in 1964 in hardback by Frederick Muller under the title Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, and then again under the same title in 1965 in paperback by Armada, which was the edition that Neil read it in ("old and battered now, from so much reading"). The Muller hardback goes for hundreds of pounds these days, but the Armada paperback can be found for a few quid online if you look hard enough. Which, suitably intrigued having bought the Target edition, I did:

Whereupon I discovered that there are a number of differences between the Armada and Target paperbacks. Self-evidently the covers are different – the Armada edition cover art is by Peter Archer, an artist best known for his Hardy Boys and Malcolm Saville work – but the interiors differ too. The text remains the same in both, but while the interior illustrations in the Armada edition are again by cover artist Archer:

in the Target edition they're not the work of Chris Achilleos but rather one Arnold Schwartzman:

who I wonder if he might be this Arnold Schwartzman, OBE. Answers in the comments, please. (Incidentally, interior illos in the Doctor Who novelisations were restricted only to the initial Muller editions and the first wave of Target editions; thereafter they were dispensed with.)

Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (or Doctor Who and the Daleks if you prefer) is a novelisation of the second Who adventure, The Daleks (1963/4; it also shares its story with the first Doctor Who movie, Doctor Who and the Daleks, 1965, starring Peter Cushing... keep up at the back), but it's actually presented as if it's the first. Whitaker's innovation was to concoct a whole new opening sequence for the novel detailing the first meeting between schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright and the mysterious Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan. This originally took place in the debut Doctor Who episode, An Unearthly Child (1963), but Whitaker penned an alternate, eerie, evocative, notably gruesome opening in which Chesterton stumbles upon a road accident on a foggy night on Barnes Common involving Barbara, Susan and an unfortunate lorry driver, "hurled sideways at the moment of impact, the glass of the window shattering but holding him from being thrown out onto the roadway". "Is he all right?" asks a bloodied Barbara, to which Ian replies bluntly, "He's dead."

However, the chief novelty of Whitaker's novelisation is that it's written – quite well, as it happens – in the first person. The standard style for all of the ensuing Who novelisations was third person, but this one is narrated by Ian Chesterton, who makes for an agreeably sceptical companion – both for the reader and for the Doctor. Indeed, much as I love many of the later third-person Who novels – Terrance Dicks' in particular (a few more of which I also found in that Brighton junk shop, to be unveiled in a future post) – first person suits the format rather well, affording an intimate perspective on William Hartnell's devious, irascible Doctor.

It's a cut above what one might normally expect of a novelisation, and a nice acquisition – or rather, pair of acquisitions – in this, the year of the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. And hey: maybe one day I'll pass on one or the other of the books – and maybe some of the other Who paperbacks I've accumulated – to a small child, and perhaps engender the same enthusiasm for reading the Who books instilled in me as a kid.

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré (Viking, 2013); Signed Waterstones Exclusive

How time flies. Seems like only the other month I was making my way through John le Carré's first three novels and now here he is with his twenty-third... Actually, come to think of it, it was only the other month: I polished off Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) in quick succession in February of this year.

Of course, I'm being disingenuous in order to begin this post with a feeble joke; part of my reason for reading those novels, having previously read and loved the later Karla Trilogy, was I knew there was a new le Carré on the way, and last week A Delicate Truth duly arrived, published by Penguin/Viking in the UK under a dust jacket designed by Superfantastic and heralded by a clutch of positive notices. Indeed, so adulatory were some of the reviews – Mark Lawson's one in The Guardian ("Le Carré is back at full power") and Robert McCrum's one in The Observer ("a remarkable return to mid-season form") spring to mind – that I was moved to pop to Waterstones in Brighton at the weekend and pick up a first edition. Not just any first edition, mind:

The Waterstones Exclusive, which boasts added content (see also the Waterstones edition of Justin Cronin's The Twelve, which included an additional chapter) in the shape of an introduction by le Carré detailing the background to the novel. And that's not all:

It's signed too. There were a few signed copies secreted in amongst the stock, which I only realised as I was about to exit the shop having bought an unsigned one; needless to say I went straight back to the counter and exchanged it for this copy. And though the novel isn't quite the "return to mid-season form" claimed by Robert McCrum – it's certainly not the equal of, say, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (then again, what is?) – it's still a sterling entry in what my good friend and colleague Roly Allen calls "later le Carré", hewing to around half of the points Roly identified as characterising the majority of the author's works from The Little Drummer Girl (1983) onwards. ("Le Carré gets cross about something he reads in a John Pilger book, or Amnesty newsletter"; "Good end up dead; bad end up dragging the bodies into the back of an unmarked van and driving off", etc.) Plus it's a nice companion to my signed first of le Carré's previous book, Our Kind of Traitor.