Singular Points of View: Patricia Highsmith and A Dog's Ransom (Heinemann, 1972)

NB: Linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books, 19/6/15.

Patricia Highsmith wrote all of her novels and short stories in the third-person singular (past tense), arguing – in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966, revised 1981) – that "first-person singular is the most difficult form in which to write a novel". She added:

I have bogged down twice in first-person-singular books, so emphatically that I abandoned any idea of writing the books. I don't know what was the matter, except that I got sick and tired of writing the pronoun "I", and I was plagued with an idiotic feeling that the person telling the story was sitting at a desk writing it. Fatal! Also, I have quite a bit of introspection in my heroes, and to write all this in the first person makes them sound like nasty schemers, which of course they are, but they seem less so if some all-knowing author is telling what is going on in their heads.

Highsmith also preferred "two points of view in a novel, but I don't always have them". In most cases where she elected not to write from two (usually male) viewpoints, she chose a single (also usually male) viewpoint – for example Deep Water (1957), This Sweet Sickness (1960), The Tremor of Forgery (1969) and all bar one (Ripley's Game, 1974) of the five Tom Ripley novels, reasoning that "keeping a single point of view throughout a book... increases the intensity of the story – and intensity can and should offset a possible monotony of a one-person viewpoint". But very occasionally she wrote a book from more than two points of view. A Suspension of Mercy (alias The Story-Teller, 1965) would be an example of this, as would this book:

A Dog's Ransom, published in hardback in the UK by Heinemann in 1972. In the opening chapters the story unfolds from the viewpoint of Ed Reynolds, a well-to-do New Yorker on the receiving end of anonymous poison pen letters; but once Ed and his wife Greta's French poodle, Lisa, is dognapped,  Highsmith introduces Patrolman Clarence Duhamell, a well-meaning but naive and, so it proves, inept cop who makes it his personal mission to retrieve Lisa. And then, just as it looks as though Highsmith will be uncharacteristically withholding the identity of the dognapper and crafting a whodunnit – as she did in probably her weakest novel, A Game for the Living (1958) – she introduces her third POV character, one of her classic creeps, the objectionable Kenneth Rowajinski.

I suppose the prior Highsmith creep Rowajinski most reminded me of was Melchior Kimmel from The Blunderer (1954), but in his nasty hobby of poison penning, Rowajinski also brought to my mind Tom in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), who in the opening stages of that book is engaged in a spot of mail fraud – "no more than a practical joke, really," as Highsmith/Tom puts it, "Good clean sport" – and considering giving one of his victims "a good scare by telephone to put the fear of god into him". But anyway: the multiple vantage points of A Dog's Ransom and its vision of a New York crippled by crime and corruption afford the novel a kind of state-of-the-nation feel – which, according to Highsmith's biographer, Andrew Wilson (in Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, 2003), was precisely Highsmith's intention.

This and other aspects of the novel are explored by John Norris in his thoughtful review of A Dog's Ransom from last week (coincidentally both John and I happened to have read the same book at around the same time). I'm not sure if John actually liked the book – I'm not sure I did either – but he like me was certainly fascinated by it. Reviews at the time of publication were mixed, however; though Brigid Brophy in The Listener thought the novel "a virtuoso piece" and praised it for "taking the reader deep into the ironies of his own ambivalence", Mary Borg in the New Statesman highlighted the "glaring unlikeliness" of the plot, while the Times Literary Supplement called the book "a mechanical exercise in self-pastiche, employing all [Highsmith's] familiar devices and rehearsing most of her familiar obsessions, but with none of the vigour, inventiveness or intensity which in her best work makes those devices and obsessions seem so rivetting".

"Such reviews," wrote Andrew Wilson in Beautiful Shadow, "compelled Graham Greene to write to Highsmith expressing his disgust at the stupidity of the critics and admiration for the book itself, noting that it was 'one of the best and most complex of your novels'." Greene was a fan of Highsmith's work – as was she of his; he's one of the very few authors she namechecks in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction – and the two corresponded for years. Greene also provided the foreword to Highsmith's first collection of short stories, Eleven (alias The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, 1970) – as quoted on the back of the Heinemann edition of A Dog's Ransom – and I'll be taking a look at that book in my next post.

The Bookshelves of the Two-Year-Old Daughter of a Chronic Book Collector

Speaking of Edie, as I was last week, I thought it might be instructive to see what the bookshelves of the two-year-old daughter of an inveterate book collector look like. A bit like this, in fact:

Those are the shelves in the alcove in Edie's bedroom. Quite a lot of books crammed in there; mostly picture books; mostly, but not exclusively, foraged from the charity shops of Lewes and, occasionally, Brighton. Favourites – both Edie's and mine and Rachel's – among that little lot include Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali's Jemmy Button (subtitle The Boy That Darwin Returned Home, Templar, 2013); Heapy & Heap's Very Little Red Riding Hood (David Fickling, 2013); Helen Ward's Wonderful Life (Templar, 2007); and Jason Hook and Ilaria Demonti's Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat (V&A, 2015; more on that one soon). Also firm favourites with Edie are Tony Millionaire's Little and Large (2005) and That Darn Yarn (both Dark Horse, 2005), which are on the top shelf; those actually come from my collection of Millionaire's various Sock Money works, but after reading them to Edie it became evident they really belonged on her shelves, and now she asks for "Sock Monkey" on a regular basis.

At the bottom of the alcove are more books, and yet more in a little bookcase next to it. Favourites among that lot include the Little Miss and Mr. Men box sets (the latter with Anna out of Frozen sitting atop it) and Judith Kerr's Bedtime Tales set, especially The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat. And there are other entries in the Mog series scattered throughout Edie's book collection, including here:

A shelving unit downstairs in the lounge which originally housed some of my records but now houses rather fewer of my records and rather more of Edie's books and toys. Still, I only have myself to blame there...

Eastbourne Book Buys: Victor Canning's Birds of a Feather (Heinemann, 1985) and the Last of Tome

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 12 June 2015.

We had a family outing to Eastbourne a couple of weeks ago, the highlight of which was undoubtedly Edie's first proper experience of paddling in the sea:

Which, after a cautious start – she was initially reluctant to put her feet down on the wet squelchy sand at the water's edge – entailed much squealing and dashing back and forth into the lapping waves. But as much fun as that was, almost as thrilling in its own way, at least for me (although rather less so, I imagine, for Edie and Rachel), was the acquisition of this:

A 1985 Heinemann first edition of Victor Canning's Birds a Feather, which I bought in Eastbourne secondhand bookshop institution Camilla's, priced £4.50. The final novel in Canning's Birdcage espionage series, it was the only one I was missing in first (non-ex-library copies are quite hard to come by), so when I spied it on the shelves in the basement of Camilla's – luckily it was on one of the higher shelves, otherwise it would've been obscured by the piles of books that sit on the floor in front of the lower third of the bookcases in the basement – I was delighted. Naturally I've added it to the Existential Ennui Victor Canning Birdcage First Edition Book Cover Gallery and to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s.

But while Camilla's marches on in much the same fashion as it ever has – well, in my experience, in the half-dozen years I've been going there – another, more recent Eastbourne secondhand bookshop is breathing its last. Tome, which opened its doors on Terminus Road (an apt location in retrospect) near the seafront a few years ago, is closing – indeed may already have closed by the time I publish this post. I was alerted to this sorry state of affairs by Existential Ennui reader Gerald, so the trip to Eastbourne was motivated at least in part by a desire to have a last look at Tome's wares. Books were being packed in boxes on the day we were there, but there were still lots on display, all priced at 50p rather than the usual £2 (I do wonder whether that pricing policy was a factor in the closure), and though there wasn't anything I desperately wanted – I've raided Tome's shelves too thoroughly on a number of prior occasions – I still managed to find a few things of interest:

On the bottom row, a 1965 Hodder & Stoughon first edition of The Third Side of the Coin, Francis Clifford's tenth novel – quite uncommon in first that one – and a 1968 Jonathan Cape first edition of The Killing Season, the debut novel by John Redgate, alias actor Adam Kennedy; and on the top row, a 1981 Cape first edition of Once a Spy, Rennie Airth's second novel – also uncommon, not to mention pricey, in first (at least sixty quid on AbeBooks) – and a 1991 Picador first edition of The Mexican Tree Duck, James Crumley's fifth novel. A good illustration of the kinds of unexpected delights Tome invariably offered up, and why the place will be sorely missed. And as further illustration, here's a pile of books I bought in Tome last year – including a signed 2006 No Exit Press first of James Sallis's Drive – as photographed on Eastbourne beach shortly after (and posted on Twitter, but not, heretofore, on Existential Ennui):

And here's Edie – who at two years old has lived her entire life with Tome in it, to the extent that on one occasion she even ate her lunch in the place (and on another occasion, did a poo there) – photobombing:

Cheerio then, Tome. And thanks for all the books.

Action: The Story of a Violent Comic by Martin Barker (Titan Books, 1990) Feat. Kids Rule OK

There was quite a bit of excitement in British comics circles – and beyond – last week when an eBay auction got underway for a copy of the 23 October 1976 issue of short-lived ultra-violent 1970s weekly British kids' anthology comic Action; within days it had sailed past the thousand pound mark and eventually sold for just north of £2,500 – a remarkable sum considering the issue before it, dated 16 October 1976, offered by the same seller, went for just under sixty quid. But this wasn't just any issue of Action: the 23 October issue was the last one before Action went on hiatus – the comic resumed publication over a month later but in a watered-down form – and the vast majority of copies were pulped, with only a few dozen known to have survived.

A censored version of that 23 October issue formed the basis of the post-hiatus 4 December issue, but at least some of the comic strips appeared as originally intended fourteen years later in this book:

Action: The Story of a Violent Comic, published in hardback by Titan Books in 1990. Compiled and written by Professor Martin Barker, the 288-page book details the history of the comic The Sun newspaper dubbed "The Sevenpenny Nightmare" and presents large chunks of key stories Hookjaw – a blood-soaked blatant Jaws rip-off – Death Game 1999 – a blood-soaked blatant Rollerball rip-off – and Look Out for Lefty – an underclass take on Roy of the Rovers – as well as a small selection of strips from spy thriller Dredger.

Best of all it reprints in its all-too-brief entirety the brutal Kids Rule OK, a bovver-booted dystopia which envisions a world where the adults have all largely carked it and gangs of feral youth reign supreme. Written by Jack Adrian – an alias of Chris Lowder – and drawn by Mike White, the story owes an obvious debt to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, something Adrian acknowledged in his initial notes for the series, as quoted by Martin Barker. But an even more apposite antecedent is Dave Wallis's 1964 novel Only Lovers Left Alive, in which the adults also cark it – at their own hands in this instance – and the unruly teens take over.

Unfortunately, in the years since its publication Action: The Story of a Violent Comic has become almost as elusive as that 23 October issue of Action: there are only around a dozen copies available online at present, and the cheapest of those is nearly sixty quid (most are more like £90 to £100). When I was in charge of the graphic novels department at Titan in the mid-2000s I remember there being a single copy of the book tucked away on the shelves in the library room behind where I sat, and I must admit I did occasionally entertain the notion of 'borrowing' it. In the end, though, I left it where it was (it may even still be there).

Happily, earlier this year I chanced upon a pristine copy in Dave's Books, the next-door-but-one back issue department of Dave's Comics in Brighton, priced at just nine pounds. Which just goes to show that good things eventually come to those who, er, elect not to thieve.

The Tower by P. M. Hubbard: First Edition (Geoffrey Bles, 1967), Book Review

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 29/5/15.

Do authors know when they've written a duff book? Kingsley Amis was in little doubt that he had with I Like it Here (1958), later calling it "a very slipshod, lopsided piece of work". Patricia Highsmith certainly knew she had with A Game for the Living (1958), describing it (in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction) as "the one really dull book I have written". And of A Thirsty Evil (1974), P. M. Hubbard wrote (to the wife of his friend and fellow novelist Alan Kennington) "...it's not one I'm very keen on myself".

I'm a lot keener on A Thirsty Evil than Hubbard was, but I'd be interested to find out what he thought of The Tower. Chances are he would have been as self-effacing about it as he was all his novels – "they are not very good books," he wrote in a letter to critic Tom Jenkins, although he did concede they were "beautifully written" – but in the case of The Tower, he would have had a point.

Published by Geoffrey Bles in 1967 under a stark, strident dust jacket designed by Donald Green (also to be found, naturally, in the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery), The Tower was Hubbard's fifth novel for adults, and the first of three to be issued by Bles (Hubbard's chief publisher to this point had been Michael Joseph). It's also, I think, Hubbard's weakest novel (at least of those that I've read, which is well over half). As one would expect of the author, it's nicely written in that detached, wry, almost arch manner of his, and additionally it boasts some divertingly off-piste word choices – a "bedizened" here, a "pargeted" there. But it lacks either the intensity of A Hive of Glass (1965) or The Holm Oaks (1965), or the charm and vigour of Flush as May (1963) or Picture of Millie (1964).

I wonder if it's the setting that lets the thing down – not in the sense that it's not an intriguing place in and of itself, because it is, at least mildly so: a fictional English village, Coyle, where one night a year the locals build a pyre and parade around with flaming torches held aloft (remind you of anywhere...?). No, it's more the lack of that main character in so many of Hubbard's novels, the British countryside, or rather a discombobulating rustic locale or unusual and unnerving feature of that countryside. For the most part Hubbard confines himself here to Coyle, and so that feeling of a somehow dangerous rurality is missing from the book, although Hubbard tries to counter that by making the eponymous bell tower of St. Udan's church the focus of such action as there is, and at least introduces a superficial sense of unease in the shape of the pyre atop the "tump" (shades of The Wicker Man there).

It doesn't help that Hubbard's lead, John Smith, who lands in Coyle as a result of car trouble, prosaically – and thus appositely – enough, is a rather less tortured soul than others of the author's protagonists. Certainly he's bewitched by a wayward woman, as is the wont of Hubbard's males, but only marginally so, and soon comes to his senses anyway, finding himself a more orthodox romantic interest instead. Hubbard admitted in a subsequent letter to Tom Jenkins that "places mean more to me than people", and it's true that in most of his novels the place is usually more memorable than any of the people; but even by that measure John Smith is an unengaging creation. Perhaps that's why Hubbard named him so: an ordinary name for an ordinary character – albeit one who prompts the odd amusing moniker-related line (for instance,  "...he felt an overpowering urge to tell her that he really was John Smith. Someone had to be") – leading an ordinary – but still readable – book.

An earlier review of The Tower can be found over at The Passing Tramp.

The Holm Oaks by P. M. Hubbard: First Edition (Michael Joseph, 1965), Book Review

NB: Included in Friday's Forgotten Books, 22/5/15.

I haven't read every single one of the eighteen novels that British cult suspense novelist P. M. Hubbard published from 1963–1979, but I have read well over half of them by this point – enough, I reckon, and given everything I've learned about the writer since Book Glutton introduced me to his work four years ago, to venture that The Holm Oaks might be the quintessential Hubbard novel.

It's also one of the scarcest in first (although readily available in print-on-demand or ebook from the Langtail Press): I fortuitously chanced upon a copy of the 1965 Michael Joseph first edition in Tunbridge Wells only very recently, but I should imagine the odds of anyone making a similarly serendipitous discovery are pretty slim, and I don't believe there are any British firsts available online at present (although fellow Hubbard enthusiast Polecat reports that he nabbed one on eBay fairly recently, plus there are one or two extant listings for the US first, published by Atheneum in 1966). Still, scarcity in first is a characteristic of all four of the Hubbard novels published by Joseph, and increasingly so of those published by Geoffrey Bles and Macmillan as well; the number of Hubbard devotees may be small, but I'd hazard the number of Hubbard first editions available to buy is smaller yet.

Happily, since I first wrote about Hubbard in 2011, a further fifteen of his novels have been reissued as ebooks by Orion imprint The Murder Room, so it's now rather easier to read him, if not collect him. And anyone interested in doing so could do a lot worse than starting with The Holm Oaks, so characteristic is it of his oeuvre. There's the preoccupation with an unsettling feature of the British countryside, in this case the eponymous oak tree wood; there's the obsessive romance, with the male lead – Jake Haddon here, who inherits a remote coastal house adjacent to the aforementioned wood and moves in with his wife, Elizabeth, and her sister, Stella – "losing his shit", as Book Glutton once put it – over Carol, the wife of the owner of the wood, Dennis Wainwright; there's the increasingly pervasive but unspecified sense of doom; and there's the dry humour and wry one-liners.

There's also a short stretch where the narrative adopts the jauntier tone of Hubbard's earliest novels (for adults), Flush as May (1963) and Picture of Millie (1964), as Jake and Elizabeth assume the joint mantle of eco-warriors, dashing about the countryside enlisting the aid of councillors and subcommittees in a bid to save the wood from destruction at the hands of Dennis Wainwright; but this doesn't last long; for the most part the book has more in common with the gloomy – but superb – A Hive of Glass (1965) or A Thirsty Evil (1974). However, in regard to that aspect of the plot the novel could almost be seen as a prototypical eco thriller; ornithologist Elizabeth's case for rescuing the wood from Dennis's nefarious designs rests on it being the roosting ground for a night heron, and even Jake argues for the survival of the wood in its own right and not merely because of what he gets up to in it with Carol.

The dust jacket of the Michael Joseph edition was designed by the wonderfully – and strangely appositely – named H. Bridgeman Grimley, and I've added it to the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s page. The Holm Oaks was the last Hubbard novel to be published by Joseph; his next was published by Geoffrey Bles, and I shall be writing about that book very soon.