The Hunted by Elmore Leonard: First Hardback Edition (Secker & Warburg, 1978)

From 1974 to 1979, British publisher Secker & Warburg issued four Elmore Leonard novels in hardback in the UK: Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), The Hunted (1978) and The Switch (1979). Those last two are especially notable as they represent the first hardback editions of those two novels, both having been published as paperback originals in the States (by, respectively, Dell in 1977 and Bantam in 1978). But while the Secker edition of The Switch doesn't appear to be in any shorter supply these days than Fifty-Two Pickup or Unknown Man No. 89 – in each case there are around a dozen copies for sale online at present, in other words not exactly plentiful, but at least attainable (although the cheapest copies of each are about forty quid) – the Secker edition of The Hunted is so scarce you'd be hard-pressed to find a single copy for sale online – and this despite it apparently being reprinted in the year of publication.

I like The Hunted a lot. A punchy, lean little thriller about a manhunt across the tiny nation of Israel, I only read it for the first time earlier this year, in the omnibus Dutch Treat, but it impressed me so much that I had to get a copy of the novel on its own. This I did, picking up a 1980 Hamlyn first British paperback edition, figuring that would be the best I could do until a Secker hardback (or, failing that, an affordable Dell paperback) presented itself. (There was a solitary copy of the Secker edition on Amazon Marketplace UK – it's still there at time of writing – but it was a second impression, lacking its front endpaper and thus probably ex-library, and listed at £32, so that was obviously a no-no... although I must admit I did still consider it.)

Given its scarcity, I didn't expect to get my hands on a Secker first of The Hunted anytime soon. But as it turned out, a month or so after I bought that Hamlyn paperback, I did:

A genuine, rarely seen, 1978 Secker & Warburg first edition/first impression, complete, not ex-library, and in pretty good nick. It popped up on eBay one day, quite out of the blue – which I guess is how most things pop up on eBay, but you take my point – and I only went and won the bugger (for what I thought was a fair price, albeit still a not inconsiderable sum of money).

The question remains, however – at least, it does for this chronic book collector, and presumably so too for any similarly afflicted poor sod deranged enough to have read this far – why, out of all the Secker Leonards, is this one so flipping scarce? The eBay seller I got this copy from reckoned it was because "most of the very small print run went to [public lending] libraries", which seems plausible to me; indeed, if that second impression on Amazon Marketplace mentioned above is indeed ex-library, it appears Secker so underestimated their initial – likely meagre – print run that an unknown quantity of the – likely even more meagre – second printing went to lending libraries as well.

Two things I noted when this copy arrived chez Louis XIV: first, regarding the top press blurb on the back of the dust jacket, when he wasn't reviewing crime fiction for The Oxford Mail – and editing sister paper The Oxford Times – Anthony Price was of course writing a series of splendid spy thrillers, as detailed in my two-part interview with Mr. Price in 2011 (incidentally, that blurb is also on the back of Secker's edition of Unknown Man No. 89); and second, as I suspected when I saw The Hunted's dust jacket in the eBay listing – the first time I'd seen the wrapper, there being, hitherto, no images of it online – the photo on the front is by Graham Miller, whose distinctive work can be found not only on the wrapper of the Secker edition of Fifty-Two Pickup, but on the jacket of the 1974 Heinemann edition of one of my favourite novels of all time, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game.

So, with The Hunted I now own all four Elmore Leonard Secker & Warburg editions. Which, as regular readers of Existential Ennui (if such fabled creatures exist) will attest, can mean only one thing: cover gallery...

Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away and The Blunderer (Heinemann, 1967 / 1971 Uniform Edition)

In a further demonstration of what a shoddy piece of workmanship Existential Ennui is, I'm once again delaying an Elmore Leonard blog post because, as with the Lewes Book Fair the other weekend, I completely forgot I was going to a book fair this past weekend – well, actually a comic mart with a pulp and vintage paperback bit tacked on: Comic Empire, which took place at the Royal National Hotel in London's Russell Square on Sunday 20 October, and which I attended because this year's Paperback and Pulp Bookfair had been cancelled. That my decision to attend Comic Empire led in a roundabout fashion to my winding up in the doghouse at home (don't ask) is on first inspection deeply ironic, in that it turned out the event was, as its title suggests, very much weighted towards comics – there were, at a guess, getting on for fifty comics dealers in attendance – and very much less so towards pulps and paperbacks: there were, I think, just two paperback dealers there; but in the end my doghouse status was at least partly assuaged when having given up on Comic Empire (while I still buy new comics, nowadays I don't have many back issues on my wants list) I chose to pop round the corner to Skoob Books, whereupon and wherein I scored a pair of Patricia Highsmith novels. All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that I have two new additions to my recently established Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery – or rather, a new addition and a swapsy, because this book:

the 1967 Heinemann first edition of Those Who Walk Away, or rather, another copy of it, was already in the gallery. The dust jacket of that other copy wasn't in the greatest of shapes, however, and I've been toying with finding a replacement almost since the day I bought the book back in 2010. So I was delighted when I spied this copy, lying flat – secreted, almost – atop some paperbacks in Skoob's crime fiction section. The case and block are in near fine condition and, more importantly in this context, the Bruce Pinkard-designed dust jacket is at least, I'd say, very good. A snip at nine quid, then.

I paid a little less for the other Highsmith book I bought in Skoob, although it's debatable whether that was still too much; depends on your point of view, I guess. It's certainly very scarce, but it's also a reprint – a reprint of a reprint, in fact – and furthermore this particular copy is missing its front endpaper, which suggests it's probably ex-library. On balance, however, and ultimately – I must admit I did um and ah a bit, popping outside the shop to check on my phone for other copies online (Skoob is in a basement, so there's no signal inside) before eventually laying down the cash – its scarcity, in conjunction with another intriguing aspect, made it irresistible to me. So what is it?

The 1971 Heinemann reprint of the 1966 Heinemann edition of the 1956 Cresset Press edition of The Blunderer, Patricia Highsmith's second novel (or third if you count the pseudonymous The Price of Salt). Published in Heinemann's "uniform edition", I've showcased a similar book previously:

The 1973 Heinemann reprint of the 1966 Heinemann edition of the 1957 Cresset Press edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's third novel (or fourth etc., etc.). Heinemann republished a number of Highsmith's novels in uniform editions in the early 1970s, not just those originally published by Cresset Press (they also reissued Highsmith's debut, Strangers on a Train) but those originally issued by Heinemann themselves in the late 1950s (Deep Water, A Game for the Living) and throughout the 1960s (This Sweet Sickness, The Cry of the Owl, etc.). All sport similar (uncredited) dust jacket designs – lower case author name (in colour) and title with an image of a metal puzzle, all on a white background – and all are, to varying degrees, hard to come by these days.

Even harder to come by, however, are the 1966 Heinemann printings of Strangers, Blunderer and Talented. I've never seen copies of any of them, so I've no idea whether they sport the same dust jacket design as the early '70s uniform reprints or something else entirely; if anyone reading this has any of those '66 edition, I'd love to take a look at them. But what I do know is that at least in the case of The Blunderer, there were a number of errors in the '66 edition, as evidenced by the reprint line on the copyright page of the '71 reissue:

Wonder what those "corrections" were...? Anyway, I've added The Blunderer to the Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery – under "Patriciaphernalia" down the bottom – and swapped the old copy of Those Who Walk Away for the new one, so I invite you once more to take a stroll along the gallery and gaze upon the Highsmith editions therein.

Next: Elmore Leonard. (Honest, guv.)

And the Winners Are...

...drum roll please... oh, wait, hang on, I haven't said what these winners are winning yet, or how they've won it. They have, of course, won this:

The Art of Movie Storyboards, a splendid new illustrated book written and researched by Fionnuala Halligan and published by The Ilex Press – where, lest we forget, I work – and Chronicle Books. I had three copies to give away to anyone who could answer the question which 1939 novel was Fritz Lang's Man Hunt – one of the films whose storyboards are featured in the book – based on – answer being Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, or as a number of American entrants pointed out, Man Hunt, that being the US title of the book, a fact I had forgotten when I concocted the question, and which rather made a mockery of the whole enterprise. BUT NEVER MIND. The point is that there was a competition to win one of three copies of The Art of Movie Storyboards, and three of you have done just that. And those winners are... reprise drum roll please...

Matthew Keeley, Kelly Robinson and Mark Brockbank!

Congratulations to all three of you. Your copies of The Art of Movie Storyboards will be winging their way towards you at the earliest opportunity, i.e. when it stops raining and I can pop over the road to the other office and grab some copies. (Although Matthew, you'll need to email me your address in order for me to send you your book.) Commiserations to those who didn't win, but you could always, if you so desired, buy the book – it's readily available from the likes of Amazon UK and US – and thus contribute, in a roundabout fashion, in as much as an undisclosed proportion of my Ilex wages go towards the many secondhand books you see littering this blog, to the upkeep of Existential Ennui. Ithangyew.

Final Call for Entries...

...to win a copy of The Art of Movie Storyboards, folks. The competition closes Sunday night, so if you haven't already – and a fair number of you have – you've still got the weekend to get your entry in. Follow this link:

WIN!!! Brand New Illustrated Book The Art of Movie Storyboards!

to find out how. And to further entice you, here's a couple more sumptuous spreads from the book, showing Hein Heckroth and Ivor Beddoes's storyboards from Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, as well as storyboards for an abandoned film version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies:

You can click on the spreads to see them a bit larger, but to see them full size, I'm afraid you'll have to either enter the competition or go and buy the book.

The Switch by Elmore Leonard: First Hardback Edition (Secker & Warburg, 1979); Book Review; Film Adaptation Life of Crime (2013)

Back in August, when I was nearing the end of my series of posts on the now late lamented Elmore Leonard, I noted in my review of Gold Coast that in the 1970s, Leonard could have been more accurately described as a paperback writer than a hardback author. (You'd be forgiven for wondering why such a distinction should matter to anyone, but it certainly mattered to Leonard, who appreciated the respectability – even if only perceived – that being published in hardback bestowed on his work.) Of the nine novels Leonard published in the '70s, six were issued straight to paperback in the US; but here in the UK, three of those six were published straight to hardback rather than paperback. One of them, Leonard's 1970 western Valdez is Coming, was published in hardback by Robert Hale (actually the year before the US Gold Medal softcover, in 1969); the other two were issued by Secker & Warburg.

In total Secker published four Leonard novels in the 1970s, and all four of their editions have become quite collectable. I've blogged about the two that were published as hardbacks in both the UK and the US – Fifty-Two Pickup (1974) and Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) – previously, but not the two that were only published in hardback in the UK, for the simple reason that I didn't own them. Now, however, I do. I'll be unveiling the scarcest one of all in my next Leonard post, but first, this:

The Switch, published in hardback by Secker & Warburg in 1979, the year after the US Bantam paperback. The dust jacket photography is by Bill Richmond, whose work also graces the jacket of Patricia Highsmith's fourth Tom Ripley novel, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. One book collecting curiosity of The Switch dust jacket is that you'd be hard pressed to find one that isn't price-clipped; there are roughly ten copies of the Secker edition for sale online right now, and every single one has a price-clipped jacket. My guess is that the publisher altered their cover price at the last moment and so clipped the wrappers themselves, although if that is the case, one wonders why they didn't sticker them on the flaps.

Anyway, tonally, The Switch is, I'd venture, the lightest of the novels Elmore Leonard published in the 1970s – if a novel about kidnapping and extortion can be described as "light". Certainly it stands in marked contrast to the somewhat more solemn Fifty-Two Pickup, with which it shares a number of themes, although here we get just the one (well-deserved) death and a climax that's not so much darkly ironic as downright comedic (it brought a smile to my face anyway). One could also make a useful comparison with 1980's Gold Coast, in that one of the chief protagonists is female – except that Leonard never really gets inside the head of Gold Coast's Karen DiCillia, whereas much of The Switch is shaped not only by the actions of Mickey Dawson, the woman who is kidnapped by ex-cons Louis Gara and Ordell Robbie in order to extract a million dollars from her property magnate husband Frank, but by her thoughts.

In fact, what it reminded me of most was the work of Kate Atkinson. I've no idea whether Atkinson has ever read Elmore Leonard, but it's striking how in The Switch Leonard's third person prose is littered with parenthetical asides, approximating Mickey's circuitous thought processes in much the same way as Atkinson would decades hence with Jackson Brodie or Ursula Todd. In that sense, Mickey has more in common with some of Leonard's male leads than his female characters – Jack Ryan from The Big Bounce and Unknown Man No. 89, say, or Calvin Maguire from Gold Coast: men who aren't sure of their place in the world, who are self-aware and prone to bouts of self-doubt or self-questioning, and yet who ultimately, when in a tight spot, can turn a situation to their advantage. As Mickey says, studying herself in a mirror, "Who are you?", answering: "If you don't know, you're gonna find out, aren't you?"

Incidentally, a film adaptation of The Switch, Life of Crime, recently debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Daniel Schechter and starring Jennifer Aniston as Mickey, John Hawkes as Louis and Mos Def as Ordell – intriguing casting there – the film received decent notices in The Guardian and Variety but slightly more lukewarm ones in The Hollywood Reporter and on Indiewire, the latter of whom also picked up on the fact that it's a sort-of prequel to Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) – or rather, The Switch is a sort-of prequel to Rum Punch (1992), in that not only do Louis and Ordell appear in both stories – played, in Jackie Brown, by Robert De Niro and Samuel L. Jackson – but so does Frank Dawson's girlfriend, Melanie, played by Isla Fisher in Life of Crime and Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown. And for more Elmore Leonard intertexual fun, see my posts on Gold Coast, LaBrava, Stick and Road Dogs and this thread (and its antecedents) on the (sadly locked) Elmore Leonard forum.

According to Jean Henry Mead in her 1989 book Maverick Writers, Leonard had a special fondness for The Switch (alongside 1976's Swag). I, on the other hand, while I did enjoy The Switch, have a special fondness for the next Elmore Leonard novel I'll be looking at – and even more especially in this particular, rarely seen edition.

From the Lewes Book Fair: Vintage Paperbacks by Michael Dibdin, Isaac Asimov and Patricia Highsmith, Plus Some Children's Books

It's been a while since I've blogged about the Lewes Book Fair and the books I've bought thereat (is "thereat" even a word...?), chiefly because despite attending almost all of the fairs over the past year or so (apart from the one in May, due to little Edie choosing that weekend to make her grand entrance), I didn't buy a single book (this 1958 third impression of the Hart-Davis edition of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man was, I believe, the last thing I got there). However, that dry spell was broken at Saturday's (12 October) event – the final one of the year (there were, I think, only four this year, as opposed to the usual five) – when I came away with three vintage paperbacks for a pound a pop, plus some kids' books; so before we get to those promised Elmore Leonard posts, I thought we could take a look at wot I got.

A 1980 first Sphere paperback edition of Michael Dibdin's debut novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, originally published in hardback in 1978 by Jonathan Cape. I'm not quite sure why I decided to purchase this, given that my interest in Sherlock Holmes extends to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's Sherlock and not much farther, and that I still have umpteen Dibdin first editions – the majority of them Aurelio Zen novels – to read and blog about (the only ones I've covered thus far are the Zen books Ratking and And Then You Die). Maybe it was the Kingsley Amis blurb on the front cover wot did it – that and the fact that the book was only a quid, whereas a first edition would be more like sixty quid (and probably more).

A 1960 first Panther paperback edition of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, originally published in hardback in 1953 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. I have a habit of occasionally picking up cheap paperback editions of science fiction classics with a view to, at some point, in some mythical future era where I miraculously have hours and hours of leisure time at my disposal (not retirement, before you suggest that; I doubt I'll ever be able to afford to retire), finally getting round to reading them (see also Brian W. Aldiss's Non-Stop). Never gonna happen, obviously, but dammit I can dream, can't I? The cover artist, by the way, is unknown (even to the illustrious Steve Holland) – as is the cover artist of the third and final paperback.

A 1968 first Macfadden paperback edition of Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away, originally published in hardback in the States in 1967 by Doubleday. This is my prize score from this bunch; unlike the other two paperbacks, which were published by British outfits, this one was was published by an American imprint, which, in conjunction with the fact that it's pretty scarce – there are at present just four copies on AbeBooks, all offered by US sellers – makes it quite unusual in the context of it being found at a provincial British book fair. I actually already own the novel in its 1967 UK Heinemann edition – see the recently established Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery – but such is my passion for Highsmith I couldn't resist nabbing this too, especially for a pound.

Those, then, were the books I bought for myself at the Lewes Book Fair. But I also bought three books for Edie, who made a special guest appearance at the fair (to the accompaniment of much cooing and the odd comment about starting her reading rather young). In fact Edie did better than I did on the day, because Rachel subsequently picked out a couple more books for her from the Red Cross charity shop (newly reopened as a children's outlet) at the top of Station Street, so that Edie's haul in the end looked like this:

Left to right we have Jemmy Button by Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali; Red Ted and the Lost Things by Michael Rosen and Joel Stewart; Marigold Garden by Kate Greenaway; The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base; and Noddy Meets Father Christmas by Enid Blyton. (That last one we're of course keeping in reserve for Christmas.) Phew. As Bruce Forsyth was once wont to say: didn't she do well?