The Curse of the Collector

Yes, dear friends, I have embarked on yet another fool's errand. I've started hunting down Allison & Busby hardback editions of Richard Stark's Parker novels. Now, bear in mind these aren't actually first editions; they date from the 1980s, twenty years after the books were first published in the States. But they are the first British hardback editions. Prior to these, the Parker novels were only available in the UK as paperbacks from Coronet (although with neat silver double-covers, the title of each book to be seen through a 'burn' hole in the outer cover). As a result, the Allison & Busby editions have become highly collectable... and in some cases highly pricey... and in other cases, highly impossible to find.

Nothing like a challenge, eh?

There are sixteen Parker novels in the original run (Stark brought the character back in a second series in the nineties/noughties), and today's post brought two of them:













That's The Outfit (Parker #3, A&B edition 1988, original US printing 1963) and The Handle (a.k.a. Run Lethal, Parker #8, A&B edition 1985, original US printing 1966). And yes, it does seem as if Allison & Busby published the novels out of sequence, which must have been a bit annoying at the time. Then again, pre-internet/wikipedia, it wasn't always easy to work out what all the novels in a particular series even were, let alone what order they came in.

So then. Two down, fourteen to go.

Ooh, and this turned up today too:













Pity Him Afterwards, Donald Westlake's fifth novel under his own name (Richard Stark was one of his pseudonyms). This is the 1964 American first edition, which I managed to find online. It's about a crazed killer, but beyond that I know nothing. Another early Westlake also turned up a few days ago, Killy, which is about a union rep's fall from grace. That one is a UK first edition, also from 1964, a year after the US edition, and published by Boardman as part of their American Bloodhound Mystery series. I can't find a scan of the cover online, but the jacket sports a great illo of the title character (in white and grey, with a red heart in front of the book's title) by Denis McLoughlin, who was Boardman's art director.

And I should have some more Westlake/Stark news soon...

(Parker Progress Report) So I finished reading Richard Stark's Point Blank,

or The Hunter to give it its proper name, and it really is a brilliant book. The prose is brutally efficient, Stark's (or rather Westlake's) descriptions pared down to the bare essentials, yet still beautifully written and with clipped passages that nonetheless convey acres of character colour, particularly about Parker, the book's anti-hero. There are lots of memorable lines, but two in particular stuck in my head. One comes early in the novel (maybe even on the first page), where Westlake is describing Parker's appearance:

"His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins." There's a fantastic rhythm to that sentence, and indeed Parker's hands feature prominently throughout the rest of the book – often, it has to be said, as they close around someone's neck. And then there's this passage, from later in the novel, where Parker is staking out criminal organization the Outfit's hotel from a restaurant:

"He could look out at the street, and let his fifteen-cent cup of coffee cool. It was a Park Avenue coffee shop, and expensive. Pastrami on rye, eighty-five cents, no butter. Like that."

Terrific stuff. The book's full of things like that. I also loved the twist right at the end of the book with the suitcase, which I don't recall from reading Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel adaptation (maybe it is there though). I've got a 1970s Coronet edition of the next Parker, The Steel Hit (or The Man with the Getaway Face) on the way to me. Can't wait to read it.

As a follow-up to the post below this one,

weirdly, after I'd emailed Goldstone Books about the Richard Stark novel I was after and received no response, and they'd subsequently taken it off AbeBooks and off their website on Friday, on Saturday they listed the same book on eBay... for exactly the same price. So I bought it. And today I received an email saying they'd posted it. Colour me baffled. What a bizarre, roundabout way to do business.

Harumph.

Manners don't cost much, do they? I spied an old edition of one of Richard Stark's Parker novels on AbeBooks yesterday, so I dropped the seller a line to find out if it was still available. Today I looked on AbeBooks again... and the listing's vanished. Which I take to mean they don't have the book anymore. Did they email me to tell me it was no longer available? Did they fuck. So a cheery "fuck you!" to Goldstone Books. A little common courtesy wouldn't have gone amiss, now would it?

Panic on the Streets of eBay

Phew. Had a hairy moment just now on eBay. I put in a bid in the last twenty seconds for a book (a Gold Medal edition of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, hard to find in this country – and yes, I am a last-minute eBay sniper; sue me) and it looked like the bid hadn't gone through. I'd entered the amount and confirmed the bid, but then another screen came up telling me to enter another bid! Which I did, frantically, and then had to confirm all over again, and I knew at that point I was stuffed. Too much time had elapsed. Sure enough I was met by a message saying the auction had ended and my bid was discounted. Gah!

I was then informed by eBay that the auction had been won by... me! My original bid had gone through after all. Thank Christ for that. I would've been mightily annoyed if that had slipped through my fingers, particularly as it went (to me!) for a decent price. And so now I can blog about the Jim Thompson books I mentioned a couple of posts back, which are:













which is the one I just, er won, and:













which I won the other day (it's a 1950s reprint of Thompson's third novel).

Splendid.

A Little in Column 'A', a Little in Column 'B'

Column 'A' being 'Comics I'm Still Buying', Column 'B' being 'Comics I've Now Dropped'. Specifically, that issue of Invincible Iron Man I missed as a result of Diamond's truck smash turned up in this week's (or rather last week's; I didn't get to the comic shop until Saturday) delivery, so I bought it. But I passed on PunisherMax because... it's just not Garth Ennis. It's OK, Jason Aaron's doing a decent job on the words, and Steve Dillon's art is always engaging... but it's Just Not Garth. So that's another title dropped. Which leaves my monthly list of comics (now that a few miniseries have finished) looking like this:

Batman & Robin
Captain America
Chronicles of Wormwood (miniseries)
Criminal
Crossed (only one more issue to go on this)
Dark Avengers
Ex Machina
Invincible Iron Man
New Avengers
Siege
Unwritten

Huh. I make that eight ongoing series (I'm including Criminal there, as it's a series of miniseries) and three miniseries. And some of the comics on this list are on life-support too. We'll see where we are in another couple of months...