Competition Time... Competition Time...

A wee announcement before the weekend: next week I'll be running that rarest of beasts on Existential Ennui, a competition. Up for grabs will be three copies of this:

The Art of Movie Storyboards by Fionnuala Halligan, soon to be published in the UK by The Ilex Press, and in the US under the title of simply Movie Storyboards by Chronicle Books. It's a splendid 240-page 10" x 11" hardback beast of a thing, featuring little-seen storyboard art from over forty of the greatest films ever made, including Gone with the Wind, Psycho, Rebel Without a Cause, The Red Shoes, To Kill a Mockingbird, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, Brazil, Ran, Oldboy, Pan's Labyrinth... well, you get the idea. It is, by any estimation, a sumptuous visual feast, but it's also a darn good read, with enlightening info on the films and the storyboards and commentary from the artists. I know all this for a fact because I edited the thing, in my capacity as managing editor at Ilex, and I'm immensely pleased with how it turned out; there's been a copy on my desk for a while now, which every now and then I pause from my chores to fondle lovingly. (The book, not the desk. That would be weird.)

You can read more about The Art of Movie Storyboards by heading here:

Ilex Press: The Art of Movie Storyboards

and there's a Q&A with the author, Finn, here:

Q&A Time with Fionnuala Halligan

I'll be back next week with details of how you can win a copy, plus maybe some musings on how the book came together. (And in the meantime, and if you haven't already, why not go read this week's Existential Ennui posts, on my most recent permanent page, the Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery; Richard Stark's Parker crime novel Run Lethal; and Tom Clancy, who passed away earlier this week.)

Tom Clancy (1947–2013), Jack Ryan, and Red Storm Rising (Collins, 1987): a Friday Forgotten Book

Events, I'm afraid, have rather overtaken me here. I've been promising – myself as much as anyone else – that I'd do a series of blog posts on Tom Clancy for bloody ages, so it was a bugger to learn on Wednesday that he'd gone and died (at the not overly ripe age of sixty-six), thus denying me the opportunity to do so while he was still with us (the swine). Not that Clancy would have cared or even noticed, I'm sure – as, say, Elmore Leonard probably didn't notice anything I wrote about him before he carked it a couple of months back – but even so, it would have been nice, as I managed with Leonard, to post something while he was still alive, given that so few of the authors I blog about are, and also given that I've been reading Clancy for longer than most of them.

There was a period in the 1990s when it felt like the only fiction I was reading was Clancy's. It was, I think, the movies wot did it. As an admirer of well-crafted action flicks and thrillers, I had a lot of time for two of the three Clancy film adaptations that had been released by the mid-'90s: John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October (1990) and, especially, Phillip Noyce's Clear and Present Danger (1994). (I was much less keen on Noyce's earlier Patriot Games, which lacked the light and shade of his later effort.) Naturally, those two films led me to the source texts: the Jack Ryan (no relation) series of novels, of which Clancy penned eight instalments proper, plus a bunch of spin-offs starring CIA agent John Clark, his partner Domingo Chavez and, latterly, Ryan's son, Jack Jr.

The Ryan books are mostly great big bricks of things, even in paperback, which was how I originally read them. (More recently I've been picking up UK Collins hardback first editions in Lewes charity shops, with that aforementioned, now likely abandoned, series of Clancy posts in mind; you can see them, with their David Scutt-illustrated dust jackets, scattered about this post; they're more akin to breeze-blocks than bricks.) Even so, I tore through them in the late-1990s and early 2000s, from The Hunt for Red October (1984) to The Bear and the Dragon (2000). (I haven't yet read the 2002 Ryan prequel Red Rabbit, which you can spy lurking in the background in the top photo, again bought in a Lewes charity shop.)

That they became, in one respect, increasingly far-fetched – the machinations necessary to elevate Ryan from CIA analyst (Patriot Games, 1987), to Deputy Director of the agency (Clear and Present Danger, 1989), then National Security Advisor, Vice President (Debt of Honor, 1994) and finally, outrageously, President of the United States (Executive Orders, 1996), left Clancy's authorial strings ever more visible – almost didn't matter: they were efficient, dense but incredibly pacey thrillers, turning on plots – Soviet defections, the war on drugs in South America, conflict between Russia and China – with more than a passing nod to real world tensions (and with an eerie prescience in the case of Debt of Honor), and narratives that were never weighed down by the technobabble Clancy loved to lace his thrillers with.

It's for the Ryan novels that Clancy will chiefly be remembered – there's a Kenneth Branagh-directed rebooted Ryan movie on the way which will doubtless help to cement that rep – but for me, Clancy's best book is one of the very few not set in the Ryanverse – his second novel:

Red Storm Rising, co-written with war gamer Larry Bond and published in the States in 1986 by Putnam's and in the UK the following year by Collins (the edition seen here). A plausible account of a hypothetical shooting war between Russia and NATO over oil reserves, its power resides in its breathless, irresistible sweep, in the way the narrative affords a swooping, God's eye view of the theatre of conflict. The action leaps from locale to locale with brazen abandon: Iceland, the north Atlantic, Europe, West Germany, back and forth, surging from one nerve-shredding military encounter to the next, and with the threat of nuclear escalation ever-present.

Admittedly the characterisation is tissue thin – the protagonists are little more than cyphers, and years later I struggle to recall a single thing about any of them (whereas I can still just about conjure up the odd bit about Jack Ryan and John Clark and Ding Chavez) – but that's a relatively minor quibble: for sheer scope and scale, the book can't be beat. Certainly it deserves not to be overlooked in the torrent of Clancy eulogies and obituaries that are sure to ensue, which is why I'm commending it (a day early, as is my wont, but also so that this post doesn't appear too far behind the news of Clancy's demise) to this week's edition of Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, in order that it should, I hope, escape that eponymous fate.

Parker Score: Run Lethal by Richard Stark (Coronet, 1972), alias The Handle, and the Parker Retitles

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

I hope to have something up on Tom Clancy – who passed away yesterday – shortly, but ahead of that, and fulfilling my Violent World of Parker contractual cross-posting duties, a return, belatedly, to the Parker Mega Score – that stack of Coronet paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels I acquired over the summer – with this:

Run Lethal, published in the UK by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett under a Raymond Hawkey-designed "bullet hole" double-cover in 1972 – the second wave of those covers I guess you could say, the initial Coronet bullet hole editions – The Steel Hit, The Outfit and so forth – having been published in 1971.

Like The Steel Hit, Run Lethal was retitled from its original appearance. Indeed, of the twenty-four Parker novels, six have been retitled at one time or another, one of them twice. Four of those retitlings were the result of publishers responding to movie adaptations: The Hunter (Parker #1, 1962) became Point Blank in 1967 (Gold Medal edition here, Coronet edition here) and then Payback in 1999; The Seventh (Parker #7, 1966) became The Split in 1968 (Gold Medal edition here, Coronet edition here); and earlier this year Flashfire (Parker #19, 2000) became Parker.

But the other retitlings – The Man with the Getaway Face (Parker #2, 1963), which became The Steel Hit; The Score (Parker #5, 1964), which became Killtown; and The Handle (Parker #8, 1966), which became Run Lethal – appear to be the result of nothing other than publisher preference... and it seems they were all the fault of Coronet. See, for a long time I assumed it was Berkley, the American paperback publisher of the Parkers in the early 1970s, who retitled at least The Score and The Handle (I'm not sure if they ever got round to issuing The Steel Hit, even though it's listed, under that title, under "By the same author" in my Berkley reprint copy of The Outfit). But I own a copy of Berkley's edition of The Score, or rather Killtown:

and it was published in 1973 (November of that year, to be precise); whereas Coronet's edition of Killtown was first published in 1972. And it's the same deal with The Handle/Run Lethal: Berkley's edition of Run Lethal arrived again in 1973, and Coronet's in 1972. Which means that Berkley adopted the new titles from Coronet, not the other way round. Which in turn means that in the cases of at least two retitlings, Parker fans have us Brits to blame.

I'm not quite sure where I'll be going next with the Parker Mega Score; I think I might take a look at a bullet hole edition of a Parker Coronet had already published once, but I may change my mind, mercurial bastard that I am.

Introducing a New Existential Ennui Permanent Page: the Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery; plus the Patricia Highsmith Papers

Well, I surprised myself with this one. I sort of figured that if I ever got round to setting up a new permanent page, a la Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, it would be focused on one or other of the artists featured in Beautiful Book Jacket Design – Val Biro, say, or Denis McLoughlin; either that, or I'd set up a paperback cover page. Instead, Existential Ennui's second permanent page has ended up being devoted not to an artist or a format, but an author.

In a way, that's rather fitting. I've been collecting Patricia Highsmith in first edition longer than any other writer – longer than Donald Westlake, or Kingsley Amis, or any other of the literary reprobates wot litter Existential Ennui. The 1974 Heinemann first of Ripley's Game at the top of this post was, I think, the first first edition I ever bought – purchased on London's Cecil Court, no less, from a secondhand bookshop the name of which escapes me and which has since vanished anyway – while my inaugural visit to the Lewes Book Fair upon moving down to Lewes in 2008 netted me Heinemann firsts of The Cry of the Owl and The Two Faces of January. Highsmith, then, is in large part responsible for all that's followed – my book collecting habit and consequently this 'ere blog, basically – so it's entirely apt, I feel, and given that I now own first editions of all sixteen of the Highsmith novels initially published in the UK by Heinemann, that she should get her own permanent page:

Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery

The gallery can be accessed by clicking the link above, or via the permanent link in Existential Ennui's sidebar, just below the link to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s. Note that I've titled it simply a first edition gallery, not a British first edition one, or indeed a Heinemann first edition one (which was what I originally thought of assembling – as a post, not a page – when the notion occurred to me last week). For while the page does currently consist of British editions, and the vast majority of those were published by Heinemann, I reserve the right to add in American – or even foreign – first editions should I come into possession of them – and I certainly reserve the right to include Cresset Press firsts of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, in the unlikely event that I ever find affordable copies of them.

If you're a fan of Highsmith's work, you'll find all manner of stuff to look at – not just jackets and cases but uncorrected proofs and a few intriguing, little seen editions of her novels – but even if you're not a fan, the gallery is interesting as a demonstration of how dust jacket design changed over the course of five decades, from the kind of hand-lettered, illustrated wrappers that were prevalent in the '50s and '60s (and which are also featured on the aforementioned Beautiful British Book Jacket Design page), to photographic and typographic treatments and, finally, back to illustrations again.

Incidentally, in the course of researching my own Highsmith archive I stumbled upon another Highsmith archive – one I dimly recall having encountered before, actually, but which I don't believe I've ever blogged about: the Patricia Highsmith Papers at the Swiss Literary Archives (part of the Swiss National Library, where a Highsmith exhibition was held in 2006). The site is essentially a catalogue of material that's archived elsewhere – manuscripts and notebooks and scrapbooks and the like, which Highsmith's biographers, Andrew Wilson and Joan Schenkar, must have drawn on heavily – but it's still well worth a rummage, especially Highsmith's photo albums, pages from which can be viewed online.

Patricia Highsmith Shelf Porn (Slight Return)

Apropos of nothing other than I took a load of pictures of my Patricia Highsmith shelf for yesterday's post on Deep Water and only used one of them, plus it subsequently occurred to me that an update to this shelf porn post from over three years ago might be of mild interest – and furthermore Patti Nase Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books Patricia Highsmith special is, as the "Friday" in the title suggests, actually today, not yesterday (evidently I simply couldn't wait another day for the world to read my erudite and pithy ruminations on Deep Water) – presenting the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith first (and other) editions book collection, 2013 iteration:

You can see that it's expanded somewhat from the collection as it stood back in 2010:

Although, remarkably, it's still in the same glass-doored cabinet it was back then, whereas all my other books have migrated to various far-flung (i.e., upstairs) bookcases and, in some cases, sadly (but necessarily; hello, little Edie), boxes in the loft.

Additions and updates since 2010 are, in the bottom photo, from left to right: a first edition of Andrew Wilson's biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow (Bloomsbury, 2003; I think I already owned that one by the time of that post, but it must have been shelved elsewhere); an uncorrected proof of Carol (Bloomsbury, 2000, alias The Price of Salt); a signed limited edition of Ripley Under Water (London Limited Editions/Bloomsbury, 1991); a first edition of Little Tales of Misogyny (Heinemann, 1977; not, in fact, the one seen in the 2010 photo, which I've since sold, but a signed edition I've since acquired); a first edition of The Tremor of Forgery (Heinemann, 1969, replacing the Penguin paperback I read in 2009); a first edition of The Glass Cell (Heinemann, 1967 – another replacement, this time for an ex-library copy); and first editions of This Sweet Sickness (Heinemann, 1961), A Game for the Living (Heinemann, 1959) and, of course, Deep Water (Heinemann, 1958).

And resting atop the hardbacks, new additions are: an uncorrected proof of Ripley Under Ground (Heinemann, 1971); a first American paperback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Dell, 1959); a first (revised) edition of Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Poplar Press, 1983); and just visible far right, an uncorrected Heinemann proof – which, it suddenly strikes me, I've yet to blog about – of the aforementioned The Tremor of Forgery (Heinemann, 1969) and a curious hardback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Heinemann, 1973). (Not seen in that more recent photo, by the way, is my 1961 Pan paperback edition of Deep Water, as I was using it to write my review.)

I make that thirteen Patricia Highsmith books bought in the three or so years since I posted that original Highsmith shelf porn piece in May 2010 (actually, fourteen: I briefly owned a 1994 Chancellor Press omnibus edition of four of the Tom Ripley novels but donated it to a Lewes charity shop). Which is only slightly less than the roughly fifteen Highsmith books I must have bought in the two years from May 2008, when I moved to Lewes, to May 2010. So, y'know: at least I'm slowing down a bit.

Hmm. Something else just occurred to me: the acquisition of that Heinemann first of Deep Water means I could, if I so desired, put together a proper Patricia Highsmith Heinemann first edition cover gallery...

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water, the Hunt for the 1958 Heinemann First Edition, and a Review; a Friday's Forgotten Books Special

When Patti Nase Abbott announced a month or two back that this Friday's Forgotten Books round-up would be devoted to Patricia Highsmith, one book sprang immediately to my mind. I've read a lot of Highsmith – not all her work, not by any means (I haven't tried many of her short stories), but certainly well over half of her novels, including all five of the Tom Ripley books – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water, collectively known as the Ripliad, which I recently finished rereading – and almost all of the novels she published in the first half of her career, from Strangers on a Train (1950) to The Glass Cell (1964). (See the bottom of this post for links to some of my previous Highsmith missives.) With, until very recently, one glaring, early exception (well, two actually – I still haven't read 1952's pseudonymous The Price of Salt, but I consider that a less glaring exception than this one): 

Deep Water. Highsmith's fifth novel (including the aforementioned The Price of Salt), it was originally published in the States in 1957 by Harper & Brothers, and the following year in the UK by Heinemann, but the edition seen here is the 1961 Pan first British paperback edition (lovely cover art by Sam Peffer), which for a long time was the best I could do in terms of my collection. (Note to those readers not remotely interested in matters to do with book collecting: you might consider skipping the next few paragraphs and instead heading straight to the review of Deep Water further down the post; although, that said, if you really aren't remotely interested in matters to do with book collecting, one wonders what on earth you're doing reading Existential Ennui in the first place.)

See, although I've been collecting Patricia Highsmith in British hardback first edition for over five years (and reading her for a lot longer), I'd pretty much resigned myself to probably never owning dust-jacketed firsts of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley – all published in the UK by Cresset Press in, respectively, 1950, 1956 and 1957 – or Deep Water, due to their being prohibitively expensive (not to mention scarce). Instead I'd collected (less valuable but arguably scarcer) Corgi and Pan paperbacks of those four books and resolved that if I ever won the Lottery, I'd revisit the situation.

Still and all, Deep Water, being the first of the sixteen Highsmith novels published by Heinemann in the UK (not counting their later reissues of Strangers, Blunderer and Talented), and the only one I didn't own, remained a tantalising prospect. Despite being the rarest of all the early Highsmith British firsts (I suspect Heinemann underestimated their print run in the wake of Talented; the book was reprinted in the year of publication), historically prices haven't been too astronomical, floating somewhere around the £250–£300 mark for a first impression – still out of my range, obviously, but given a little luck... And so I'd check the likes of AbeBooks and eBay periodically, wondering if an affordable copy might somehow hove into view (I thought I was in with a chance when a first appeared on eBay one time, but then bidding went north of £100) – until, quite unexpectedly, one did:

A genuine 1958 Heinemann first edition/first impression. It popped up on AbeBooks a month ago, and even though I didn't have an alert set, I happened to be looking, and after establishing that it was indeed a first impression – as evidenced by the dust jacket back flap (which on the same-year reprint carries reviews of the novel itself) and the interior copyright line – I snapped it up. The only real fault is there's a small chunk missing from the wrapper, but considering I paid a fraction of the going rate, I can live with that. The dust jacket, by the way, was designed by Stein, who also designed the wrapper for the 1959 Heinemann edition of A Game for the Living, and it's now taken its place in the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery (increasing the number of covers therein to 120).

So, having at long last acquired a Heinemann first of Deep Water, and knowing that the Patricia Highsmith Friday's Forgotten Books special was imminent, I figured the least I could do was read the damn thing. And happily, after all the time and effort I put into getting my hands on a first edition (actually not that much effort, but a fair amount of time), I'm pleased to report that it's good. Not quite The Tremor of Forgery or Ripley's Game good, but maybe This Sweet Sickness or The Cry of the Owl good. Bloody good, in other words.

Highsmith's point-of-view character – her sole point-of-view character, unlike Strangers on a Train and The Blunderer (where there are two perspectives), but like The Talented Mr. Ripley and This Sweet Sickness – is Victor Van Allen, a well-to-do small-town small-press publisher in his late thirties, and a cuckold in all but name. Vic's wife, Melinda, has been merrily carrying on with a succession of men while Vic affects an air of studied indifference, seemingly content to breed snails (also a pastime of Highsmith's) and read terribly dull-sounding books about installing stained glass in church windows. But beneath the surface the tension is building: first Vic boasts (untruthfully) to one of Melinda's paramours that he killed a previous beau, and then matters boil over when a party the Van Allens attend ends with Melinda's latest lover, a cocktail bar pianist, floating face down in the swimming pool.

Highsmith's stated aim with Deep Water, as recounted in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow, was to convey the "sniping, griping, ambushing" of a loveless marriage, the "ballet of the wearing of the nerves", as well as to show how "repressed emotions can become schizophrenic" and "explore the diseases produced by sexual repression". All this she does with aplomb, greatly assisted by adhering doggedly to Vic's viewpoint, forcing us to empathise with him even as we pity him and are eventually appalled by him (a trick she performed previously in Talented and would go on to deploy in three of the four Ripley sequels, among others).

Andrew Wilson notes in Beautiful Shadow that the inhibited, remote Vic "shares quite a few characteristics" with Highsmith's most famous outsider, Tom Ripley, and indeed he does; but Tom never cuts quite so tragic a figure as Vic, even in his more impulsive incarnation in Talented. Tom's goal was to attain the kind of idle, comfortable existence he coveted in Dickie Greenleaf, at which he succeeds; Vic, worn down by his wayward wife, desires nothing more than a quiet life with his sodding snails (or at least thinks he does), and can't even manage that. Both are driven to murder, but though neither displays much in the way of a conscience ("Vic's guilt did not materialize," Highsmith narrates drily), Tom proves rather better at the act than Vic, especially the getting away with it.

Still, as Highsmith retorted when the critic Craig Brown called Vic a weak man, "At least he HAD A GO." It's clear where her sympathies lie: not with flighty, flirtatious Melinda, who suspects her cold fish husband and schemes to bring about his downfall; not with the private detectives she employs, or Don Wilson, the "humourless", "hack" writer of western, detective and romance stories who assists her; not with any of the bores in the Val Allens' stultifying suburban circle; but with Vic; poor, doomed, snail-watching Vic, whose final, furious explosion is an arresting, unforgettable testament to the dangers of bottling up one's feelings.

Head to Patti Nase Abbot's blog this Friday, 27 September, for a bunch more Patricia Highsmith missives, and click here and here for Highsmith bonus posts, and here to visit the newly established Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery.

Previous Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith Posts

The Great Tom Ripley Reread

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Ripley Under Ground (1970)
Ripley's Game (1974)
The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980)
Ripley Under Water (1991)
The Ripliad Revisited and Rated

Other Ripley Posts

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1973)
The Tom Ripley Novels

Other Novels

Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Blunderer (1954)
The Price of Salt (1952), alias Carol
A Game for the Living (1958)
This Sweet Sickness (1960)
The Cry of the Owl (1962)
The Two Faces of January (1964)
The Glass Cell (1965)
The Tremor of Forgery (1969)

Short Stories

Little Tales of Misogyny (1977)

Non-Fiction

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1981 revised edition)

Collecting Highsmith

The Secret Bookshop
Ripley's Claim
New Arrivals
To Arundel and Chichester
Knock knock, it's a New Arrival
Patricia Highsmith Shelf Porn
Patricia Highsmith First Editions, Part 1
Patricia Highsmith First Editions, Part 2
Patricia Highsmith Shelf Porn (Slight Return)

Odds and Sods

I've realised
Looking for the Perfect Bond (and Ripley too)
Ripley's Flicks
Ripley Under Ground Movie Review