Manning Coles, Let the Tiger Die (Hodder, 1948)

No. 1 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do.

What is it?
A British first edition of Let the Tiger Die by Manning Coles, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1948 – the eighth in Coles' twenty-six-book series of novels starring British Intelligence agent Tommy Hambledon.

Who designed the dust jacket?
Ethel "Bip" Pares.

Where and when did I buy it?
At the Lewes Book Fair, a couple of years ago.

Why did I buy it?
Manning Coles is – or rather are; 'Manning Coles' is the nom de plume of two writers, Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles – one of a number of classic spy fiction authors whose work I'm interested in and intend to try at some point, so when I spotted this first edition on a dealer's table and then looked it up on my phone and discovered that it's rather scarce in first, and especially so in its wrapper (and still is today; I can only see a couple of – quite pricey – jacketed firsts available online at present), I couldn't resist, especially when the dealer knocked a few quid off the already-reasonable asking price.

Have I read it yet?
No.

Books I Haven't Got Round to Blogging About

What with a somewhat overfull slate of freelance editing and writing work and the usual demands of family and home life, I find myself rather pushed for time of late, and as a result blogging has had to take a back seat (as may be surmised by the fact that this is only the fifth post I've managed this year). I can't see any letup anytime soon either, which means that there probably won't be too many extensive posts on Existential Ennui for the foreseeable future.

However, I have begun to miss blogging – it sometimes feels like it's the only thing that keeps me sane – and so rather than abandon Existential Ennui entirely, I thought I'd keep the site ticking over with some pithy posts showcasing books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – of which there are a good many sitting on my shelves. I'm not quite sure what these posts will consist of, but I imagine they'll be along the lines of a picture (or two, or three) of a book I've plucked randomly from my shelves, some bibliographical info about that book (including, naturally, dust jacket or cover designer), where I bought it (if I can remember) and, er, that's probably about it; after all, the whole point is to do something that doesn't take up much time.

How frequent these proposed posts will be remains to be seen, but I'm hoping I'll be able to knock out at least a couple a week. More soon.

I, Spy: Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958) and Ways of Escape (1980)

For anyone interested in exploring the geneses of and backgrounds to Graham Greene's novels (not to mention his plays, screenplays and travelogues), I can highly recommend Ways of Escape (Bodley Head, 1980, dust jacket design by Michael Harvey). A kind of sequel to A Sort of Life (1971) – Greene's autobiography, which covers his life up to the age of twenty-seven and the publication of his fourth novel, Stamboul Train (1932) – Ways of Escape is part memoir, part book-by-book exploration of the author's backlist, drawing on his introductions to the 1970–1982 Bodley Head/Heinemann Collected Edition of his works along with assorted essays for assorted newspapers and magazines. I read the whole thing last year (after buying a first edition for a fiver at the Lewes Book Fair) and touched on it briefly in my review of The Ministry of Fear (1943) and my year-end books top ten; but I'm minded to dwell on it a little more in regard to another Greene book I read last year:

Our Man in Havana (Heinemann, 1958, dust jacket design by Donald Green – said wrapper also to be found, naturally, in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s). The story of a middle-aged Havana-based vacuum-cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, who winds up spying for British Intelligence – after a fashion; he fabricates all of his reports – Our Man in Havana also featured in my top ten books of the year, placing at number ten, just below the ninth placed Ways of Escape in fact. While I enjoyed it, I'd venture that it isn't as rich a piece of fiction as, say, the aforementioned The Ministry of Fear, or The Quiet American (1955), or The Human Factor (1978). However, like those novels it does deal with matters of espionage – a subject Greene had plenty of experience with, having spied for the Secret Service in Africa during the war – and in many ways is perhaps more illuminating on the realities of spying than any of them.

Greene notes in Ways of Escape that Our Man in Havana started life as an outline for a film, written shortly after the war at the request of the Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti but never developed into a full screenplay. (In the event the book was filmed – after publication – by British director Carol Reed.) "I thought I would write a Secret Service comedy based on what I had learned from my work in 1934–4 of German Abwehr activity in Portugal," Greene explains, before continuing:

I had returned from Freetown – and my futile efforts to run agents into the Vichy colonies – and been appointed to Kim Philby's sub-section of our Secret Service, which dealt with counter-espionage in the Iberian peninsula. My responsibility was Portugal. There those Abwehr officers who had not been suborned already by our own service spent much of their time sending home completely erroneous reports based on information received from imaginary agents. It was a paying game, especially when expenses and bonuses were added to the cypher's salary, and a safe one. The fortunes of the German Government were now in decline, and it is wonderful how the conception of honour alters in the atmosphere of defeat.

I had sometimes thought, in dealing with Portugal, of how easily in West Africa I could have played a similar game, if I had not been content with my modest salary. I had learned that nothing pleased the services at home more than the addition of a card to their intelligence files. For example there was a report on a Vichy airfield in French Guinea – the agent was illiterate and could not count over ten (the number of his fingers and thumbs); nor did he know any of the points of the compass except the east (he was Mohammedan). A building on the airfield which he said housed an army tank was, I believed from other evidence, a store for old boots. I had emphasised the agent's disqualifications, so that I was surprised when I earned a rating for his report of 'most valuable'. There was no rival organisation in the field, except SOE, with whose reports mine could be compared, and I had no more belief in SOE reports than in my own – they probably came from the same source. Somebody in an office in London had been enabled to add a line or two to an otherwise blank card – that seemed to be the only explanation.

So it was that experiences in my little shack in Freetown recalled in a more comfortable room off St James's gave me the idea of what twelve years later in 1958 became Our Man in Havana.

In their absurdity and especially their apparent veracity, Greene's recollections of spying in Ways of Escape and their fictionalised versions in Our Man in Havana remind me of W. Somerset Maugham's magnificent Ashenden, or, The British Agent (1928). Admittedly there's less humour in the latter, but despite the differences in tone (although less marked differences in the clarity of their prose; Greene and Maugham were both beautifully clear writers), in its own way Our Man in Havana strikes me as being as authentic a (fictional) depiction of spying as Ashenden. And regarding the lighter tenor of Our Man in Havana, as Greene reasons, "It seemed to me that either the Foreign Office or the Intelligence Service had amply merited a little ridicule."

Incidentally, the chapter on Our Man in Havana in Ways of Escape is revealing in ways entirely unrelated to espionage as well, not least when Greene recounts the episode in Cuba when he tried to score some cocaine. And equally incidentally, the copy of Our Man in Havana pictured in this post is a first edition (and first impression) I bought on eBay last year, partly because I wanted to read the book, partly because I love Donald Green's wrapper, but also because this particular copy bears the ownership signature of a Georgina Greene on the front free endpaper. I haven't been able to establish any kind of familial connection with Graham Greene, but Greene did have quite an extended family – he had five brothers and sisters – so you never know. In any case, as a collector of books himself, in particular signed editions, Graham Greene would surely have approved of the purchase.

Bandits by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1987)

According to Elmore Leonard, Bandits (Viking, 1987, dust jacket illustration by James Hussey, jacket design by Bet Ayer), much like his previous novel, Glitz (1985), grew out of an idea for a film. (Glitz had begun life, bizarrely enough, as an Ernest Tidyman screenplay for a Sidney Poitier-starring sequel to In the Heat of the Night.) Leonard told John Williams for Williams's 1991 book on crime fiction and America, Into the Badlands: "Bandits came about when a film producer said, 'How would you like to write the script of a big caper movie: several old pros get together for one last heist,' and I said, 'Sure, but I want to write it as a book first and I want to set it in New Orleans.'"

Leonard's researcher, Gregg Sutter, however, remembers it differently. In an article for the spring 1986 issue of The Armchair Detective ("Advance Man: Researching Elmore Leonard's Novels Part 2"), Sutter explains how Leonard was hired by TV producer David Gerber "to write a cop action-adventure series – with total freedom to select subject matter, characters, and location". The show, Wilder, never made it past the script stage, "But just as Split Images spawned Cat Chaser, Wilder would provide the foundation for Bandits."

Whatever the case, Bandits is a curious entry in Leonard's canon – "perhaps a little over-researched and occasionally uncertain in tone" in Williams's (fair) assessment, certainly one of the writer's more overtly political novels. Starring one Jack Delaney – thief (his speciality is turning over hotel rooms), ex-con, and another in a long line of lovable Leonard rogues (see also Jack Ryan from The Big Bounce and Unknown Man No. 89, Ernest Stickley, Jr. from Swag and Stick, and Jack Foley from Out of Sight and Road Dogs) – the story deals with the struggle between the Nicaraguan Sandanistas and Contras, except as already noted it's set in New Orleans and, this being an Elmore Leonard novel, there's a sizeable score to be taken down too.

"[P]lanning the book, I had to think of something for these guys to steal," Leonard told Williams, "so I read in the paper about money being collected privately for the Contras. And I thought that this money could be sitting in one place and these guys could find out about it so I introduced the ex-nun who enlists them and told them what was going on down in Nicaragua. But I've been asked if I wrote that book to get my political views across. I didn't. It was only something for these guys to steal. Of course you do get politically involved when you have to explain what's going on and you have to show some passion for one side or the other... and of course it's going to be for the former nun against the Contras."

For sure, by the novel's close it's pretty clear where Leonard's sympathies lie, but then the book is all about choosing sides; more than once Jack wonders which side the various protagonists are on, indeed whether he himself is "on the side he thought he was on or on a different side". That Jack eventually reaches the same conclusions as his creator shouldn't come as a huge surprise – his deliberations reflect Leonard's own, the author literally working things out for himself on the page as the novel progresses – but the getting there is engrossing, and as a glimpse of a questing and inquisitive creative mind at work, Bandits has much to recommend it.

Elmore Leonard's next book after Bandits was Touch – at least, his next published book; Touch was actually written in the 1970s. The next book he wrote, however, was Freaky Deaky (1988).

NB: Proffered for this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Glitz by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1985)

Glitz (1985) was Elmore Leonard's first major bestseller – "the book that put him over the top", as Leonard's researcher Gregg Sutter put it in an article in the spring 1986 issue of The Armchair Detective ("Advance Man: Researching Elmore Leonard's Novels Part 2"). Leonard had had successful novels before, and especially so as his career entered its fourth decade in the 1980s – John Williams, in his 1991 examination of crime fiction and America, Into the Badlands, notes that "Stick [1983]... was the first of his books to hit really big" – but the rapturous reception the writer's twenty-third novel received was of a different order altogether: the American first edition reprinted half a dozen times, no doubt helped along by a glowing review in the New York Times by Stephen King ("Glitz may be the best crime novel of the year").

Why Glitz should have been quite so successful I'm not really sure. It's a good Elmore Leonard novel – which is to say it's by definition a cut above much other crime fiction – but he'd written better ones before: LaBrava (1983), Split Images (1981), City Primeval (1980), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), others besides. (I would include the brilliant Touch, which I read – and loved – last year, but though written in the 1970s, that one wasn't actually published until 1987.) Maybe it was the surface glamour of the thing, from its title to its choice of locales – sunny Puerto Rico and the bright shiny lights of Atlantic City's casinos, a far cry from the urban grit of Leonard's Detroit stories and his laconically sun-drenched but still low rent Florida tales.

Certainly the story is in keeping with previous novels, taking the form of a meandering but deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a typically deranged criminal, in this instance loathsome rapist and murderer Teddy Magyk, and a male lead, convalescing (after a shooting incident) Miami cop Vincent Mora, who's cut from the same cloth as prior Leonard protagonists like Bryan Hurd (Split Images) and Raymond Cruz (City Primeval). Except that Vincent can lay claim to a rather different heritage: he was originally written as a role for actor Sidney Poitier.

As Gregg Sutter explains in his article, Glitz actually began life as a script for a sequel to Poitier's 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. Leonard was hired to work on Shaft author Ernest Tidyman's initial treatment, which had been deemed "too much like the original book and movie", but as the screenplay developed, the notion of the film being a sequel was dropped and Poitier's character became first a Philadelphia cop "drawn into conflict with people in high places", then either an "Atlantic City cop" or "a homicide investigator for Atlantic County", and finally "Vincent Mora, a retired Detroit cop living in San Juan, Puerto Rico". At which point, Poitier realised "the movie was turning into a book", and told Leonard to "Go write a book". Which Leonard did.

None of which, I realise, explains why Glitz became such a huge bestseller, but it's an interesting bit of backstory at least.

The copy of Glitz pictured in this post is a 1985 British Viking first edition of the book – as opposed to the 1985 American Arbor House first edition – which I picked up in Colin Page Antiquarian Books in Brighton last year for a fiver. It was part of a big collection of crime fiction the bookshop had only just bought in and put on the shelves – as mentioned in this Patricia Highsmith post in September – and which also included a British first edition of Elmore Leonard's next novel, which I also bought for a fiver – a novel which like Glitz started life as an idea for a film: Bandits (1987).

NB: Proffered for this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Desmond Cory's Mr. Pilgrim in Pilgrim at the Gate and Pilgrim on the Island (Muller, 1958 / 1959)

I've read just over half a dozen Desmond Cory novels since I first came across the somewhat overlooked thriller writer four years ago – largely entries in his Johnny Fedora spy series – and while I've enjoyed all of them, none have been quite up there with the first Cory I read, the beautifully written, curiously languid Undertow (the twelfth Fedora instalment, and the first in the Feramantov quintet). The early Corys I've tried – Secret Ministry (1951), Intrigue (1954) – have been pacy enough (almost madcap in the case of Secret Ministry), while the later ones – Hammerhead (1963), Feramontov (1966) – have been dense and quite compelling... but they haven't been Undertow – by definition, obviously, but also in terms of literary accomplishment.

And then I read the two novels featuring lesser known Cory protagonist Mr. Pilgrim: Pilgrim at the Gate (Muller, 1958) and Pilgrim on the Island (Muller, 1959). I'd been wanting to try them for a while and actually laid my hands on a very nice, inexpensive first edition of Pilgrim on the Island three years ago, but Pilgrim at the Gate proved rather more elusive in first (as is frequently the case with Cory novels) – until last year fellow Cory enthusiast Chris Hiscocks pointed me in the direction of a cheap ex-library copy in Australia. The copy in question is actually a Shakespeare Head edition – the Australian publishing arm of Frederick Muller – and is missing its front endpaper, but crucially it does still have its splendid S. R. Boldero-designed dust jacket (which has taken its place in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside Boldero's jacket for Pilgrim on the Island).

For the uninitiated – which I imagine will be most people reading this post – Mr. Pilgrim is a kind of postwar Scarlet Pimpernel, except that rather than smuggling aristocrats out of France he spirits defectors out of East Germany. Or at least that's his stated MO; in fact in the first book, Pilgrim at the Gate, he has a more vengeful purpose in mind in that he's really hunting former Nazis hiding out in the East, appropriating a West Berlin travel agency set up by Nazi war criminal Egon Hoffman, Pilgrim Tours (the name being "A quaint coincidence," as Pilgrim puts it shortly before killing Hoffman) in order to facilitate this highly personal mission (Pilgrim is a concentration camp survivor).

The adventure which follows is absorbing enough, but the best things about the book are Pilgrim himself – who, by dint of his palpable absence throughout most of the novel, takes on an almost mythic countenance – and the occasional philosophical jousts – verbal and physical – he engages in when he does appear. One discussion in particular, about the German civilian population's acceptance of Nazism and how totalitarian regimes thrive on innocence, is fascinating:

"Innocence demands a closed system; demands laws it doesn't have to question. Communism is an excellent answer. Or Catholicism. Or Nazism. That's the whole point. You can accept any of these, if you accept innocence as the inevitable lot of mankind."

"Wouldn't a better word be... ignorance?"

"Oh no. Ignorance is merely lack of knowledge. But innocence implies the acceptance of a belief to the exclusion of all others; it's a lack of understanding."

Trudy took a deep breath. "The alternative, though, is not to believe in anything. To treat life purely as a question."

"Life is a question," said Mr. Pilgrim. "Innocence won't accept that awful fact. And that's why innocence is dangerous."

These philosophical and political discourses continue in the second novel, Pilgrim on the Island, which deals with Mr. Pilgrim's efforts to extract East German Under-Minister of Propaganda Otto Berendt (genuinely extract in this instance, rather than assassinate) and which is an even better book than its forbear: engrossing, deeply felt and on a literary par, I believe, with Undertow. Here, though, the subject is invariably Communism:

"Communism will succeed, though, in spite of everything you and your friends can do."

Mr. Pilgrim shrugged. "We're not so important as you suppose. Communism will succeed if the people find it satisfactory; and if they don't, it won't."

"They do find it satisfactory."

"I'm one of them," said Mr. Pilgrim. "And I don't."

Just as compelling are the political manoeuvrings Berendt becomes embroiled in as his opponents move against him – one extended sequence in a Committee meeting where Berendt realises the game is up is utterly gripping – and the practical manoeuvrings Mr. Pilgrim engages in as he tries to spirit Berendt away – whilst also simultaneously using him to identify the instigators of the coup. That the thing culminates in a Mexican standoff, with subterfuges uncovered, motives laid bare and guns pointed, is merely the delicious icing on what is by any standards an excellent – and lovingly baked – slice of espionage.

Linked in Patricia Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books round-up, 5/2/16.