Westlake Score: Two Much! by Donald E. Westlake; British First Edition (Hodder & Stoughton, 1976)

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

My (cross-)posting of this particular Westlake Score was prompted by a newspaper article I noticed last month. I actually bought the book in question – the British first edition of Donald E. Westlake's Two Much!, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1976, the year after the US M. Evans edition – on a whim on Amazon Marketplace at the tail end of 2012 and have had it sitting on my to-be-blogged-about shelves ever since; the Hodder edition is incredibly scarce, and it's hard for me to resist scarce books – especially Westlake ones – when I encounter them. That said, Two Much! doesn't number among Westlake's more celebrated works; pretty much the only reputable reviews of the novel readily available online are this glib Kirkus Reviews one and Ethan Iverson's capsule review as part of his "A Storyteller That Got the Details Right" essay (Ethan places it in Westlake's canon as "probably the darkest of all the humorous crime novels"). It's perhaps better known for its 1995 Hollywood film adaptation – which in turn is arguably better known for the on-set romance which developed between co-stars Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith – and for its 1984 French film adaptation, Le Jumeau (The Twin).

All of which was why I was quite surprised when it cropped up in a Guardian article in March. Written by author Stephen May and titled "The Top 10 Imposters in Fiction", the article caught my eye principally due to a mention of Tom Ripley in its standfirst. Being, as I am, a Ripley obsessive, naturally I took a look to see which of Patricia Highsmith's five Tom Ripley novels had been included (the first, The Talented Mr. Ripley, unsurprisingly; you could make just as strong a case for Ripley Under Ground, but May does at least nod to the greater Ripliad), and there, in the number two position (appropriately enough), was Two Much! It's difficult to tell whether May has read any other Westlake works besides Two Much! – or indeed Two Much! itself; he does little more than recount the plot – but he's obviously aware of Westlake's wider oeuvre, noting that the author "published books under at least 16 names".

To my knowledge this (cross-)post marks the online debut of the Hodder hardback's dust jacket; I'd certainly not seen it prior to getting my hands on the book, not even on either AbeBooks – not least because at present there isn't a single copy for sale there (and only one other copy that I can see for sale online anywhere, making it possibly the rarest of all the Hodder hardback editions of Westlake's novels) – nor at the official Donald E. Westlake website. The jacket design isn't credited, but the designer evidently took a cue from the M. Evans wrapper (image borrowed from the official Westlake site):

Except to my mind the Hodder jacket isn't as well executed. Because while the Evans jacket clearly shows a risque greetings card – the writing of which being the narrator of the novel's profession – it's much less obvious, at least to my eye, that that's what we're supposed to be seeing on the Hodder cover. Still, given how uncommon the Hodder first is – as opposed to the Evans first, of which there are getting on for fifty copies on AbeBooks alone – I know which I'd rather have in my collection.

UPDATE, 11/4/14: The front of the jacket of the Hodder edition of Two Much! has now been added to the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s gallery.

James Mitchell, alias James Munro: First Editions of Bonfire Night (Callan Spy Novel #5, 2002) and The Money That Money Can't Buy (John Craig Spy Novel #3, 1967)

Television writer and producer James Mitchell penned two series of spy novels of note in his near-fifty year career. The first, a four-book series starring gunrunner-turned-secret agent John Craig, written under the pen name James Munro, ran from 1964–1969; the second, a five-book series starring British Intelligence assassin David Callan, spinning out of the Mitchell-created Callan TV show, ran from 1969–2002. I profiled both series last year, reviewing the first book in each – respectively The Man Who Sold Death and A Magnum for Schneider, alias A Red File for Callan – and showcasing first editions of almost all of the other novels – almost all, because there were two I hadn't at that point got my clammy hands on. Fortunately, in the interim, I have; and so, seeing as I reviewed the second Callan book, Russian Roulette (1973), last week, I figured now's as good a time as any to showcase them. Oldest first, I think:

The Money That Money Can't Buy by James Munro, published in hardback by Hammond in 1967 (dust jacket design uncredited). The third John Craig spy thriller, Kirkus Reviews describe it as "Just so much spy schmaltz", which seems a little harsh to me; of the Craig novels, I've only read The Man Who Sold Death thus far, and though I wasn't as keen on it as I was A Magnum for Schneider, it wasn't that bad, and given the kind of writer Mitchell was, I can't imagine the quality of the series plummets too dramatically – a supposition supported by Existential Ennui reader Darryl Crawford, who commented on my John Craig post that the later books have "some of the coolest villains this side of Modesty Blaise", and Randall Mastellar at Spy Guys & Gals, for whom "the stories are good reads and the character does come up with a couple of the greatest one-liners I've ever read".

I found this first edition on an all-too-rare-these-days trip up to London (I moved down to Lewes from London nearly six years ago), in the basement of Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road. (On the same trip I also secured a vinyl copy of my album of the year from last year, Everything Everything's Arc, in Sister Ray on Berwick Street, which I was immensely pleased about because it's incredibly hard to come by on vinyl.) I think I paid about a fiver for it, which isn't bad considering the Hammond first isn't exactly in abundant supply – there are at present only half a dozen copies for sale online – and especially not in the UK, where I can currently only see one jacketless (I believe) copy for sale online (offered, coincidentally enough, by fellow Lewes exile, and fellow blogger, Steerforth).

Even scarcer, however, unless you're prepared to put up with an ex-library copy, is the Callan novel I secured:

Bonfire Night by James Mitchell, published by Severn House in 2002 (shortly before Mitchell's death that same year), jacket photograph by Ute Klaphake. The fifth and final Callan novel, there was a near-thirty year gap between this and the previous one, 1975's Smear Job, and according to reports from Existential Ennui commenters it's either "a bit weird" (Stuart Radmore), "confusing, and reads more like a script than a book" (Saz), or is "Mitchell... operating at the very top of his game in this dense narrative" (the aforementioned Darryl Crawford). Given which, the best thing to do, I imagine, is to read the book oneself and make one's own mind up, which ordinarily would mean stumping up at least twenty-five quid for an ex-library copy of the Severn House edition – the sole edition of the novel to date. Seems the vast majority of the print run of the Severn House edition went to public lending libraries, and even my copy, which I won on eBay (in the end for less than twenty quid), while it isn't ex-library, was evidently intended for libraries:

The book's case replicates the jacket front and back as a PLC (printed laminated cover), rather than the more usual Arlin over boards, suggesting it was bound with libraries in mind. Where it actually ended up, though, was with Mitchell's agent, as evidenced by this stamp on the front free endpaper:

All of which makes one wonder if the entire print run was bound for libraries. Anybody own a copy of the Severn House edition which doesn't sport a PLC...?

Russian Roulette (Callan Novel #2) by James Mitchell (Hamish Hamilton, 1973 / Top Notch Thrillers, 2013): Book Review

NB: Linked in Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, which this week is celebrating its sixth anniversary.

I made a mental note last October, when I finished reading A Magnum for Schneider, the excellent first book in James Mitchell's five-book Callan spy thriller series – which span out of the Mitchell-created Callan TV series – not to leave it too long before trying the second one, Russian Roulette. Mostly that was because I hugely enjoyed A Magnum for Schneider (alias A Red File for Callan) – it wound up taking the number two spot in my 2013 year-end top ten – but also because I knew that Mike Ripley had reissued both books that October under his Top Notch Thrillers imprint, and I like to lend a hand – in however minor a capacity – in Mike's tireless efforts to resurrect overlooked old thrillers whenever I can. In the event, it's taken me five months to get round to Russian Roulette, which probably isn't of much use to Mike in promoting his new edition of the novel – I'd have been better off reviewing the third Callan book, Death and Bright Water, which I believe Mike is reissuing sometime over the next month – but actually isn't bad for me: I've been known to let years elapse between reading instalments in a series of novels.

Russian Roulette was first published in hardback in 1973 – under a dust jacket sporting a gloriously '70s photograph of Edward Woodward as Callan, taken by glamour snapper and one-time Existential Ennui obsession Beverley le Barrow (here credited in the traditional Hamilton fashion as Beverly Lebarrow) – by Hamish Hamilton – a change of publisher from the first book, which was issued by Herbert Jenkins in 1969. Accordingly, Hamilton make very little of this being a sequel – there's a mention of A Red File for Callan on the jacket back flap and under "Other books by James Mitchell" in the prelims, but that's about it. Mind you, neither does Mitchell: as the novel opens, working class assassin David Callan is once more happily ensconced in the bosom of British Intelligence dirty tricks department the Section, with nary a mention of his being temporarily booted out by his boss, the supercilious Hunter, in A Magnum for Schneider.

It's ironic, then, that Russian Roulette once more sees Callan being kicked out of the Section, this time because Hunter has offered him up to the Russians in exchange for British Intelligence's "top man in Russia", who's been nabbed by the Soviets. To compound Callan's problems, not only does he have a specially imported KGB death squad on his tail, and not only has Hunter blocked any means of his obtaining a gun – right down to freezing his current account and even stealing his most valuable model soldiers (Callan is an enthusiastic wargamer) so that he can't sell them – but Callan's eyesight is failing too. All of which means he's forced to turn for assistance to his only friend, the odoriferous thief Lonely.

Whereas in A Magnum for Schneider the relationship between Lonely and Callan was mostly based on the former's fear of the latter, here it seems to have developed into a genuine friendship. Lonely is still scared of Callan, but then Lonely is scared of pretty much everything; he's happy to call Callan a proper mate, which is a change from his professed hatred of his erstwhile prison cellmate in the first book. And that bond is certainly tested in Russian Roulette: Callan asks things of Lonely that even the firmest of friends would balk at, and Lonely pays a terrible price for standing by him, as Callan is beset by a trio of KGB killers and betrayed by Hunter, by his fellow Section assassin Meres – in fact by almost everyone he gets close to.

Mitchell's characterisation is as surefooted as that in A Magnum for Schneider – not just Callan, who remains a convincingly common-as-muck lead, owing a small debt to Len Deighton's nameless operative but otherwise quite an original creation, but also the put-upon Lonely, the various criminals they encounter (some related to Lonely) and Hunter and Meres, representing the Establishment/old boys network, from which Callan will forever be excluded. As in the first book Mitchell grounds the espionage action in a recognisable milieu of London cafes, boozers, building sites and grubby little flats, and if the hunter/hunted story isn't quite as compelling as that in the more confined, more focused, and thus more intense, A Magnum for Schneider, Russian Roulette still rates as a very good vintage spy thriller indeed.

I showcased first editions of almost all of the Callan novels in my series of posts on Mitchell last year, as well as firsts of almost all of the John Craig spy novels Mitchell wrote under the alias James Munro. Back then, however, in both cases I was missing one book from each series. No longer: in the interim I've come into possession of first editions of those absent titles – so I thought I'd take a look at them in the next post.

Darwyn Cooke's Book Cover Design for Donald E. Westlake Non-Fiction Miscellany The Getaway Car: Exclusive First Look

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

Here's a nice exclusive – well, semi-exclusive; I'm cross-posting it at The Violent World of Parker – for my thousand-and-first post:

Darwyn Cooke's handsome cover design for The Getaway Car, the Donald E. Westlake non-fiction anthology put together by Levi Stahl of The University of Chicago Press and due to be published by UCP in September. Levi himself broke the news about Darwyn illustrating and designing the book's cover on his own blog earlier this month, but this is the first time said cover has been seen online (thank you to Levi for allowing me the opportunity to unveil it here and at The Violent World of Parker). It's also, I believe, the first time that Darwyn's work has adorned a Westlake project outside of the Richard Stark/Parker sphere – but not, I fervently hope, the last. Head to the UCP website for more about the book.

1000th Post: 20 Secondhand Books Which to My Mind Have Come to Define This Ridiculous Book Collecting Blog

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

I've done my research here – i.e. I've googled "1000th blog post" and glanced at the first two pages of results – and it seems the form with one's one thousandth post is to begin with an exclamation of surprise and disbelief – something along the lines of, "Crikey, 1000th post, eh? Who'd have thunk it, only seems like yesterday etc., etc." – before banging on at length about one's blogging "journey" and then, in many cases, fatally undermining the notion of marking such a milestone in the first place by pointing out that in fact it's only the 1000th post on this particular blog and there were many blogs, and therefore many blog posts, before this one (which is as true of Existential Ennui as any other blog: I, like, many bloggers, have former, long-since-discarded-and-sometimes-deleted blogs in my past – one of them even called Existential Ennui). Which is all well and good, and perfectly acceptable for most blogs reaching their thousandth post, I'm sure; but I'd rather mark the occasion of Existential Ennui's thousandth post with something a little less myopic, a little more meaty – indeed something more pertaining to the reasons why Existential Ennui has reached 1000 posts. Which is to say, books and book collecting.

You see, the collecting of old books – '50s and '60s and '70s crime and spy novels and first editions and the like – has, in large part, driven Existential Ennui (after an initial dalliance with comics blogging), and the collecting of old books has brought me to this juncture: if I hadn't discovered a hitherto unrealised passion for book collecting somewhere around 2008/2009 I sincerely doubt this blog would have troubled the hundred post mark, let alone the thousand. And there are, to my mind, certain books in my collection which define Existential Ennui (whatever Existential Ennui is, or rather, has become: repository of bibliographic esoterica, elaborate excuse for me to carry on buying old books – take your pick). They're some of my favourite books, sure, but they're also more than that: each one is, I think, in some way emblematic of an aspect of Existential Ennui – of how the blog has developed; of its – and therefore my – preoccupations and predilections over the past five years (I don't really count the first two years of this incarnation of Existential Ennui, as it was little more than a placeholder until July 2009).

There are twenty of them in total. They aren't by any means all of my favourite books – that list would also include the likes of Stephen King's The Stand, Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, Jeffrey Bernard's Low Life and Alan Clark's Diaries, all of which I have written about on Existential Ennui – but rather the ones that mean the most in the context of Existential Ennui, both as physical objects and in terms of the words within them. In a vague and ill-defined sense – one which I strongly suspect won't actually make any sense to anyone other than me – these books are Existential Ennui (although Google Images, if you search for "Existential Ennui", only partially concurs). And they are, in roughly the order in which I bought and/or blogged about them:

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1974)
The 1974 Heinemann edition of Patricia Highsmith's third Tom Ripley novel is, if not the first first edition I ever bought (as a first edition, i.e. consciously buying an old book in first, as opposed to buying a new book that just happened to be a first), then at least one of the first; I picked it up in a secondhand bookshop (no longer extant) on one of my first visits to London's Cecil Court (and that's quite a lot of "firsts" in one sentence, for which I apologise). I'd read and fallen for the Ripliad a number of years beforehand and love them just as much, if not more, today: witness the 2012/2013 Great Tom Ripley Reread from 2012 (a series of posts of which I'm uncharacteristically proud). Ripley's Game remains my favourite instalment in the five-book Ripliad, and this copy of the Heinemann first remains one of my most treasured books, even though I own other more valuable and arguably more collectable Highsmith books (Deep Water and This Sweet Sickness in first; a unique signed and inscribed copy of the Heinemann edition of Little Tales of Misogyny; a signed Ripley novel, which I'll come to shortly). Partly it's that thing about never forgetting your first love, but more than that, the Heinemann first of Ripley's Game was, I think, the book that made me a book collector.

The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis (Gollancz, 1966)
In 2008 I moved to the East Sussex town of Lewes, with its sundry secondhand bookshops and antique shops and charity shops; shortly after that my interest in book collecting was kindled, and shortly after that I bought a cheap first edition of Kingsley Amis's The Riverside Villas Murder (Cape, 1973) in the Lewes Antique Centre. It was my first exposure to Amis's work, but not my last: I've since read and admired a further dozen or so Amis books, the best of which being the wonderfully humane espionage novel The Anti-Death League. But it's not just his fiction which has shaped Existential Ennui: Amis's critical writing, especially that in the 1970 collection What Became of Jane Austen?, has also informed my thinking about fiction and thus much of my writing on Existential Ennui; he also formed the basis of a fine guest post by Michael Barber in 2011. Fittingly, very first post about my then-blossoming interest in book collecting on Existential Ennui, in September 2009, made mention of just one author: Kingsley Amis.

The Man with Getaway Face (alias The Steel Hit) by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1963; Coronet, 1971; Allison & Busby, 1984)
Butcher's Moon by Richard Stark (Random House, 1974; Coronet, 1977)
If there's one series of books that defined Existential Ennui in its early days as a books blog, it's Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels. My quest to collect all of the Allison & Busby hardback editions of the Parkers drove much of my blogging for a good few years – said quest only drawing to a conclusion in 2013 – while the wider quest to own every Parker in hardcover still isn't done (I'm looking at you, Deadly Edge). Even so, it felt like something of a milestone when I acquired an American first edition of Butcher's Moon – copies of which even a couple of years ago were in short supply – and though, with the novel back in print and readily available again, that achievement doesn't mean quite what it once did, it's still a totemic book in my collection. The Man with the Getaway Face, on the other hand, is simply one my favourite Parker novels (I reread it recently); for me it's the archetypal Parker thriller (as opposed to The Hunter, which I'd suggest is the prototypical Parker thriller), the deadened, stripped-back prose sometimes equalled in the later books but never bettered. It also boasts the best title of the series – and its Coronet retitle ain't bad either.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household (Chatto & Windus, 1939; Penguin, 1949)
Rogue Male made quite an impact on me when I first read it in 2010. It sparked an interest in Geoffrey Household's wider canon, for sure, but more than that it opened my eyes to the possibilities of really good thriller writing – of how a well-written thriller can be so much more than the sum of its parts. I own the novel in two editions – a 1939 Chatto first edition/third impression, with its wartime Enid Marx-designed Services Library wrapper, and a 1949 Penguin paperback edition – and I'm not sure which I prize more.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré (Hodder, 1974)
The work by which all other serious espionage fiction should be judged: rich, layered, elegiac, quietly devastating. Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) is often cited as the best spy novel ever, but for my money Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy beats it hands down – plus it has two fine sequels in the shape of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley's People (1979). The Hodder first edition/first impression of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (it went through multiple printings) has become quite pricey in the wake of the 2011 film adaptation; ridiculously, I own two copies of it.

The Alamut Ambush by Anthony Price (Gollancz, 1971)
The Alamut Ambush, the second in Anthony Price's David Audley series of spy novels, is certainly my favourite Audley novel (bearing in mind I'm not even halfway through the nineteen-book series) – not least because it's set in part in Firle, just down the road from Lewes – but my copy of the Gollancz first is especially dear to me because Mr. Price signed and inscribed it to me when I interviewed him in 2011. (He also inscribed my Gollancz first of the debut Audley novel, The Labyrinth Makers, and inscribed his US edition of Our Man in Camelot and gave me that too.) As such, it's the only signed first of The Alamut Ambush that I know of (as is my first of The Labyrinth Makers), but even more gratifyingly my two-part interview has since become a key text for anyone interested in Price's work.

The Silver Locusts by Ray Bradbury (Hart-Davis, 1951)
There are many books I could have chosen to represent the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – the most popular page or post on the blog, with hits in the tens of thousands – but I've picked Roy Sanford's wrapper for the 1951 Rupert Hart-Davis edition of Ray Bradbury's The Silver Locusts, partly because it is indeed beautiful, but mostly because I've loved The Martian Chronicles – the title by which Bradbury's collection of stories is rather better known – ever since I was a teenager.

Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas (Hamish Hamilton/Simon & Schuster, 1978)
For a while there around 2010/2011 I became mildly obsessed by the book cover work of glamour photographer Beverley le Barrow, the jacket of the Hamilton edition of Ross Thomas's Chinaman's Chance being a prime example thereof. But it's also the best Thomas novel that I've read thus far (although The Fools in Town Are On Our Side runs it a close second); indeed, so impressed by the book was I that I ended up getting a signed US first edition as well.

Undertow by Desmond Cory (Muller, 1962)
Undertow isn't the scarcest Desmond Cory book I own – that would be the 1951 Muller edition of Secret Ministry, the debut Johnny Fedora spy thriller, my copy of which is only physical copy of the book I've ever seen (although it is available as an e-book) – but it's still extremely uncommon in first, and not only is it the best Johnny Fedora outing but an exquisite novel in its own right.

Game Without Rules by Michael Gilbert (Hodder, 1968)
I reread some of the tales in Michael Gilbert's first collection of Calder and Behrens short spy stories (a second collection, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, followed in 1982) earlier this year, and it was a timely reminder of just how terrific they are. Physical copies of Game Without Rules remain in as short supply as they were when I wrote about the book two years ago – especially the Hodder & Stoughon edition – but since then it's at least been made available as an e-book. I have read better espionage short stories than the ones in this collection – by W. Somerset Maugham; see further down this post – but these are almost as good.

Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn (Collins, 1967)
I try not to put too much stock in the fact that in many cases, my reviews of the books assembled in this post appear on the first page of results when you google their titles/authors. After all, I sincerely doubt that the search engines are taking note of my incisive criticism and sparkling prose; merely that they judge that the posts in question are somehow relevant or popular or, god forbid, authoritative. Even so, to google "Towards the End of the Morning" and find my review nestling just below articles by Christopher Hitchens and Hugh Barnes affords a minor frisson: the web can be a great leveller. Hitchens, incidentally, reserves special praise for Frayn's earlier novel about journalism, his debut, The Tin Men (1965), which I haven't read yet but which I possess a first edition of; I guess it's conceivable it could end up supplanting Towards the End of the Morning in my affections, but it really will have to be extraordinary in order to do so.

The Mercenaries by Donald E. Westlake (Boardman, 1961)
361 by Donald E. Westlake (Boardman, 1962)
The Mercenaries and 361 appear here for a variety of reasons. The former is Donald Westlake's debut novel proper (following a bunch of sleaze novels); the latter is probably the best non-Parker Westlake I've read, and is also important because midway through writing it Westlake stopped and knocked out the first Parker novel, The Hunter (with which it shares certain sensibilities). Moreover, both are the British T.V. Boardman editions of the novels, with their striking and memorable dust jackets designed by Boardman's art director, Denis McLoughlin; jacketed Boardman editions of Westlake's early novels are notably scarce, and these two especially so. And on top of all that, my copy of the Boardman edition of The Mercenaries is signed – one of only a handful of copies of the novel in any edition to bear Westlake's signature – and inscribed, to author and pioneer in gay and lesbian studies Byrne Fone (who also signed it), making it a fabulous association copy.

A Thirsty Evil by P. M. Hubbard (Macmillan/Atheneum, 1974)
It was an earlier Hubbard novel, A Hive of Glass (recommended to me by Book Glutton), which for me brought home what a brilliantly idiosyncratic storyteller P. M. Hubbard was, but A Thirsty Evil is just as idiosyncratic a novel, and in its own way just as brilliant. Moreover, I own two association copies of the novel which are themselves unique: an American first edition, signed by Hubbard (one of only two signed copies of the author's books I've come across) and accompanied by a handwritten letter to fellow suspense author Alan Kennington, and a British first edition accompanied by an internal Macmillan note signed by the chairman of the company – and former British prime minister – Harold Macmillan.

Commander-1 by Peter George (Heinemann, 1965)
Dr. Strangelove writer Peter George's final novel – published the year before he took his own life – is a powerful piece of fiction, one which I own in signed first, but I'm including it here not so much because it's a fine (and unjustly overlooked) book and I possess a collectible copy of it – all of which is true – but rather because of what I wrote about it. I researched the bejeezus out of my post on George and Commander-1, and was rewarded for my efforts when George's son, David, emailed me to let me know that he had read the post and was impressed by it. David's email also gave me the opportunity to correct some misinformation (still present on George's Wikipedia page, unfortunately) about there being a final unfinished and unpublished Peter George novel; there isn't: Nucleus of Survivors (or Nuclear Survivors as Wikipedia has it) was merely the original title of Commander-1. All of which goes to show what Existential Ennui is capable of when I put my mind to it.

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (London Limited Editions/Bloomsbury, 1991)
As outlined further up this post, my love for Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad knows no bounds, and the first – and other – editions of the Tom Ripley novels I've collected may well be the books I most often gaze at and remove from the shelf and fondle lovingly (it's no accident that they and my other Highsmith books are shelved downstairs while the rest of my collection is upstairs). Sadly a first edition of the first book in the series, The Talented Mr. Ripley, will probably forever be beyond my slender means, but I own the other four Ripleys in first, and last year, after an earlier abortive attempt, I finally got my hands on a signed copy of a Ripley novel – the London Limited Edition of the final book in the series, Ripley Under Water, of which only 150 copies were produced. The acquisition of it was a splendid way to end the Great Tom Ripley Reread, and it's a splendid book to have on my shelves (and gaze at, and fondle lovingly, etc., etc.).

Unknown Man No. 89 by Elmore Leonard (Secker & Warburg, 1977)
The Hunted by Elmore Leonard (Secker & Warburg, 1978)
There are many, many Elmore Leonard books from my collection I could have chosen here: my signed British first editions of 1980s classics Stick and LaBrava (the latter an association copy); my signed British first of 1990s classic Pronto (the debut of Raylan Givens of Justified fame); my British first of Get Shorty, which for a long time was my favourite Leonard novel; my US paperback originals of The Big Bounce and Mr. Majestyk. But in the end I settled on Unknown Man No. 89 and The Hunted – the former because I've come to believe it's Leonard's best book (of those that I've read) and I own a signed British first of it; the latter because it's one of the scarcest editions of a Leonard novel I own, and its relevant post is as neat an illustration of the madness of book collecting as you'll find on Existential Ennui – plus it was in part the inspiration for the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page.

Ashenden, or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (Heinemann Collected Edition, 1934)
And finally there's Ashenden, a book I only encountered this year – in a roundabout fashion; I initially read bits of it in two spy fiction anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock's Sinister Spies and Eric Ambler's To Catch a Spy – but which is easily one of the two best pieces of espionage fiction I've ever come across (the other being John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). Originally published by Heinemann in 1928, the copy seen here is the first appearance of Ashenden in the Heinemann Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham, and thus the first time the book carried a preface by Maugham. The preface was later expanded for the 1941 US Doubleday edition, a copy of which I also own, but it's the highly scarce Heinemann edition which I prize most.

Those, then, are the twenty books which I think somehow symbolise or perhaps embody Existential Ennui – at least, for right now. Because there are dozens of books on my shelves I've not yet read or blogged about... and there are doubtless hundreds if not thousands of books I've not yet discovered or bought. Accordingly, the chronicle of this particular chronic book collector... continues.

Ashenden, or, The British Agent (1928): W. Somerset Maugham's Preface to the 1934 Heinemann Collected Edition and 1941 Doubleday Edition; Book Review

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

W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, or, The British Agent is for me a fairly recent discovery. Despite my having become interested in spy fiction well over three years ago, and despite Ashenden being arguably the most important work in the field, I only encountered it earlier this year when I read two of the connected stories which make up the book in two different spy fiction anthologies – Alfred Hitchcock's Sinister Spies and the Eric Ambler-compiled To Catch a Spy, both published in the mid-1960s. The story in the former was "The Traitor" (actually comprising two stories from Ashenden: "Gustav" and "The Traitor"); I described it in my review – if I may be so gauche as to quote myself – as "one of the best pieces of spy fiction I've ever come across – almost languorous in pace and yet packing an emotional punch that's uncommon in the field of espionage writing", adding for good measure: "It's a beautifully judged, wonderfully written tale." The story in the latter was "Giulia Lazzari" (again comprising two stories from Ashenden: "A Trip to Paris" and "Giulia Lazzari"); that one I reckoned was "every bit as remarkable" and "at least as affecting as... 'The Traitor'", gushing over "the elegance and clarity of the prose".

Having been bowled over by those two tales, I determined to get my hands on the complete Ashenden, preferably in an interesting and/or scarce edition (I know, I know: I despair of myself sometimes too; why can't I just buy a new paperback off Amazon like everyone else?). A jacketed copy of the Heinemann first edition/first impression, published in March 1928, was beyond my means – those run into the thousands of pounds – but as I researched editions of Ashenden I learned that Maugham had penned a preface for the book, one which wasn't present in the earliest impressions of the Heinemann first. (Eric Ambler alluded to this preface in his introduction to To Catch a Spy when he wrote that "Ashenden was based, as Mr Maugham has told us, on his own experiences as a British agent in Switzerland and Russia during the 1914–18 war.") A true first of Ashenden was out of the question, but perhaps I could obtain the earliest edition to include Maugham's preface.

As it turned out, that wasn't as straightforward a task as I'd hoped, because there are in fact two versions of the preface. The first version appeared here:

In the Heinmann Collected Edition of Ashenden. The copy seen here is the 1934 first appearance of Ashenden in the Collected Edition of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham (it would be reprinted thereafter), which also represented the first reset of the book following various reprints and Cheaper Editions and Popular Editions (and, in the same year as the Collected Edition, a Collins 7D edition).

As such, it's quite a rare book; this was the only copy I could find with a complete dust jacket (and both book and wrapper are in lovely condition too, especially considering they're 80 years old), and even jacketless copies are thin on the ground. Fortunately, interested parties need not go to the lengths I did to read the 1934 version of the preface because it was reprinted in the 2000 Vintage paperback edition of Ashenden, and can even be viewed in large part via Amazon's 'search inside' facility.

The preface is essentially Maugham's thoughts on fact versus fiction and the vogue for fiction – still prevalent – which attempts to replicate the "arbitrary and disconnected" nature of life. He tells us little of his experiences as an agent for the British Intelligence Department during World War I beyond imparting a grim anecdote about a train journey through Russia in 1917; instead he writes of how "[f]act is a poor storyteller" which "starts a story at haphazard" and "rambles on inconsequentially and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion", adding that "[t]here is a school of novelists that looks upon this as the proper model for fiction". Evidently Maugham didn't number himself among them: 

There is nothing wrong in a climax, it is a very natural demand of the reader; it is only wrong if it does not follow naturally from the circumstances that have gone before. It is purely an affectation to elude it because in life as a general rule things tail off ineffectively. For it is quite unnecessary to treat as axiomatic the assertion that fiction should imitate life. It is merely a literary theory like another. There is in fact a second theory that is just as plausible, and this is that fiction should use life merely as raw material which it arranges in ingenious patterns.

He goes on: 

I have written all this in order to impress upon the reader that this book is a work of fiction, though from my own experience I should say not much more so than several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during the last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs. The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic and probable.

That's basically it for insight into Intelligence work in the first version of the preface. However, the second version of the preface boasts an additional three paragraphs, in which Maugham elaborates on the nature of espionage. It first appeared here:

In the 1941 printing of the 1928 US Doubleday edition, issued under a new dust jacket design (uncredited, but rather lovely) in the year America joined the Second World War. I picked this battered copy up on eBay dead cheap simply so I could read those three extra paragraphs, and they are quite revealing in a number of ways. Maugham notes that when World War II broke out, "...thinking that the experience I had might be useful, I was eager to rejoin the Intelligence Department, but I was considered too old to be worth employment". He reflects on how during World War I "the nationals of neutral countries were allowed considerable liberty of movement and it was possible by their means to get much useful information", whereas in 1941 "...the authorities are watchful and it would go ill with any alien who displayed unseasonable curiosity". He continues: 

I take it that the success of such an organization as the Intelligence Department depends much on the character of its chief, and certainly during the last war this position in Britain was held by a man of brilliant ability and resource. I wish I could give a description of him, but I never saw him and knew him only by an initial. I know nothing about him except what I surmise from some of the results he achieved.

This is interesting because in Ashenden, our eponymous novelist-turned-spy lead – whose Christian name, incidentally, is never revealed, although Maugham's 1930 novel Cakes and Ale is narrated by a William Ashenden, also a writer, and in the 1936 Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation Secret Agent he's named as Richard and in the 1991 BBC television adaptation as John – meets his Intelligence boss, the cunning R., a number of times in the book. But then as Maugham states in the opening line of his preface, "This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the last war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction."

Maugham writes in closing:

But there will always be espionage and there will always be counter-espionage. Though conditions may have altered, though difficulties may be greater, when war is raging, there will always be secrets which one side jealously guards and which the other will use every means to discover; there will always be men who from malice or for money will betray their kith and kin and there will always be men who, from love of adventure or a sense of duty, will risk a shameful death to secure information valuable to their country. Though twenty years have passed since these stories were written I cannot think they are entirely out of date, since till quite recently, I am told, they have been required reading for persons entering the Department; and early in this war Dr Goebbels speaking over the air, taking one of them as a literal statement of recent facts, gave it as an example of British cynicism and brutality.

But it is not for any topical interest they may have, not because they have been used as a sort of textbook, that I now offer to the public a new edition of these stories. They purpose only to offer entertainment, which I still think, impenitently, is the main object of a work of fiction.

Eric Ambler in his introduction to To Catch a Spy called Ashenden "the first fictional work on the subject [espionage] by a writer of stature with first-hand knowledge of what he is writing about", adding, "...there has been no body of work in the field of the same quality written since Ashenden." Ambler wrote those words in 1964, but fifty years on I'd suggest you could still reasonably make the same claim. It's probably a little early in 2014 to be talking about books of the year, but I'll be astonished if I read a better piece of fiction over the remainder of the year. It is an extraordinary novel – for, despite its episodic nature, that is in essence what it is – "The Traitor" and "Giulia Lazzari" matched by the triumvirate of "The Hairless Mexican"/"The Dark Woman"/"The Greek", with its deliciously subversive payoff, and even by the later tales like "His Excellency" and "Love and Russian Literature", which on the surface seemingly have little to do with espionage but deal with the same themes of betrayal and affairs of the heart that inform the earlier tales. Certainly I doubt I'll read a more devastating coda this year than the closing "Mr. Harrington's Washing".

It's fitting, therefore, that Ashenden, and in particular the 1934 Heinemann Collected Edition (my copy of which sports a fetching ex-libris bookplate) should form the basis of this prolix blog post, which is my nine hundred and ninety-ninth. Because in the next post – my thousandth, for those nodding off at the back – I'll be taking a look at the books which (to my fevered mind) have come to define Existential Ennui – Ashenden being a late entry onto that list.