The Sandbaggers Writer Ian Mackintosh's Second Novel, Count Not the Cost (Robert Hale, 1967); Book Review

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

If A Slaying in September, the 1967 debut novel by naval officer turned writer Ian Mackintosh – who would go on to create cult TV spy show The Sandbaggers (among other celebrated television endeavours) – was bad – and it really was quite dreadful – his second novel was perhaps even worse.

Count Not the Cost was published in the same year as A Slaying in September, again by Robert Hale in hardback, sporting a beautiful dust jacket, designed by Barbara Walton – and now residing in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – which belied the literary horrors lurking within. Like A Slaying in September and the rest of the five crime and spy thrillers Mackintosh published in the late-1960s before he broke into TV writing with BBC drama Warship, this was to be the novel's only printing; and like its brethren it's now so scarce that at the time of writing not a single copy can be found for sale online. Mine is an ex-library copy (an ex-City of London Police Library copy, to be precise), which I acquired from book dealer par excellence Jamie Sturgeon last year; it was the first Ian Mackintosh novel I read, and its sublime awfulness inspired me in part – the other part being the collector's urge to own that which is rare – to purchase three of the remaining four early Mackintosh novels from Jamie (the only one I'm missing is the third one, A Drug Called Power, 1968).

You may be wondering why on earth I'd purchase a handful of secondhand books – a couple of them ex-library for God's sake – which I was almost certain would be bloody terrible; but as the excerpts in my review of A Slaying in September hopefully demonstrated, this is a different order of bloody terrible we're dealing with here. I hesitate to trot out the hackneyed phrase 'so bad they're good', but when it comes to Mackintosh's early novels, there's a lot of truth in that. Whether they were written in jest or, more disturbingly, in earnest, there's a compulsive quality to these books – the two that I've read anyway (and having flicked through the other two, I've seen nothing to dissuade me from my belief that they're just as crap); they induce in the reader – at least this reader – an irresistible urge to keep turning the pages even though you know it's only going to get worse.

Count Not the Cost is no different. The antihero of the piece this time is Rod Holt, a grey-eyed "gunman", as his friend Commander Hammond of Scotland Yard puts it, "an outlaw and an outcast", a "San Francisco guttersnipe... officially a trouble-shooter for the Olinett Diamond Company" who "does free-lance investigations" – and as such, aside from the American heritage, being a bit older and being possessed of an inclination to wearing black rather than grey, cut from the same cloth as the hero of A Slaying in September, Tim Blackgrove. If anything, however, Rod is even more emotionally crippled than Tim. Where Blackgrove fell for a shop assistant (whilst buying fags) and spent a third of that novel mooning around after her – with some success, it must be said, albeit with a sting in the tail – Holt has devoted his entire existence to the safety and wellbeing of a woman – Jean Lamont – who absolutely loathes him.

To that end he elects to assist her current beau, dashing but ineffectual Frenchman Luc Lenoir, in his struggle against a bunch of French fanatics who believe that Lenoir and a friend of his late father's, Gaspard Rousseau – whom Lenoir hopes to bring to England from Hong Kong – are members of the OAS and thus enemies of France. Or something; to be honest the narrative is so garbled I kind of lost track of why the hell anyone was doing anything. In any case, after a dust-up or two with the French fanatics on British soil, Holt jets to Hong Kong, hooks up with beautiful but deadly smuggler Laura Paine and sets about devising a plan to bring Rousseau back to Blighty. Or possibly just kill him. I dunno; could be either. Or both.

Somewhere in all this there's the makings of a really good spy thriller. Unfortunately this isn't it. But the undercooked plot is only part of the problem; more of an issue is Holt and his devotion to Jean Lamont, which in some ways is akin to a monk's vow of chastity (although Holt does get to shag Laura Paine). And here we find commonality with the dominant theme of A Slaying in September – that of the seemingly hard-bitten hero who is in reality a lovelorn, self-doubting, self-loathing wreck. Rotten metaphors – and there are some choice ones here, as in A Slaying in September – and sloppy plotting aside, Mackintosh's prose is at its most turgid when he's dealing with Holt's broken heart, attaining an overwrought, hysterical tone and tenor more befitting of a romance novel (or rather how I imagine romance novels to be; I can't say I remember ever reading one) or a 1970s girls' comic (I'm on rather firmer ground here because I read a lot of those as a kid – don't ask).

I speculated in the previous post that Mackintosh's novels of this period might actually be parody, but on reflection, and with a couple of them under my belt, I'm starting to wonder whether they were his way of working through the pain of either rejection or an unrequited love. He was only in his mid-twenties, possibly even younger, when he wrote these books (whilst at sea and stationed at a remote naval base in Scotland), so any teenage yearnings he might have had wouldn't have been that distant a memory – or perhaps not distant at all but a more recent crushing of his feelings. Pure conjecture of course, but there's a rawness – as well as, inevitably, a rubbishness – to the passages where Rod Holt rages at Jean Lamont and her rejection of him (for reasons to do with the death of Holt's one-time CIA partner, also Jean's husband), not least the early one where Holt is introduced:

'Five years,' muttered the man in grey. Five long years. And now she was back. He had not seen her, but he knew – as he knew of every movement she had made in those endless, hate-filled years. He hated her still and loved her still and, against his better judgement, he had returned to the House of Memories.

His eyes went to the lonely, rusting sentinel that was the pole of the bus-stop. It was also the headstone of his grave. And how he loathed the thought of all those queues of stupid, fat-faced and vacant-looking women with their laden bags and big backsides, trampling across his tomb. He wanted to wait for them, to descend on them, to smack their baskets into their chattering faces and to wipe away their smug smiles. He wanted them on their pudgy, work-worn, peasant knees, to worship at his burial-ground.

And, by God, it was his burial-ground! Because of the childish sentimentality of his past, this little patch of hard-standing was stained with the blood of wounds of a thousand battles of his own emotions and somewhere within, his life was entombed and linked forever to this damned bungalow and to the girl whom he could not forget.

The bitch!

All at once, a huge hammer hit his heart, crushing it, driving from it the very breath of existence and leaving only a mangled mechanism that sobbed on in dry gasps and pulsed painfully in defiance of his wish to run. A terrible wave of agony hurtled upwards from his soul to crash against his reeling brain and threaten his very sanity.

The bitch!

Then again, maybe it is parody. I suspect I'm rather overthinking it. But that's the thing: these frightful novels hold a mysterious power. I defy anyone not to read the above excerpt and be gripped by an overwhelming urge to read on, although I guess for me it might also be the scarcity of the books as much as the overblown, overripe prose within. Whatever: there's no denying I've been dwelling on them quite a lot of late, turning them over and over in my head. I mean, look at the length of these bloody blog posts for one thing. Thankfully for all concerned there's just one last post to come, a double-bill affair in which I'll be taking a briefer look at the two remaining Ian Mackintosh books in my possession: The Man from Destiny (1969) and The Brave Cannot Yield (1970).

The Sandbaggers Creator Ian Mackintosh's Debut Novel, A Slaying in September (Robert Hale, 1967); Book Review

A dozen years before his presumed death in a plane accident; a decade before he created celebrated cult TV spy series The Sandbaggers (1978–1980); five years before he broke into television with the hugely successful BBC drama series Warship (1973-1977), Ian Mackintosh made his debut as a novelist.

He'd turned to writing, according to his brother Lawrie, in the early years of his naval career (he served in the Royal Navy from 1958 until his retirement in 1976, whereupon he was awarded an MBE) "to relieve the boredom, first at sea and later when posted to [a] remote Naval base in Scotland". The results were five crime and spy thrillers published in quick succession over a four-year period: A Slaying in September (1967), Count Not the Cost (1967), A Drug Called Power (1968), The Man from Destiny (1969) and The Brave Cannot Yield (1970). Each received just the one printing, in hardback, by Robert Hale; there were no paperback editions, and with Hale's print runs at the time being notoriously conservative – see also the Elmore Leonard books they published around this period – in the years since all five have become so unbelievably scarce that there is, at time of writing, not a single solitary copy of any of them available on the web. Consequently, online commentary on them is scant, largely comprising this Mystery*File post and my own post on the novels and Mackintosh's later work on The Sandbaggers from last week.

It's fair to say, then, that they represent something of a blind spot in Mackintosh's otherwise thoroughly raked-over oeuvre and life (aside from The Sandbaggers site OpsRoom.org, which boasts a good selection of articles and clippings on Mackintosh, there's a 2012 biography on him, The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian MacKintosh); but thanks to book dealer to the stars Jamie Sturgeon I've managed to secure four of those five novels, among them Mackintosh's debut, A Slaying in September, published in hardback in 1967 with a dust jacket designed by Colin Andrews.

Written, like the other four books from this period – and like Mackintosh's later The Sandbaggers novelisation (Corgi, 1978) – in the third person, the novel introduces grey-eyed, black-clad loner and, as the press have apparently dubbed him, "Hired Gun of Big Business"/"High Society's Trouble Shooter" Tim Blackgrove, although the villagers who live near the shop Blackgrove buys his fags from, and which he's frequented ever since, a year ago, "on the run, the police behind him and his quarry in front... he had – with typical Blackgrove unconcern – taken time off to buy cigarettes [a]nd... found himself looking across the counter into the most appealing face he had ever seen", refer to him "simply as 'the detective from London who goes to the shop'".

So far, so bizarre – and we're still only on page two. For the unwary reader – those perhaps only familiar with Mackintosh's work on The Sandbaggers or Warship or even Wilde Alliance, or his novelisations of those TV shows – and of course having first surmounted the not inconsiderable challenge of actually laying hands on a copy of any of his five early novels – exposure to his writing, at least in its late-1960s incarnation, is an unsettling, unbalancing experience (I should mention that this was the second Mackintosh novel I'd read). As you turn the pages, initial misgivings give way to profound doubts and then slack-jawed disbelief, until, in the case of A Slaying in September, you reach the end of the first chapter, where Blackgrove, having bantered playfully with Julie, the doomed daughter of his occasional employer Julian Cambridges (or as Blackgrove labels her in his head, "Silly bitch!"), is described thus:

He was near to being contented. But then, he was deaf to the relentless rumblings of the tumbrils on the deadly road of his own destiny.

Alliterative, melodramatic metaphors such as this litter the text like twisted twigs bobbing atop a murky winter lido. But they're merely a symptom of the malaise which infects the novel – the fever sweat signifying the underlying illness, if you will (a disease which is evidently contagious). Because the bald fact of the matter is that A Slaying in September is really, really bad – hilariously, audaciously so – not just in terms of the tortured metaphors, or the cardboard cut-out characters, or the by turns hysterical and portentous dialogue – all of which abounds in abundance – but in the rubbish plotting too.

All of these elements come together in a kind of awful extended crescendo in the long middle stretch of the book. Having decamped to Antwerp on the trail of the drug dealer who murdered Julie Cambridges – and upon arrival, in a vengeful fury, torturing and killing a couple of drug addict underlings and dumping them in the same country ditch – Blackgrove practically forgets all about his self-appointed mission of retribution and spends over a third of the novel doing little other than moping about after the comely wench from the village shop, who's inexplicably turned up in the Belgian city. (There is an eventual explanation for this, one which forms the twist in the tale, but it truly beggars belief.) Seemingly the muse has transported Mackintosh to a higher plane of terrible prose here, because he pummels us with one putridly overripe passage after another:

...He felt awed. For so many months, he had been longing for a meeting with a girl who had the youth and vitality and the eyes and smile of that little shop-assistant; someone who would be a soulmate and who would understand him in all his moods and with all his weaknesses, who would be a shelter from his insecurity and a loving envoy from a Heaven where he would never again walk alone and where, through her, he would truly find himself...

...Fool! It might still be a dream! He sneered at his sentimentality. But he knew simultaneously, in the register of his own soul, that this girl's smile could, at will, send a flame through him, a fire that licked dangerously at the stockade of indifference which locked his heart and made him the man he was...

...Would not his life remain true to the pattern he had chosen for it: a tortuous testimony of canker and havoc, of truculence and fury, bringing disaster to himself and all those who touched upon it?...

I could go on. And I think I will:

...He had always believed that to 'feel one's heart soften' was a phrase used solely in women's magazines, but he could now feel his own iron soul liquefy in the glory of her smile and he knew that the rigid hold which he kept on the reins of his life was relaxing with dangerous celerity...

...But Alex's words were bricks of gold for the castle of hope he was building in his heart and he was warmed to the remotest and coldest regions of his soul...

...He had been damming up his floods of loneliness with a wall of self-delusion, telling himself that, inevitably, an angel would call for him, an angel who would be his very own, to guide him along the secret escape-route from the deadly quicksand that was his life. But his angel had come – and gone again. She had overflown his quagmire of hopelessness...

Thing is, in the word selection and the irresistible surge of the sentence structure, it's evident from these excerpts that Mackintosh could write. It's just that what he chose to write at this formative stage of his career were barking, overblown, intermittently violent potboilers.

Part of me wonders whether he wasn't bashing this stuff out with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek – if he was perhaps parodying the spy novels and crime fiction and even romance novels which were prevalent at the time. There's a line in A Slaying in September, one which seems to me to be especially arch and knowing, which suggests that he knew exactly what he was up to: "If he wanted to, he could ask himself how many more times he would see some soul take that last ferry-ride across the Jordan, but euphemisms did not help." The only problem with that theory is Mackintosh wrote five of these buggers (three of them starring Tim bloody Blackgrove), which to my mind is wearing the joke really thin.

I guess you could chalk it up to youthful inexperience (Mackintosh must have only been in his mid-twenties when he penned A Slaying in September), to a writer taking his first faltering literary steps – first novel nerves, as it were; except that Mackintosh's second book, Count Not the Cost, published in the same year as A Slaying in September, is, if anything, even worse...

Ian Mackintosh, The Sandbaggers (TV Series and Novelisation, 1978), and the Writer's '60s Spy and Crime Thriller Novels

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 15/11/12.

Ian Mackintosh – or MacKintosh, depending on who you believe – is a name which excites a fair bit of interest in certain spy-obsessed circles, due in large part to his being the creator and writer of (most of) The Sandbaggers:

a cult television series which ran on ITV from 1978 to 1980, starring Roy Marsden as Neil Burnside, the head of a small team of troubleshooters – the eponymous "Sandbaggers" – within Britain's Special Intelligence Service – this being the Mackintosh-penned novelisation of a couple of episodes thereof, published in paperback by Corgi in 1978. I've only ever seen the odd clip of The Sandbaggers (a state of affairs I intend to rectify) and don't remember it being on telly when I was a kid (unlike another British TV spy series, Callan, which I wrote about the other week and do dimly recall) but I have been aware of it for a while due to Greg Rucka pointing to it as the chief inspiration for his fine espionage comic book (and novel) series Queen & Country in an essay in the first issue in 2001. And Rucka's not alone in his admiration either: earlier this year The Guardian ran a positive review of the three-season DVD box set of The Sandbaggers (written, incidentally, by an old mucker of mine from Mixmag days, Toby Manning) and there's an active dedicated fan site.

For espionage enthusiasts, a big part of the appeal of The Sandbaggers lies in the fascination with Ian Mackintosh's life. A career naval officer who was awarded an MBE upon his retirement in 1976, he created the hugely successful BBC drama Warship in 1973, embarking on a new career as a television writer and producer in its wake. And then in July 1979, halfway into the writing of the third season of The Sandbaggers (Mackintosh wrote all thirteen episodes of the preceding two seasons), the light aircraft Mackintosh was flying in with his girlfriend, Susan Insole, and his friend, Graham Barber – who was piloting the airplane – vanished over the Gulf of Alaska after sending out a distress signal. No survivors or wreckage were ever found, and this, along with Barber reportedly having failed to file a flight plan and the plane making an unscheduled stop at a disused World War II airfield, has led to much speculation about what actually happened, not least in Robert G. Folsom's biography The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian MacKintosh (Potomac Books, 2012).

Further fanning the flames of intrigue, fans of The Sandbaggers have long wondered whether Mackintosh was himself a spy, such was the apparent authenticity of the series. And reading Mackintosh's The Sandbaggers novelisation, the picture he paints of SIS does seem plausible: a grey, worn-out world of late nights, endless paperwork and office politics, and with the fug of cigarette smoke hanging heavy in the air, punctuated by all-too-rare and usually grubby missions where the odds of making it back alive are fifty-fifty. Small wonder, then, that Greg Rucka drew on the series so heavily for Queen & Country, right down to the overworked, irritable head of department – Burnside in The Sandbaggers, Paul Crocker in Queen & Country – and the M.O. of having two Sandbaggers – Minders in Rucka's comic book – on standby and referring to them as Sandbagger One and Two (or Minder One and Two).

Irrespective of its origins – not having seen the TV series I can't comment on how accurate an adaptation it is – The Sandbaggers novelisation is an effectively downbeat and latterly – during a climactic assault on a mountainous Cyprus stronghold by Sandbagger One (Willie Caine) and a female double-agent – nail-biting little spy thriller. (Randall Masteller at Spy Guys and Gals reckons so too, though he thinks less highly of the subsequent loose spin-off novel The Sandbaggers: Think of a Number, written by Donald Lancaster – an alias of Australian mystery novelist William Marshall – and published by Corgi in 1980.) It's also quite uncommon these days: it's been out of print for decades and there are a scant few copies available online. But even more scarce, and little-remarked upon – this Mystery*File review being (heretofore) practically the only online commentary – are the handful of novels Ian Mackintosh penned in the late-1960s before he embarked on his TV career – and it's these that kindled my particular interest in the writer.

From 1967 to 1970 Mackintosh published five crime and spy thrillers. Each received just the one printing – by Robert Hale in hardback in the UK – and each is so scarce that there isn't a single copy of any of them currently for sale online. Their titles in order are:

A Slaying in September (Hale, 1967)
Count Not the Cost (Hale, 1967)
A Drug Called Power (Hale, 1968)
The Man from Destiny (Hale, 1969)
The Brave Cannot Yield (Hale, 1970)

I blogged about one of them, Count Not the Cost, in passing a couple of months ago, as part of this Barbara and Eileen Walton cover gallery. I acquired that ex-library copy from fabled crime fiction book dealer Jamie Sturgeon last year, and since then have taken three other Mackintosh novels off his hands (the only one I'm now missing is A Drug Called Power). What's remarkable about them – aside from their scarcity – at least the two that I've read thus far (the first two), is how extraordinarily, deliciously bad they are: overwrought, hysterical, melodramatic and laced with the kind of painfully over-extended metaphors that cause editors to wake in the wee small hours bathed in sweat. Compare The Sandbaggers novelisation, with its pared-back prose and attempts at naturalistic dialogue, with A Slaying in September or Count Not the Cost and it's almost as if they're the work of a different writer, although in Burnside's romantic obsession with Sandbagger Two – the chilly, remote but beautiful Laura Dickens – there are admittedly hints of Mackintosh's earlier writing.

Indeed, so terrible are these books that they frequently teeter over into brilliance. Certainly they're compulsively readable, and part of me wonders whether they weren't Mackintosh's idea of an extended situationist prank (largely at the expense of Robert Hale, who never managed to sell paperback rights on any of the novels). (There's an inscription by Mackintosh in one of Jamie's own copies of the novels which suggests that might not be far from the truth.) Three of them – A Slaying in September, A Drug Called Power and The Brave Cannot Yield – star private investigator-turned-scourge of the drugs underworld Tim Blackgrove, but the (anti)heroes of the other two novels – Rod Holt (Count Not the Cost) and Danny Mason (The Man from Destiny) – are so similar to Blackgrove as to be almost indistinguishable: grey-eyed, pale, haunted loners prone to excessive violence who are nonetheless (reluctant) media celebrities.

As you may have gathered, I've become ever-so-slightly obsessed by these bloody awful but strangely beguiling books; so over the next few posts I'll be taking a closer look at them, starting with Mackintosh's debut, A Slaying in September.

William Haggard's Colonel Charles Russell Spy Novels in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

It's been nearly two years since I last devoted a post to William Haggard, an author fellow spy novelist Anthony Price once memorably described as "more right wing than even me!" But though I haven't written about Haggard at any length for a while – and in truth am not planning to do so now either – I have been quietly collecting cheap first editions of his Colonel Charles Russell spy series when I see them. I must have acquired another five since I posted this cover gallery in 2011, and it so happens that three of them meet the criteria for my recently established British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s gallery (in which I'd already deposited a pair of Haggard covers: The Bitter Harvest, 1971, and Yesterday's Enemy, 1975) – i.e. they're thrillers, and they were published in the '70s. And since as of Friday British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s needed just three books to bring the number of covers therein up to 110, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to blog about them, however briefly. And they are:

The Old Masters, the fifteenth instalment in the twenty-six-book Colonel Russell series, published in hardback by Cassell in 1973, jacket design by Design Practitioners. I can't recall now where I bought this copy – or indeed an increasing number of the secondhand books I've bought over the past few years and then stowed on my 'to-blog-about' shelves. I have a feeling I got it from Eastbourne's excellent Tome (where secondhand books are two pound a pop), so for the sake of expediency let's just say that is where I got it, and that I got these ones there too:

The Scorpion's Tail, the sixteenth Colonel Russell novel, published in hardback by Cassell in 1975, jacket photograph by Michael Lyster and further credited to the Zoological Society of London, and:

The Poison People, the eighteenth Colonel Russell novel, published in hardback by Cassell in 1978, dust jacket uncredited. Interesting thing about this one is, as noted by commenter 'faithful researcher' in March last year, the plot hinges on the death of a chap named Harry Maxim – which makes ones wonder if perhaps Gavin Lyall read Haggard.

I've loads more additions to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s lined up, but next I'm turning to another writer of '70s spy fiction – of the televisual variety.

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer in Black Money and The Underground Man: British First Editions (Collins, 1966 / 1971)

As is her occasional wont, Patti Nase Abbott is running another of her author-specific Friday's Forgotten Books round-ups today, the author this time being Ross Macdonald. The previous recipient of this honour was Patricia Highsmith, and for that Friday's Forgotten Books – in September – I managed not only a review of Deep Water (and an accompanying prolix account of how I came into possession of a first edition of that novel) but a Highsmith shelf porn post and a Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery too. By comparison, my contribution to the Ross Macdonald round-up is paltry: I haven't had a chance to read any Macdonald so you won't be getting a review, so all I can proffer is a pair of recently bought British first editions, both of them late-ish instalments in Macdonald's eighteen-novel Lew Archer private eye series, both impulse online purchases (they were cheap, basically) and both sporting striking restricted-palette dust jacket designs. Like this one:

The sadly uncredited jacket wrapping the 1966 Collins edition of Black Money, the thirteenth Lew Archer novel. Quite an uncommon edition this one – there are just four copies available on AbeBooks at present – which is partly what prompted me to acquire this copy from Brighton book dealer Alan White – that and that it's reportedly one of the better novels in the series, a "watershed", according to Thrilling Detective, "modelled on (or a homage to) Macdonald's favourite book, The Great Gatsby".

Perhaps more acclaimed, though, is this:

The Underground Man, the sixteenth Archer novel, seen here in its – not especially uncommon, which is why I managed to nab this copy for a few quid – 1971 Collins edition, with a dust jacket designed by the unfortunately named Roy Belcher. Frequently pinpointed as one of, if not the, best Lew Archer novels – see, for example, Malcolm Forbes' Daily Beast review, or Prof. William Marling's Detnovel.com article – it was reviewed on publication by the author Eudora Welty, whose laudatory front-page New York Times Review piece (excerpted here) helped break Macdonald into the mainstream, turning The Underground Man, according to Robert L. Gale in A Ross Macdonald Companion, into "Macdonald's biggest bestseller".

In keeping with the general drift of book cover design from the mid-1960s on, post-Black Money the dust jackets of the Collins editions of four of the five remaining Lew Archer novels – The Instant Enemy (1968), The Goodbye Look (1969), Sleeping Beauty (1973) and The Blue Hammer (1976) – were photographic in nature – the exception being The Underground Man, the wrapper of which is very much of a piece with that of Black Money: an arresting, simplified design using bold blocks of colour. But as the two books fall either side of the dividing line between my two galleries – Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s and the recently established British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s – I've added Black Money to the former (under "Designer Unknown" down the bottom) and The Underground Man to the latter, thus illustrating the point I made in the introduction to British Thriller Book Cover Design that the division between design styles of particular eras isn't as clear cut as one might suppose.

I guess those four Collins editions with the photographic covers would have been a better fit for British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s than The Underground Man, but I don't own any of them (my Ross Macdonald collection is highly selective, comprising just a handful of books). I do, however, own this:

The 1971 second impression of the 1966 Fontana paperback edition of the debut Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, which I bought over three years ago in Kim's Bookshop in Arundel. Fontana – Collins' paperback imprint – introduced this style of photographic cover design across their range of Macdonald titles in the early '70s, all variations on the same titillating theme of a close-up of part of a woman's body in conjunction with a target or a gun or a badge or somesuch. This one appears to feature the woman's buttocks – which, as I'm sure many would agree, makes the cover eminently suitable for the load of old arse that is British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. (I thank you.)

Next: HAGGARD.

Andrew York, George V. Higgins, Brian Garfield and Charles McCarry in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

When I established Existential Ennui's new permanent page, British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s, at the end of last week, I did so partly with the purpose in mind that it would afford me the opportunity to blog about some of the many secondhand books I've collected but haven't yet found the time to read (and probably won't for a while), thus at least allowing me to clear them from my groaning 'to blog about' shelves and instead move them to boxes in the loft – my reasoning being that though they may be out of (direct) sight, I can always refer to their posts on Existential Ennui when I'm pondering what to read next. Of course, what will probably happen is I'll forget all about this and instead do what I usually do when pondering what to read next, which is to stand before my bookcases (often in my pants) and study the books therein; but that's the idea, anyway. Cases in point are the books below, all of them by authors already represented in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. And they are:

The Dominator by Andrew York – an alias of author Christopher Nicole – published in hardback by Hutchinson in 1969, jacket photograph by George Coral. This is the fifth novel in York's nine-book series starring Jonas Wilde, a.k.a. the Eliminator, and not only is it now in the British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s gallery, I've also added it to this Jonas Wilde cover gallery, where a number of other George Coral wrappers can be found (Coral's work can also be found on the jacket of the 1968 Jonathan Cape edition of Kingsley Amis's I Want it Now). Strictly speaking, as it was published in 1969 it really falls outside the purview of the former, but stylistically I'd say it's very much a child of the '70s rather than the '60s, so I'm bunging it in anyway, alongside the 1984 Severn House edition of York's non-Wilde novel The Combination, which sports a jacket photograph (of a mosque in Isfahan, Iran) by Michael Lancaster, and which I picked up on holiday in Suffolk.

The Digger's Game by George V. Higgins, published in hardback by Secker & Warburg in 1973, jacket design by Tom Simmonds. Higgins has made a few prior appearances on Existential Ennui, the last time being in 2011; The Digger's Game was his second novel, following 1970s's classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I blogged about in its 1972 Secker edition back in 2010, and which also boasts a Tom Simmonds dust jacket, beneath which The Digger's Game now resides in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s. And very fetching they both look too.

The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry, published by Hutchinson in 1975, jacket illustration by Ian Robertson (who also illustrated the wrappers of the Collins editions of Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare). This is the spy novel sequel to McCarry's debut, The Miernik Dossier, which I wrote about in its 1974 Hutchinson edition in 2011 in relation to how plagiarist Quentin Rowan had nicked chunks of McCarry's – and other authors' – novels for his debut novel Assassin of Secrets – The Tears of Autumn being, I believe, one of the McCarry books Rowan lifted passages from. Rowan later turned his experiences as a plagiarist into, you guessed it, a book, which was published last year to little acclaim.

Death Sentence by Brian Garfield, published by Macmillan in 1976, jacket photograph by Steve Puplett. Another sequel here, this time to Garfield's 1972 classic Death Wish, which I wrote about last year in its 1973 Hodder & Stoughton edition. The wrapper of this one intrigues me, as in its styling and setting it seems to be playing on the Michael Winner-directed Charles Bronson-starring 1974 film adaptation of Death Wish. A natural thing for a publisher wishing to shift books to do, I suppose, even though Garfield's Death Wish is a far superior best to its movie offspring: challenging, nuanced and thought-provoking as opposed to undemanding, bludgeoning and ham-fisted. And by the sounds of this Pulp Serenade review, Death Sentence is just as good, "a desolate but distinguished suspense novel".

There'll be further additions to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s over the coming days and weeks, including a couple of covers from books by the subject of my next post: Ross Macdonald.