Existential Ennui

Peter Rabe's From Here to Maternity (Muller, 1955) Heralds an Existential Ennui Hiatus

2013-05-09T06:30:00.000-05:00

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

If there's been a fin-de-siecle feel to my posting of late – tying up long-running series, completing a particular book collection, drawing a (pencil) line under Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s – there's a very definite reason for that, to do with this book:

From Here to Maternity, by Peter Rabe, published in hardback by Frederick Muller in 1955. Rabe is an author I've written about repeatedly, most recently in this series of posts on what Donald E. Westlake reckoned to Rabe's remarkable cult crime fiction. But before Rabe started penning crime thriller originals for (chiefly) Gold Medal, he wrote – and drew, a skill he reportedly picked up working in advertising – From Here to Maternity, a cute if occasionally opaque (in that curious Rabe manner) account of his first wife's pregnancy which began life as an article in McCall's Magazine (the book, not the pregnancy... although I guess the two may well have gone hand in hand).

As the brighter sparks among you will have guessed, the reason the book is pertinent both to me and to Existential Ennui is that my long-suffering girlfriend, Rachel, is currently very heavily pregnant with our first child – so heavily pregnant, in fact, that the due date is tomorrow. Which, if the kid's anything like me – and it is to be fervently hoped (or possibly feared) that that should be the case, else I'll be having words with the milkman (and we don't even have a milkman) – means that she – for she is a she (we think) – will probably turn up in a fortnight's time. But that's immaterial. In practical terms, it's unlikely – although not completely out of the question – that I'll be able to devote any time to blogging even if Baby Louis(e) XIV, "The Sun Princess" elects to spend another few weeks in her mother's womb.

And even if I do manage to squeeze in a post before her royal arrival, looking further ahead, what all this will mean for Existential Ennui post-birth is anyone's guess. Certainly there'll be a hiatus, of an indeterminate length; probably there'll be a gushing missive comprising photos of Firstborn suitably arranged in some kind of ridiculous books-related fashion; hopefully, at some point, there'll be a resumption of books blogging proper, albeit no doubt necessarily scaled back. Who the hell knows though. It's an unpredictable business, this having kids thing. So wish me luck, chums. I shall, I trust, return.

Flush as May by P. M. Hubbard (Michael Joseph, 1963) Joins Beautiful British Book Jackets

2013-05-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

This will be my last addition to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, at least for a little while; I do have some other wrappers I'm still planning to add, but probably not till later in the year. Let's draw a (pencil) line under the page, then, with rather a suitable book given that it's now the month of May:

Flush as May, by P. M. Hubbard. The splendid dust jacket design is by Kenneth Farnhill, an artist already represented in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery by another Hubbard wrapper – for the author's second novel, Picture of Millie (1964) – and by three Agatha Christie wrappers (follow that second link to read a comment by Farnhill's granddaughter, Kate). This is the British first edition, second impression, published by Michael Joseph in April 1963, three months after the first impression. Like many of Hubbard's early novels it's quite uncommon in any kind of first; I won this copy on eBay, beating, I later learned, fellow Hubbard enthusiast John from Pretty Sinister Books by a few pence (sorry John!). It's an ex-library copy, but complete and in very good condition, still sporting the Cambridge Union Society library sign-out sheet:

Hubbard's debut novel, published when he was in his early fifties, Flush as May is set in and around the (fictional) rural community of Lodstone, where the heroine, Margaret Canting, comes across a body whilst out walking one May morning. Reporting her discovery to the village constable, Margaret is alarmed to find when she revisits the scene that the body has vanished, and thereafter recruits the aid of her soon-to-be lover, Jacob Garrod, in getting to the bottom of this case of the disappearing corpse.

It's a conventional murder mystery opening that leads in large part to a conventional murder mystery plot, but there are inklings of the darker Hubbard to come. Early in the book Hubbard writes of the "menace that hung in the fields and streets of Lodstone", and there's a woozy, possibly drug-induced feel to a scene where Garrod gatecrashes a pub get-together on market day, embodied by a magnetic woman who "was like Life-in-Death". The secret that lies at the heart of this curious community is explicitly spelled out late in the novel, and it's here, in the closing stages, as Margaret embarks on an eerie cross-country trek from the churchyard at Lodstone to the Beacon on the downs over neighbouring Ebury, that Hubbard's writing is at its strongest, recalling – or, more accurately, hinting at, given that it precedes those later novels – some of the heightened intensity of A Hive of Glass or A Thirsty Evil.

There's a perceptive review of Flush as May over on the Записки реликтовой рыбы blog, detailing in an admirably clear-eyed fashion why the novel is really only for Hubbard completists. I'm not sure I have much more to add to that, beyond saying that in my limited experience of Hubbard – I've only read six of his eighteen novels thus far – it's perhaps worth noting that the books that seem to work the best, that exert the greatest power, are those that, like the aforementioned A Hive of Glass or A Thirsty Evil, are narrated in the first person; whereas those written in the third person – Flush as May, Picture of Millie – are weaker, suffering from an overabundance of expository dialogue. I'm sure that's a horrible generalisation, however; Hubbard aficionados should feel free to correct me in the comments.

Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (alias Doctor Who and the Daleks) by David Whitaker (Armada, 1965/Target, 1973)

2013-05-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

NB: Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books, 3/5/13.

A couple of years ago I posted a rambling essay on the Doctor Who Target novelisations – my memories of them, how they helped drive and shape my formative reading as a child, how they were my first and in some cases only exposure to many Doctor Who stories, and how chancing upon a stack of them in a Lewes secondhand bookshop led in a roundabout fashion to Existential Ennui becoming a (prolix) books blog. Shortly after that the BBC began reissuing some of the earliest Target paperbacks, with new introductions by, among others, Russell T. Davies, Charlie Higson and Target Who stalwart Terrance Dicks. Perhaps the biggest draw, though, was Neil Gaiman's intro for the new edition of this:

The very first Doctor Who novelisation, Doctor Who and the Daleks, by Who screenwriter David Whitaker. The copy seen here is the original Target edition, published in 1973, which I came across the other week in a Brighton junk shop; it's essentially the same as the 2011 BBC edition, with the same Chris Achilleos cover, although obviously minus the Neil Gaiman intro. But as Neil notes in that later intro, the Target paperback wasn't the first edition of the book; it was originally published in 1964 in hardback by Frederick Muller under the title Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, and then again under the same title in 1965 in paperback by Armada, which was the edition that Neil read it in ("old and battered now, from so much reading"). The Muller hardback goes for hundreds of pounds these days, but the Armada paperback can be found for a few quid online if you look hard enough. Which, suitably intrigued having bought the Target edition, I did:

Whereupon I discovered that there are a number of differences between the Armada and Target paperbacks. Self-evidently the covers are different – the Armada edition cover art is by Peter Archer, an artist best known for his Hardy Boys and Malcolm Saville work – but the interiors differ too. The text remains the same in both, but while the interior illustrations in the Armada edition are again by cover artist Archer:

in the Target edition they're not the work of Chris Achilleos but rather one Arnold Schwartzman:

who I wonder if he might be this Arnold Shwartzman, OBE. Answers in the comments, please. (Incidentally, interior illos in the Doctor Who novelisations were restricted only to the initial Muller editions and the first wave of Target editions; thereafter they were dispensed with.)

Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (or Doctor Who and the Daleks if you prefer) is a novelisation of the second Who adventure, The Daleks (1963/4; it also shares its story with the first Doctor Who movie, Doctor Who and the Daleks, 1965, starring Peter Cushing... keep up at the back), but it's actually presented as if it's the first. Whitaker's innovation is to concoct a whole new opening sequence for the novel detailing the first meeting between schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright and the mysterious Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan. This originally took place in the debut Doctor Who episode, An Unearthly Child (1963), but Whitaker pens an alternate, eerie, evocative, notably gruesome opening in which Chesterton stumbles upon a road accident on a foggy night on Barnes Common involving Barbara, Susan and an unfortunate lorry driver, "hurled sideways at the moment of impact, the glass of the window shattering but holding him from being thrown out onto the roadway". "Is he all right?" asks a bloodied Barbara, to which Ian replies bluntly, "He's dead."

The chief innovation of Whitaker's novelisation, however, is that it's written – quite well, as it happens – in the first person. The standard style for all of the ensuing Who novelisations was third person, but this one is narrated by Ian Chesterton, who makes for an agreeably sceptical companion – both for the reader and for the Doctor. Indeed, much as I love many of the later third-person Who novels – Terrance Dicks' in particular (a few more of which I also found in that Brighton junk shop, to be unveiled in a future post) – first person suits the format rather well, affording an intimate perspective on William Hartnell's devious, irascible Doctor.

It's a cut above what one might normally expect of a novelisation, and a nice acquisition – or rather, pair of acquisitions – in this, the year of the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. And hey: maybe one day I'll pass on one or the other of the books – and maybe some of the other Who paperbacks I've accumulated – to a small child, and perhaps engender the same enthusiasm for reading the Who books instilled in me as a kid.

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré (Viking, 2013); Signed Waterstones Exclusive

2013-04-30T08:02:00.000-05:00

How time flies. Seems like only the other month I was making my way through John le Carré's first three novels and now here he is with his twenty-third... Actually, come to think of it, it was only the other month: I polished off Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) in quick succession in February of this year.

Of course, I'm being disingenuous in order to begin this post with a feeble joke; part of my reason for reading those novels, having previously read and loved the later Karla Trilogy, was I knew there was a new le Carré on the way, and last week A Delicate Truth duly arrived, published by Penguin/Viking in the UK under a dust jacket designed by Superfantastic and heralded by a clutch of positive notices. Indeed, so adulatory were some of the reviews – Mark Lawson's one in The Guardian ("Le Carré is back at full power") and Robert McCrum's one in The Observer ("a remarkable return to mid-season form") spring to mind – that I was moved to pop to Waterstones in Brighton at the weekend and pick up a first edition. Not just any first edition, mind:

The Waterstones Exclusive, which boasts added content (see also the Waterstones edition of Justin Cronin's The Twelve, which included an additional chapter) in the shape of an introduction by le Carré detailing the background to the novel. And that's not all:

It's signed too. There were a few signed copies secreted in amongst the stock, which I only realised as I was about to exit the shop having bought an unsigned one; needless to say I went straight back to the counter and exchanged it for this copy. And though the novel isn't quite the "return to mid-season form" claimed by Robert McCrum – it's certainly not the equal of, say, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (then again, what is?) – it's still a sterling entry in what my good friend and colleague Roly Allen calls "later le Carré", hewing to around half of the points Roly identified as characterising the majority of the author's works from The Little Drummer Girl (1983) onwards. ("Le Carré gets cross about something he reads in a John Pilger book, or Amnesty newsletter"; "Good end up dead; bad end up dragging the bodies into the back of an unmarked van and driving off", etc.) Plus it's a nice companion to my signed first of le Carré's previous book, Our Kind of Traitor.

Richard Stark's Parker Novels Series: The Allison & Busby Hardback Collection, feat. The Black Ice Score, 1986 (a Westlake Score)

2013-04-25T05:00:00.000-05:00

Early in 2010, when my secondhand book collecting – an interest which had only really been kindled the year before – was gathering pace and Existential Ennui was drifting towards its eventual destination as – and stop me if you've heard this one before – an increasingly circumlocutory chronicle of what has since become, let's be frank, a flaming obsession, I decided to finally try The Hunter, the first novel in Richard Stark's twenty-four book series starring taciturn heister Parker. I'd been thinking about it for a while before that, having long been an admirer of John Boorman's 1967 film adaptation of The Hunter, Point Blank; indeed it was in the British Coronet movie tie-in paperback edition – a slightly scruffy copy since replaced with a rather nicer one – that I eventually read The Hunter – retitled, accordingly, as Point Blank.

It was lust at first sight: stripped-back, brutally efficient prose; a cold-hearted protagonist as fascinating in his own way as another fictional career criminal I'd previously fallen for (Tom Ripley, of Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad); and a structure whose seeming simplicity belied the clever tricks played by the narrative. In short order I bought and read a Coronet paperback of the next book in the series, The Man with the Getaway Face (or The Steel Hit as it was titled by Coronet), then a US Berkley paperback of the third Parker, The Outfit, and I was off to the races: like so many before me I had embarked on my own personal Parker odyssey. (Somewhere during that first flurry of books I learned that "Richard Stark" was a pen name, just one of many employed by Donald E. Westlake, thus instigating a larger, parallel odyssey... but that's another story.)

At that stage I wasn't giving much thought to how I was collecting the Parkers; I just knew I wanted to read them, preferably in cheap, vintage paperback editions (which, given that they were mostly out of print in the UK at that point, was how they were largely available). Then I encountered Allison & Busby's hardback editions of the Parkers, issued in the UK in the 1980s. I think I first saw a copy of the 1984 A&B edition of Point Blank, with its black, foil-embossed bullet-holes dust jacket (designed, like the bulk of the A&B Parker jackets, by Mick Keates), on the shelves of the late lamented Nigel Williams Rare Books on London's Cecil Court – priced out of my range, naturally (I rarely ever actually bought anything from Nigel Williams, much as I loved the place).

My book collecting inclinations were increasingly leaning towards modern firsts, and consequently my curiosity was piqued: though the A&B Parkers weren't, strictly speaking, the first editions of the novels – for the sixteen Parkers in the original 1962-1974 run of the series that honour belonged to American publishers Pocket Books and Gold Medal in the '60s and Random House in the '70s – they were the first hardback editions (in most cases; Slayground was published straight to hardback by Random House, and I later discovered that another three of the Parkers A&B published were first issued as hardbacks by Gold Lion in 1973).

Here, then, was an interesting way for me to collect the bulk of the Parker series, one which I readily – perhaps foolhardily, given how pricey some of them were – embraced. I secured a relatively inexpensive copy of Allison & Busby's edition of Point Blank, and over the next six months managed to track down the majority of the remainder of the thirteen Parkers A&B issued in hardback (A&B did publish a fourteenth title, Deadly Edge, but only in paperback), chronicling the quest on Existential Ennui as I did so.

And then my mission stalled: two of the Allison & Busby Parkers proved highly elusive, partly due to scarcity, partly to prohibitive prices. One of those, the 1986 hardback of the sixth Parker, The Jugger, I eventually managed to nab in 2011, leaving me with just one last Allison & Busby hardback to find at an affordable price. Which brings me, in my usual long-winded manner, to the point of this post:

That there is the first (and only) hardback edition of Richard Stark's The Black Ice Score, Parker #11, published by Allison & Busby in 1986 under a Mick Keates-designed dust jacket and won by me on eBay last month. The irony here is that the Parker that took me the longest time to acquire in hardback (I bought an Allison & Busby paperback in 2010 as a stopgap) is the one that I probably like the least – but that's by the by; what matters is what it represents: the last piece of a collection that has taken me over three years to complete.

Which leaves me with an odd mixture of feelings. There's a sense of accomplishment, sure, but also a little sadness (in every meaning of the word, heading any quips off at the pass). Trying to find all of the Allison & Busby hardback Parkers has been a constant in my book collecting, not to mention my blogging about that book collecting – the one feeding the other. My crazed quest to collect all of the A&B editions helped to build Existential Ennui's (admittedly still slender) readership: I know there are some folk who began following the blog as a direct result of that quest. (Some of them have even stuck around, poor buggers.) I guess reaching the end of a journey – to use X Factor parlance – any journey, however minor and inconsequential it may be in the grander scheme of things, can be a bittersweet experience: arriving at a destination only to realise it was the getting there that was the thing.

Mind you, that phase of my Parker collecting might be done, but I expect I'll still be picking up intriguing editions of the Parkers as and when I see them; after all, these days, in a way as a consequence of the Allison & Busby Parker collecting quest, I have to have a ready supply of material for the Violent World of Parker blog as well as for Existential Ennui. And though my hardback Richard Stark shelf is a handsome thing to behold:

There are still a few hardback Parkers I'd like to get my clammy mitts on (and doubtless there are other, non-Parker Westlake Scores still to be had). So I suppose in a wider sense it's not really the end at all. The quest – and the chronicle – continues...

Guest Post: It's Impossible to Be Objective About Evelyn; Michael Barber on Evelyn Waugh

2013-04-24T03:30:00.001-05:00

It's been over a year since I last hosted a guest post, so I reckon it's long past time for another one. And so I'm delighted to welcome back to Existential Ennui writer, broadcaster and critic Michael Barber. Michael has twice before contributed terrific articles to this 'ere blog, on authors in whom he knew I had an interest: a piece on Zachary Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis, and one on Dennis Wheatley, both of which appeared in January 2011. Michael's latest offering is on another author I've blogged about, only very recently in fact – Evelyn Waugh, whose archetypal "novel about journalists", Scoop, I wrote about in a Penguin paperback edition in March. Coincidentally, around the same time Michael's short biography of Waugh was published by Hesperus Press as part of their Brief Lives series, and Michael suggested I might like to run the preface to the book, along with a specially written introduction.

Naturally I leapt at the chance; apart from my admiration of Michael's writing, unashamed opportunist that I am I knew it would give me the opportunity to showcase a 1977 Heinemann Evelyn Waugh Omnibus I'd acquired but was struggling to find anything interesting to say about – you can see its cover above and below. So without further ado, over to Michael.

. . . . . . . . . .

Evelyn Waugh, by Michael Barber

In September 1975 I interviewed Christopher Sykes for the BBC World Service about his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Nearly forty years later I was commissioned to write a book about Waugh myself. I can't pretend that this was always my ambition. Waugh may have been the greatest English novelist of his generation, the 'Commanding Officer' mourned by Graham Greene. But as a subject he had less appeal for me than, say, contemporaries of his like Anthony Powell and Cyril Connolly, neither of whom shared Waugh's militant Catholic faith.

On the other hand you do not spend your life in Grub Street without learning that it's a crime to waste material. Over the years I had accumulated innumerable anecdotes about Waugh and his circle. I had also covered Sword of Honour, his war trilogy, in two radio series I wrote and presented. Meanwhile interest in Waugh, which had declined rapidly following his death in 1966, was reawakened by the publication of his Diaries and Letters and by the alluring television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. His novels continue to sell briskly and OUP are planning a scholarly edition of all his works.

One of Waugh's earliest biographers, Frederick Stopp, said that 'several quite different books' could be written about the writer, a view echoed by Christopher Sykes in the preface to his biography. My aim has been to try and produce a 'short, popular life', like Waugh himself did of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, selecting the incidents that strike me as important and relating them in a single narrative. I hope to amuse the reader as well as instruct him (or her), my target being the sort of person who would welcome an appetizer rather than a banquet.

. . . . . . . . . .

Preface to Evelyn Waugh (Brief Lives), Hesperus Press, 2013

Lunching one day at the Beefsteak club with the historian High Trevor-Roper, Christopher Sykes spoke of the 'terrible difficulty' of writing the life of a man 'whose every action showed him to be a shit'. The man in question was his old friend, Evelyn Waugh, probably the most paradoxical figure in modern English literature. Waugh wrote some of the funniest passages in the English language, yet for the last twenty years of his life he suffered from chronic melancholia. Again, he gave away large sums of money to Catholic charities and, unprompted, went out of his way to commend other writers whose work he admired; yet he was also a merciless bully, particularly of those whoe were not equipped to answer back. In later life he behaved like a country gentleman, but spoilt the effect by dressing like a bookie in loud check suits and a grey bowler hat. His second home was White's club in St James's, yet his intimates were tough, opinionated females like Nancy Mitford, Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper. And so disillusioned did he become with his one-time favourite novel, Brideshead Revisited, that he mocked it in the final volume of his war trilogy, Sword of Honour.

Sykes's 'terribly difficulty' was all too apparent to Kingsley Amis, who began his review of the biography by saying that this book reinforced his thankfulness that he never met Evelyn Waugh. But would Waugh have written so well had he not been such a shit? Amis – of whom one could ask the same question – thought not: '[W]ithout this compulsion to say the unsayable he would never have come to be the writer he was.' John Carey, writing later, made a similar point: 'The acid refinement of his style required a certain part of his brain to remain dead. His blanket denunciation of fellow humans would have been impossible for a fully formed intelligence.' He was at his best with rogues like Basil Seal and Captain Grimes. When he tried to create a righteous character like the saintly Mr Crouchback senior, he asked too much of his reader: the old man was simply too good to be true.

Waugh's friends, all of whom knew how badly he could behave, forgave him his trespasses because they were outweighed by his qualities. 'What a monster!' wrote Nancy Mitford. 'How I miss him!' She died before the publication of his diaries reawakened an interest in his life and work that continues to this day. Whether this would have flattered Waugh himself is another matter. When an inoffensive American woman with whom he was dining praised Brideshead Revisited, he replied: 'I though it was good myself, but now that I know a boring, common American woman like yourself admires it, I am not so sure.' No wonder Waugh's fellow-novelist, Anthony Powell, told Sykes, 'It's impossible to be objective about Evelyn.'

The Ripliad: Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley Series Revisited and Rated

2013-04-22T06:30:00.000-05:00

Having finally completed the Great Tom Ripley Reread (roughly seven months later than I figured I would, but hey, who's counting? Er, apart from me, evidently), I thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series as a whole, and revisit the Tom Ripley Quality Graph I proudly – perhaps foolishly, if the first comment on that post is anything to go by – unveiled back in 2011, with a view to seeing where each of the five Ripley novels now resides on it (innit). An absurdly self-indulgent and inconsequential exercise, I realise, but hey: when has that ever stopped me in the past?

First though, for any latecomers, in order of publication the five Tom Ripley novels are:

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

If you're so inclined, and if you haven't done so already, you can click on each title to read my prolix Ripley Reread piffle – or you can simply take my word for it that those five blog posts are some of the most insightful and critically incisive essays ever written about Highsmith's Ripliad and leave it at that. Ahem. In any case, the Reread was certainly instructive as regards my relative appreciation of each Ripley novel: of the five books, only one remained unchanged in my estimations, and that was mostly because I rate it so highly – unlike some of the other novels in the Ripliad, I'd actually read it at least twice, possibly three times, before this latest Reread – it couldn't really rise any further. Although I suppose it could have fallen... which is what happened to one of the other Ripley novels, as we shall see.

Here's what the Tom Ripley Quality Graph looked like in 2011 (actually, not quite: I've redrawn it – the original was a bit scruffy – although the data is the same):

The Talented Mr. Ripley scored a very healthy 8 – it is, after all, the bedrock upon which the Ripliad is based – then the first sequel, Ripley Under Ground, scored an even healthier 9, and then the high water mark: Highsmith's masterpiece, Ripley's Game, with an unbeatable 10 – unbeatable, that is, if your graph only goes up to 10. Which mine does. Anyway, after that it's a steep decline to The Boy Who Followed Ripley on 7, and another drop to the final novel in the series, Ripley Under Water, on 6.

That was then. Now here's how things look in the wake of the Great Tom Ripley Reread:

Just one book has remained where it was: Ripley's Game, the Ripley novel par excellence. Or so I once believed, because its lofty position is now paralleled by the preceding Ripley book, Ripley Under Ground, which on this second go-through, and in its own way, I found just as compelling as Game. Talented has also moved up one – for me, more so than even Highsmith's 1950 (non-Ripley) debut, Strangers on a Train (and certainly more so than 1954's The Blunderer), it's the first book where her abiding concerns of power, identity, obsession, deception and the nature of evil fully coalesced – whereas the fourth Ripley novel, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, has fallen one place; on this read I found it lacked the urgency of others in the series (although as an aside, I should note that such is my enthusiasm for Ripley that Highsmith could have written an entire novel consisting of Tom gardening, playing the harpsichord and sauntering down the road to George and Marie's bar-tabac and I'd probably have been perfectly happy). Finally, Ripley Under Water – a direct sequel to Under Ground – went up one; on reflection I feel it is a better book than Boy, although still not as good as the first three Ripley novels.

So there you have it. For further thoughts on each book in the series I'll direct you to each of my five individual posts on them – assuming you've read the books, that is; if you haven't, well: you know what to do next. Suffice it to say in closing that to my mind Highsmith's Ripliad is a remarkable achievement: a peerless extended study of a man who literally gets away with murder – who is, as he himself puts it (in Ripley Under Ground), "a font of evil" – and how such a man might live with himself and even, by his own cunning, intellect, force of will and sense of self-preservation, flourish.

The Great Tom Ripley Reread, 5: Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (London Limited Editions, Signed / Bloomsbury, 1991)

2013-04-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 19/4/13.

And so the Great Tom Ripley Reread – which seemed like such a good idea when I embarked on it, ooh, over seven months ago – reaches the final novel in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad: Ripley Under Water. And once again I have a very special edition of the book from which to springboard some musings:

This is the London Limited Editions, er, edition of Ripley Under Water, published in 1991 in conjunction with Bloomsbury, who published the regular UK first edition, with a dust jacket illustrated by Elspeth Ross, that same year. Bound in marbled cloth boards under a delicate glassine paper jacket – not shown, although my copy does have its wrapper – it was limited to just 150 copies, each one signed by Highsmith. Curiously, however, this one isn't numbered:

Even though the signature does appear to be genuine, so either the number got forgotten for this copy, or Highsmith ended up signing more than 150 of the buggers. I missed out on an eBay auction for another copy over a year ago – as a consolation prize bagging a terrific signed and inscribed first edition of Little Tales of Misogyny instead – so when this one popped up on eBay, I made damn sure I secured it (as it turned out for under half what the first copy went for). Anyone who's been following this series of posts will hopefully understand that for me, owning a signed Ripley novel is quite something, especially since the cheapest copy currently listed on AbeBooks is £135 (plus postage from America).

Although the four Ripley novels which follow The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) are, loosely speaking, sequels, most of them aren't sequels in the sense that they pick up on plot threads from previous books. The exception is this fifth and final entry in the series, which is a direct sequel to the second book, Ripley Under Ground (1970). Set five years on from that novel – in the mutable timeline of the Ripliad, that is, which means the presence in the narrative of slightly incongruous-for-1975 things like CDs and microwave ovens – it finds Tom besieged by an unhinged American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, who have moved into a house in the area of rural France in which Ripley resides. The Pritchards – David especially, but also Janice – are digging into the death of the art collector Thomas Murchison, who, you'll recall, Tom murdered in Under Ground in order to keep Murchison from revealing that Tom and his English cohorts Ed Banbury and Jeff Constant of the Buckmaster Gallery were neck-deep in an art forgery ring.

Having got wind of this from Cynthia Gradnor, the one-time girlfriend of the artist doing the forging, Bernard Tufts (standing in for the deceased Derwatt), David Pritchard is now seemingly intent on finding the corpse of Murchison, which Tom deposited in a local river, enlisting the aid of the aforementioned Bernard (who also subsequently died). All of which is explained piecemeal by Highsmith for those who haven't read Under Ground, but even so, unlike that and the other Ripley sequels, with Under Water, it helps enormously here to have read the book it references.

Which isn't to say there aren't references to other parts of the Ripliad too. For instance, one of the methods David Pritchard employs to unsettle Tom is prank telephone calls from someone purporting to be Dickie Greenleaf, the first of Tom's multiple victims (killed, of course, in The Talented Mr. Ripley). Dickie is perhaps the only one of Tom's murders that he feels any kind of remorse for – "The beginning of his troubles", as Tom reflects after the first call, "...The first man he had killed, and the only one he regretted killing, really, the only crime he was sorry about." Though he's certain that Dickie is in fact dead, that initial phone call makes Tom physically sick – an atypical response from the usually in-control Ripley.

The presence of an existential threat for Tom makes for a welcome change from the previous book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), in which Tom's role was often quite passive. Highsmith's original idea for what would be her last Ripley novel (she died in 1995) was "Ripley touches madness" (jotted in one of her notebooks, as revealed in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow), and elements of that notion do make it through to the finished novel: when David Pritchard – or "Prickard", as Tom's wife, Heloise, repeatedly mispronounces it, causing Tom to drily correct her ("Pritchard, dear") – follows Tom and Heloise to Tangier, Ripley lures him to a coastal cafe and beats him up, only just keeping from killing him. By and large, though, Tom acts no more crazy than at any other point in the Ripliad, and considerably less so than in Ripley Under Ground, where he struggled to keep a grip on the freewheeling insanity he'd unleashed.

Of course, Tom is unhinged; at one point, in reference to Pritchard, he muses that he doesn't understand cracked people (the one exception being Bernard), when in fact he himself is by any definition, to put it mildly, highly abnormal: a conscienceless serial killer. Highsmith is performing her usual trick here of never deviating from Tom's viewpoint, so that we unwittingly empathize with him and Pritchard becomes the villain of the piece. In reality, they're as bad as each other; indeed, Pritchard nails Tom when he calls him a "snob crook".

There again, Tom does display some of his more admirable qualities in the book as well. His relationship with Heloise is never more touching than it is here: he twice tells her he loves her – an unusually forthright declaration from the normally reticent Ripley – and a postcard from her makes "his heart jump". (The only hint of his latent homosexuality this time comes courtesy of his reading a biography of Oscar Wilde – in the previous book he was reading Christopher Isherwood – but even there, that was the book Highsmith herself was reading whilst writing Under Water.) Meanwhile, his loyalty to Ed and Jeff, and theirs to him, seems to go beyond simple self-preservation; when Ed volunteers to come over to France to help thwart Pritchard's "anti-Ripley game" (nicely done, Ms. Highsmith), he apparently does so out of genuine friendship.

Still, let's not get too carried away. Ripley is still, as Cynthia Gradnor puts it, "the most evil man I've ever met", adding: "if you consider that a favourable distinction. You probably do." He does some pretty despicable things in Ripley Under Water, not least of which being his gruesome "autopsy" of Murchison's remains when they're delivered by David Pritchard to his house, freshly recovered from the river, complete with "bits of flesh... pale and flabby, [stuck] to the spinal column" – a scene which recalls the similar desecration of Bernard Tufts' corpse in Under Ground. As for Tom's opportunistic solution to the Pritchards' meddling, in its own way that's as cold and calculating as any other of his actions across the Ripliad.

Unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying Ripley Under Water a lot more than I thought I would on this second go-round. I'd previously viewed it as the weakest instalment in the Ripliad, but it actually went up in my estimations; I think I'd put it somewhere just above The Boy Who Followed Ripley on my Tom Ripley Graph now. In fact, having (finally) completed the Great Tom Ripley Reread, I'm of a mind to revisit that graph to see where each of the five Ripley novels now rests on it...

Francis Clifford's Honour the Shrine (Cape, 1953) & Helen MacInnes's Pray for a Brave Heart (Collins, 1955) Join Beautiful British Book Jackets

2013-04-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

Let's take a look at the two latest additions to the still-expanding (these covers will take it up to 104 entries) Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – the first one of which I could do with some assistance identifying the jacket designer:

Namely Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford, published by Jonathan Cape in 1953. There's no credit on either flap and no signature that I can see; I did wonder if it might be by Val Biro, but I put it in front of Val at a Lewes Book Fair last year and he thought not. Mind you, when I asked Val to sign the jacket of Desmond Cory's Secret Ministry at an earlier Midhurst Book Fair, he told me that wasn't one of his wrappers either – until his agent, David Schutte, pointed out Val's signature in the bottom left corner (Val did, after all, design an estimated 3,000 dust jackets). Plus, Val was doing a little work for Cape around this period (as was Hans Tisdall, who also comes to mind as a possible culprit) – he designed the wrapper for the 1953 Cape first of Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope for one – so he could have misremembered. In any case, until confirmation is forthcoming, the cover is consigned to the "Designer Unknown" group at the bottom of Beautiful British Book Jacket Design.

No such confusion surrounds the book itself, however, at least not round these parts, because I've blogged about it before, in its 1957 Corgi paperback incarnation. Clifford's debut, and quite uncommon these days (there are barely a dozen copies in any edition on AbeBooks at present, none of those the Cape first), it's one of a number of the author's novels I've spotlighted – see also Time Is an Ambush (1962), The Green Fields of Eden (1963), The Hunting-Ground (1964) and The Naked Runner (1966) – the jackets from the first editions of all four of which are also featured in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design.

And there's little doubt as to who was responsible for the dust jacket design of the second new addition to the gallery, despite there once again being no credit on the flaps:

This is the British first edition of Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen Macinnes, published by Collins in 1955 and bought by me just the other week for two quid in the excellent Tome in Eastbourne. MacInnes's ninth novel, it's one of fourteen MacInnes spy thrillers that Titan Books have brought back into print since last year. The wrapper isn't, as I say, credited, but it does bear a signature: "Petty". That's almost certainly the Australian political cartoonist Bruce Petty, who evidently had a nice sideline designing jackets in the 1950s; other examples of his jacket work include a further three wrappers for Collins in 1955 – Jon Cleary's Justin Bayard, Laselle Gilman's The Dragon's Mouth and Kem Bennett's Dangerous Knowledge – along with Edward Maxwell's Quest for Pajaro (Heinemann, 1957), Tom Girtin's Not Entirely Serious (Hutchinson, 1958) and Robin Maugham's The Man with Two Shadows (Longmans, Green, 1958).

So, two further splendid duotone dust jackets for Beautiful British Book Jacket Design. And I'm not done with the gallery just yet...

Choose Your Own Adventure: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, 2012); Signed First Edition

2013-04-11T03:15:00.000-05:00

As I'm sure I've stated before, I don't buy many new (as in, newly written and published) novels; my tastes tend to run to older, usually mustier tomes (although those tomes, though frequently foxed and smelling of fags, are often as not "new" to me). But occasionally either a new novel will catch my eye – as was the case recently with Roger Hobbs's debut, Ghostman, which I bought and read shortly after publication (verdict: not bad at all) – or an author whose work I admire will publish a new novel and I might find myself inclined to pick it up. Which brings me to Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.

I love Atkinson's four Jackson Brodie novels – I've blogged about them a few times – but I've never read any of her non-Brodie books, so I was in two minds whether or not to try Life After Life, which was published by Doubleday in March of this year under a dust jacket designed by Claire Ward. In the end, the prospect of securing a signed first edition at cover price swayed me, along with the novel's premise: a woman, Ursula, dies over and over again at various junctures of her life, from childhood to adulthood, throughout the twentieth century until she gets it "right". I'm a sucker for a World War II-related alternate history tale (which Life After Life in part is) – Len Deighton's SS-GB, Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, C. J. Sansom's Dominion – so for me the novel's science fiction trappings – to use the term loosely – were an additional lure, even though I knew going in that the hows and whys of Ursula's plight probably wouldn't be addressed.

Which of course they aren't. But in the event, it turns out Atkinson has inadvertently tapped into a rather different form of storytelling than the alternate history thriller (and it'll be no surprise to anyone familiar with Atkinson's work that Life After Life isn't a thriller, either, even though it opens with an assassination attempt on Hitler). Structurally, the form the novel most brought to mind for me was that of the video game, or perhaps more accurately those old "choose your own adventure" Fighting Fantasy books. Video games and Fighting Fantasy novels both hinge on a learning process: you get something wrong the first time, get killed, and have to start again either at the beginning or earlier in that level, and that's pretty much how Life After Life works too, both for Ursula and in a more passive sense for the reader. In fact, you could probably chop the novel up and rearrange it in the same manner as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and it would still function reasonably well. ("If you want to retrieve the dolly Queen Solange from the snowy rooftop, turn to page 87; if you want to leave her where she is, turn to page 36.")

I say Atkinson has "inadvertently" alighted on this approach because I kind of doubt she's ever played a video game, or indeed read The Citadel of Chaos. In that sense, while the novel's structure might have more resonance and perhaps even be more familiar to younger generations than linear storytelling, it's not comparable to what, for instance, Christopher Brookmyre was getting at in a recent interview in SFX to promote his novel Bedlam (thank you to Book Glutton for bringing it to my attention) when he said that video games are changing storytelling, pointing to the film Source Code as possessing "the structure of playing a videogame, you have someone who has to keep reloading the game until he's got it right". It's more feasible that it's a side effect of a parallel development in home computing: word processing, which has made it far easier, far more natural-feeling, for writers to write in a disjointed, out of sequence fashion – something that many have always done anyway – noting random lines of dialogue, penning whole scenes before embarking on a book – but which writing on a word processor particularly lends itself to.

Mind you, I've no idea what Kate Atkinson uses to write with or on – computer, typewriter, pen and paper, an Etch A Sketch. From the little I've read about her, the scattershot, seemingly meandering quality of her novels is merely a symptom of how her mind works; witness the parenthetical asides which litter her books (Atkinson has said that she herself thinks in brackets). So the structure of Life After Life could simply be a case of Atkinson starting the novel over and over again, allowing Ursula to drift almost of her own accord into a succession of (slightly deadly) cul-de-sacs (where darkness, the "black bat", awaits her) and then rewinding and trying a different plot branch.

In the final analysis, it doesn't really matter how Atkinson arrived at the approach (thus making my musings in this post even more pointless than usual); the novel is what it is: enchanting, frustrating, breathless, confounding, but above all beautifully written – and in that sense at least the equal of the Jackson Brodie books. By way of illustration, I'll leave you with a passage from early in the novel, describing how the baby Ursula is regularly left alone in her pram in the garden by Bridget, the maid, at the behest of Ursula's mother, Sylvie, who has "inherited a fixation with fresh air from her own mother, Lottie":

Bare branches, buds, leaves – the world as she knew it came and went before Ursula's eyes. She observed the turn of the seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mould and mushroom of autumn. From within the limited frame of the pram hood she saw it all. To say nothing of the somewhat random embellishments the seasons brought with them – sun, clouds, birds, a stray cricket ball arcing silently overhead, a rainbow once or twice, rain more often than she would have liked. (There was sometimes a tardiness to rescuing her from the elements.)

Once there had even been the stars and a rising moon – astonishing and terrifying in equal measure – when she had been forgotten one autumn evening. Bridget was castigated.

Westlake on Rabe: Murder Me for Nickels & Anatomy of a Killer by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal, 1960 / Panther, 1962)

2013-04-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Featured in Friday's Forgotten Books.

In his 1989 essay on Peter Rabe for the critical anthology Murder off the Rack, Donald E. Westlake identified two distinct periods during which, Westlake reckoned, Rabe produced his best work. The first came at the start of Rabe's career, encompassing the five books from Stop This Man! (1955) to Kill the Boss Good-by (1956). The second – also encompassing five books – began in 1959 and comprised the final Daniel Port novel, Time Enough to Die, along with My Lovely Executioner (1960), The Box (1962), and the final two novels I'll be blogging about in this current run of Rabe posts: Murder Me for Nickels and Anatomy of a Killer (both 1960).

Only the second of Rabe's novels to be narrated in the first person (the first being the aforementioned My Lovely Executioner), for Westlake Murder Me for Nickels was "absolutely unlike anything that [Rabe] had done before... as sprightly and glib as My Lovely Executioner was depressed and glum". Westlake isn't alone in appreciating the merits of the novel, either: it's also a particular favourite of Westlake aficionado and The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, who has called it "marvelously sardonic". And the Gold Medal original – this copy of which I found at the last-but-one London Paperback & Pulp Bookfair – boasts one of the best covers ever to grace a Peter Rabe book, by the great Robert McGinnis.

But for anyone looking for the single Rabe novel that perhaps exerted the greatest influence on Westlake, especially on his pseudonymous (as Richard Stark) Parker series, I'd still point to Anatomy of a Killer. I blogged about this one two years ago, in its original hardback edition – published, as Westlake puts it in his essay, by "a penny-ante outfit called Abelard-Schuman" – that post later appearing in an altered form over at The Violent World of Parker. In order to demonstrate the similarities between Anatomy and the Parkers I quoted extensively from the opening of the novel, and would you Adam and Eve it that's precisely what Westlake does too, sampling the exact same passage – including the opening "When" – and labelling the novel "as cold and clean as a knife".

The copy seen here is the British paperback edition, published by Panther in 1962 as part of their Crime Circle line. The cover art is uncredited and I can't make out the signature, but around this time Panther had a habit of taking cover art from often random and unrelated American paperbacks and reusing it, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that this artwork is lifted from a completely different book.

UPDATE: Ray Garraty quickly identified the original book the cover art was taken from as Harry Whittington's 1959 novel Strange Bargain, as seen on Killer Covers. No word as yet on cover artist, although that signature could be "Darcy", an alias of Ernest Chiriaka.

I do have a handful of other Peter Rabe paperbacks to blog about, dating from the mid-1960s to the early '70s, but Westlake doesn't have much to say about those in his essay, so I think I'll save them for another time. But before I leave Rabe behind, there is one last book of his I'd like to take a look at – an atypical entry in his canon that has a special significance for me right now...

Donald E. Westlake Non-Fiction Anthology Announced

2013-04-05T05:30:00.000-05:00

Here's something rather exciting for those of us unhealthily obsessed with the work of Donald E. Westlake: Levi Stahl of University of Chicago Press (publishers, as if you didn't know, of Westlake's written-as-Richard Stark Parker novels) has announced on his blog that he's got the go-ahead to put together an anthology of Westlake non-fiction. This is a project that I and one or two others have known about for a little while: Levi initially cavassed myself, Trent (from The Violent World of Parker, where I'm co-blogger) and Ethan Iverson (of The Bad Plus fame, and a noted Westlake aficionado) for our opinions on what we thought should appear in the collection last year. I'm not sure how much help I was, but Trent and Ethan both had excellent suggestions, so it should prove a fascinating volume.

Levi hasn't yet revealed which pieces will end up in the collection, other than that it will comprise "reviews, essays on favorite writers, magazine pieces, occasional writings... likely... a couple of the most interesting interviews he sat for over the years; a piece or two by prominent fans, friends, and critics about Westlake and his work; and possibly even letters and e-mails". I've blogged about a number of Westlake's non-fiction pieces over the years – his enlightening introduction to Levine; his book on the British invasion of a Caribbean island; his piece on prison breaks; his farewell to science fiction; his essay on Peter Rabe – and I'm hopeful at least some of those articles (as in, Westlake's articles, not my rubbish posts) will make it in. But Levi is keen to cast his net as wide as possible, and so has asked for further suggestions; anyone who has any can contact him via his blog, or maybe drop him a line on Twitter.

I'll endeavour to post updates on the project as and when... and I'll also, hopefully, have some more Westlake/University of Chicago Press news before too long...

Beautiful British '50s & '60s Book Jacket Design: Beyond 100 Covers

2013-04-04T11:30:00.001-05:00

Ever since the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery reached the 100 cover mark back in October of last year I've been pondering what to do next with the page. I hadn't really intended to venture beyond 100 covers, instead expressing a desire in that centenary celebration post (which also announced Existential Ennui's custom domain name) to set up a permanent page dedicated to paperback covers, say, or to particular dust jacket designers, most likely Val Biro and/or Denis McLoughlin. Which I might still get round to doing at some point: I have some cracking additional examples of each of those two artists' dust jacket work still to unveil, and dedicated artist pages strike me as a fitting way of showcasing those jackets.

Inevitably, however, and despite an ongoing concerted effort to cut back on the number of secondhand books I buy, I've since acquired a small pile of books bearing wrappers not by Biro or McLoughlin but every bit as good as their stuff, not to mention that of the other artists featured in the gallery. Which begs the question: what to do with those further wrappers? I considered setting up another general dust jacket page – Beautiful British Book Jacket Design Part II, if you will – but that would only be an encouragement to start buying loads of books again, something I'm keen to avoid (for reasons which will become clear quite soon). Plus, there's something to be said for having all of those covers together in one place, especially since the page has by itself clocked up over 10,000 hits.

Therefore, I've decided to add a few more covers to the gallery. Not too many: just a handful – the very best wrappers from my recent acquisitions. Beginning with two books, both published by Michael Joseph in 1955, both boasting jackets designed by children's book author and illustrator Brian Wildsmith.

Fellow Passenger by Geoffrey Household, and White August by John Boland. Given that Wildsmith graduated from The Slade in 1952 and did his National Service shortly thereafter, these two covers must represent some of his earliest professional work. And jolly lovely they are too – splendid examples of the duotone style prevalent at the time, and fine additions to the Beautiful British Book Jackets page, marking Wildsmith's debut in the gallery.

Both books are eBay wins; Fellow Passenger was Household's seventh novel for adults (following 1951's A Time to Kill) – and one of his personal favourites – White August Boland's first. I've blogged about Household many times before, most recently in this post on his most famous novel, Rogue Male, but Boland is a new name to Existential Ennui. His best-known work is probably this:

The League of Gentlemen, first published by T. V. Boardman in 1958 but seen here in its 1960 Pan paperback incarnation, complete with cover art by Sam Peffer. Personally, I was more aware of the film adaptation of the same year – blurbed on the back cover of the Pan edition – than I was of the novel; I think I must have caught it on telly at some point. And that Peff cover's rather good, isn't it? Hmm. Maybe I should set up a permanent paperback cover art page after all...

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household: First Penguin Edition, 1949, plus Robert Macfarlane on the Novel

2013-03-28T09:10:00.000-05:00

Let's round off this short, sporadic run of vintage Penguin paperbacks with an iconic edition of an iconic work of fiction:

The 1949 first Penguin printing of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, originally published in hardback by Chatto & Windus in 1939. As with the Penguin paperback of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, this particular edition has appeared on Existential Ennui before – more than once, in fact – but not, I hasten to add, this particular copy. Because for reasons far too tedious and testing to go into I've ended up with two copies of the Penguin first edition: the one seen in this post, which is a recent acquisition, and the one seen in this 2010 review. Ridiculous really, but at least it gives me the excuse to dedicate a post to what is an uncommon edition (despite appearances to the contrary; at time of writing I can't see a single copy of the 1949 Penguin printing on AbeBooks) of a brilliant book.

Of course, the novel itself already has a dedicated post on Existential Ennui, in a 1939 Chatto & Windus Services Library edition; if you've a mind to, you can read that or my 2010 review – or indeed this post on the 1982 sequel, Rogue Justice – for my thoughts on it. But I'd direct you instead to this more recent Guardian piece on the book by the travel writer Robert Macfarlane. When I came across it in the Review section of the paper the other week it was an unexpected delight; an edited version of Macfarlane's introduction to Orion's new edition of Rogue Male, it covers, as Macfarlane himself says on Orion's Murder Room website:

...its cult status, my own relationship/history with it, my visits to its landscapes, my tracking of Household's hero, Household himself, the book's qualities and histories and interests, why it compels (and survives) and why it is still read – and still should be read – now, more than seventy years after it was published.

I was especially struck by Macfarlane's pilgrimage to what he'd been led to believe was the Dorset "holloway" in which Household's initially nameless hero – later christened Raymond Ingelram in Rogue Justice – literally goes to ground in order to elude his pursuer, the cunning Major Quive-Smith. It's this part of the novel that I found the most affecting, not to mention alluring: a retreat into a primitive rural idyll, one which for me exerts a powerful appeal. Many others of Household's novels have a similar rustic fascination (A Rough Shoot springs to mind), something that Macfarlane touches on when he mentions on the Murder Room site that "Household has been, in his odd way, at the heart of my writing for years now."

And as luck would have it I have another Household novel lined up for my next post, in which I'll be revisiting what has become by far the most popular post or page on Existential Ennui: Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.

Westlake on Rabe: A Shroud for Jesso & Kill the Boss Goodbye by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal, 1955/6)

2013-03-26T08:54:00.000-05:00

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

Continuing the rolling – if intermittent – showcase of Peter Rabe books I've bought of late (well, over the last year or so, anyway) – with, of course, additional commentary on each by perhaps Rabe's greatest admirer, Donald E. Westlake, taken from Westlake's 1989 essay on Rabe – we reach Rabe's third novel:

A Shroud for Jesso, published, like Stop This Man! and Benny Muscles In, by Gold Medal in the States in 1955. Although once again this particular copy is the British Frederick Muller edition, issued... I don't know when, actually: there's no publication date inside. But anyway, it's essentially the same as the Gold Medal edition, with the same Lu Kimmel-illustrated cover.

This, according to Westlake in his "Peter Rabe" essay in Murder off the Rack, is where Rabe starts to come into his own – at least, "in the second half of" the book. Westlake calls the characters "rich and subtle, their relationships ambiguous, their story endlessly fascinating". For me personally, it's that ambiguity in Rabe's novels that makes them especially appealing: there's an unpredictability to his characters, and as a consequence to his plots; one never quite knows in which direction they're going to head next. He's also a dab hand at eliciting empathy with essentially unheroic or criminal characters, something Westlake, whose Parker series (written as Richard Stark) was almost certainly inspired in part by Rabe, naturally responds to, as evidenced by the elevated position in his essay he affords Rabe's fifth novel:

Kill the Boss Good-By, published by Gold Medal in 1956 (although as before, this copy is the Frederick Muller edition, bought at the last-but-one London Paperback & Pulp Bookfair), with terrific cover art by Barye Phillips. Westlake uses Kill the Boss Good-By to kick off his essay, ridiculing the title ("Why would anybody ever want to read a book called Kill the Boss Goodbye?") but calling the novel itself "one of the most purely interesting crime novels ever written", adding "The entire book is spare and clean and amazingly unornamented."

For Westlake, Kill the Boss Good-By "was the peak of Rabe's first period, five books [the fourth being A House in Naples, 1956; I don't have a copy of that yet], each one better than the one before". He continues:

In those books, Rabe combined bits and pieces of his own history and education with the necessary stock elements of the form to make books in which tension and obsession and an inevitable downward slide toward disaster all combine with a style of increasing cold objectivity not only to make the scenes seem brand new but even to make the (rarely stated) emotions glitter with an unfamiliar sheen.

Sadly, in Westlake's eyes, that peak was followed by a trough that lasted roughly ten novels; for him it wasn't until the late-1950s that Rabe regained some of his early promise, producing a "final cluster of five excellent books"...

Kingsley Amis: My Enemy's Enemy (1965, Penguin #2346) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Lewes Book Bargains)

2013-03-22T05:00:00.000-05:00

A Friday Forgotten Book.

From one Penguin paperback edition of a Kingsley Amis book, to another – one which, like that copy of Lucky Jim, I again plucked from the dump bins outside Lewes secondhand bookshop A & Y Cumming (although rather more recently; just the other week as opposed to a couple of years ago):

Published in paperback by Penguin in 1965 under a Pop Art cover designed by Alan Aldridge (who became Penguin's art director that same year), My Enemy's Enemy was Amis's first collection of short stories, originally issued in hardback by Gollancz in 1962. All bar one of the stories had been published prior to appearing in this collection – mostly in the 1950s in the likes of The Spectator, Esquire and an anthology or three – and three of them form a sequence of sorts, all set within the ranks of the Royal Corps of Signals at the tail end of the Second World War: "My Enemy's Enemy", "Court of Inquiry" and the previously unpublished "I Spy Strangers".

It's these three tales that are the standouts of the collection; taken together they can be considered the equal of the best of Amis's novels, including my personal favourite, The Anti-Death League, for which they act as a kind of aperitif, tackling similar themes of prejudice, class and petty point-scoring in the British Army. (Amis served in the Royal Signals during the war; in 1975 he told Michael Barber of The Paris Review that "Court of Inquiry" was based on his own experiences.) "I Spy Strangers", where the politics of Westminster – and Europe – are played out in a mock parliament, is especially good, but for reasons to do with an ongoing situation at my place of work (don't ask), it was the title story that really struck home with me: a cautionary tale for anyone who's ever considered clambering up the greasy pole.

I wasn't quite so taken with the ensuing (unlinked) trio of tales of civilian life: "Moral Fibre", "Interesting Things" and "All the Blood Within Me"; of the three, I found the latter the most affecting, dealing as it does with regret, old age and the lies we tell ourselves (themes Amis would return to in later works). But perhaps most intriguing of all is the final story, "Something Strange", wherein Amis has a stab at writing science fiction. I've blogged about his interest in the genre before – he published a critical volume on SF (New Maps of Hell, 1960), edited a series of SF anthologies (Spectrum, with Robert Conquest), and some of his novels have elements of SF to them (alternate history tale The Alteration, for example). But "Something Strange" is one of the few – possibly only – pieces of "proper" science fiction Amis wrote, and while it pales in comparison to the better stories in My Enemy's Enemy, it's still not bad at all: a little stiff, and with a telegraphed "twist" that anyone familiar with, say, Ray Bradbury will see coming, but otherwise effective and thoughtful.

"Something Strange" had actually been published three times prior to appearing in My Enemy's Enemy: in 1960 in The Spectator; and in 1961 in Pick of Today's Short Stories 12, and here:

The November issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Vol. II, No. 12, British edition). Which in fact is where I first read it: I found the copy seen here in, I think, the Lewes Antique Centre last year, and bought it expressly for Amis's tale. To my knowledge it was the only time Amis contributed fiction to the magazine (correct me if I'm wrong, SF fans); his story appeared alongside his friend Brian Aldiss's novelette "Undergrowth", which would become part of the full-length novel Hothouse the following year.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis: First Penguin Edition (1961, #1648); a Lewes Book Bargain

2013-03-19T08:00:00.001-05:00

Y'know what? That post on the first Penguin edition of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop from the other week has got me hankering after some more hot Penguin action (steady), so rather than showcase random softcovers in amongst the Peter Rabe paperback posts, let's stay with the Penguins for a little while and pluck some vintage examples of the publisher's wares from my collection – such as this:

The first Penguin edition of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Penguin #1648, published in 1961, with a cover illustration by Nicolas Bentley, who would later illustrate Amis's excellent book on booze On Drink (Jonathan Cape, 1972 – in fact one of three boozy books Amis wrote). Not an especially uncommon Penguin this one; I found this copy in a dump bin outside one of Lewes's secondhand bookshops – probably A & Y Cumming – a few years ago, and you can pick up copies online quite easily. But it's a nice edition in which to own Amis's debut novel, I feel, and certainly a damn sight less expensive than the 1954 Victor Gollancz first edition, i.e. a few quid as opposed to a couple of thousand.

This particular copy of Lucky Jim has popped up on Existential Ennui before, back in 2010, when I used it to illustrate a highly tedious essay on Kingsley Amis, but it's never had its own dedicated post. However, there's little point in my reviewing the thing; as Amis's best-known work, doubtless there are already countless critiques available online – I can't be arsed to look right now, but I'd be astonished if there aren't – so I'll simply restrict myself to saying that while it's not my favourite of the Amis novels I've read (that honour would go to either The Anti-Death League or Ending Up), it's still first rate, and an indispensable part of the Amis canon – and even more so now that Twitter users have adopted the novel's eponymous lead, Jim Dixon's habit of deploying "faces" to denote emotional states (*Sex Life in Ancient Rome face*).

Actually, I've changed my mind: I will direct you to one review of the book, because during the writing of this post I came across an excellent Penguin collector blog, one to which I suspect I'll be referring again before too long: A Penguin a week, in which, unsurprisingly given the blog's title, owner Karyn Reeves reads and reviews a Penguin a week. A splendid and admirable endeavour, I'm sure you'll agree.

And I've another Lewes-found Kingsley Amis Penguin lined up for the next post: a collection of short stories, no less, dating from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s...

Westlake on Rabe: Stop This Man! & Benny Muscles In by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal, 1955/58)

2013-03-15T04:00:00.001-05:00

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Right then. Let's get stuck into that stack of Peter Rabe crime fiction paperbacks I've been threatening to unpack for a while now, and find out what Donald E. Westlake – upon whom Rabe was a big influence – made of each of them in his critical essay "Peter Rabe" in Murder off the Rack (Scarecrow Press, 1989). Beginning, appropriately enough, with Rabe's first novel:

Stop This Man!, originally published by Gold Medal in the States in August of 1955. The copy seen here isn't that printing, however; it's the April 1958 second printing, which I bought for a few quid online, and which sports a different cover to artist Lu Kimmel's 1955 original. And much as I admire Kimmel's art in general, I think I prefer this deftly painted, simultaneously titillating and menacing effort, which is by Ernest Chiriaka, who often used the alias "Darcy" (his signature can be seen bottom left). Evidently Chiriaka was pretty pleased with it too: he used very similar staging for a 1962 Beacon Signal sleaze paperback cover – Cult-Priest's Daughter by John Furlough.

In his essay on Peter Rabe, Westlake reckons that Stop This Man! "showed only glimpses of what Rabe would become", adding: "The elements... just don't mesh. There are odd little scenes of attempted humor that don't really come off and are vaguely reminiscent of Thorne Smith, possibly because one character is called Smith and one Topper. A character called the Turtle does tiresome malapropisms. Very pulp-level violence and sex are stuck onto the story like lumps of clay onto an already finished statue." Although he does offer some praise – calling one character "real and believable" – clearly Westlake expects more of Rabe's writing.

At the close of the passage on Stop This Man! Westlake acknowledges that "An inability to stay with the story he started to tell plagued Rabe from time to time", a criticism he also levels at Rabe's second published novel:

Benny Muscles In, originally published in the same year as Stop This Man! I've blogged about this one before, in a 1973 UK Five Star edition, but the copy seen here is the first British edition, published by Frederick Muller in 1958, but practically identical to the 1955 Gold Medal original, complete with cover by the aforementioned Lu Kimmel. I could have sworn I bought it at one or the other of the last two London Paperback & Pulp Bookfairs I attended, but having examined the photos of my ill-gotten gains from those fairs (follow the links to see them), it appears not, so Christ knows where the damn thing came from.

In any case, in his essay Westlake is much more approving of Benny Muscles In than of Stop This Man!, noting that the "characters of Benny and Pat are fully developed and very touchingly real", and that the "hopeless love story never becomes mawkish... The leap froward from Stop This Man is doubly astonishing when we consider they were published four months apart".

But it's Rabe's next book where Westlake believes the author "finally came fully into his own" – the third Peter Rabe novel to be published by Gold Medal in 1955, A Shroud for Jesso...

Peter Rabe, by Donald E. Westlake, in Murder off the Rack (Scarecrow Press, 1989)

2013-03-11T08:23:00.001-05:00

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

Chances are, if you become inordinately interested in the work of Donald E. Westlake – as I self-evidently have – at some point you're going to encounter Peter Rabe. In interviews and articles Westlake would often cite Rabe as being a major influence (alongside Dashiell Hammett, Vladimir Nabokov and perhaps one or two others), an influence that's particularly noticeable in the hardboiled Parker crime novels Westlake wrote as Richard Stark (especially in Stark/Parker's debut, The Hunter). I've blogged about Rabe repeatedly over the past few years, sometimes comparing Stark to Rabe – notably in this post on Rabe's 1960 crime novel Anatomy of a Killer (which also appears, in an altered form, on The Violent World of Parker) – mostly just reviewing and showcasing Rabe's novels (the majority of which were published straight to paperback). But for true critical insight into Rabe's work, there's really only one place to go, courtesy of Rabe's biggest fan, the aforementioned Donald Westlake.

In 1989 Westlake contributed an essay to Murder off the Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters, an anthology edited by Jon L. Breen and Martin Harry Greenberg and published by Scarecrow Press. Titled simply "Peter Rabe", and nestling alongside essays by, among others, Bill Crider ("Harry Whittington"), Max Allan Collins ("Jim Thompson: The Killer Inside Him"), Ed Gorman ("Fifteen Impressions of Charles Williams") and Loren D. Estleman ("Donald Hamilton: The Writing Crew"), across twenty pages Westlake examines the bulk of Rabe's work, novel by novel – from his 1955 debut, Stop This Man!, to 1974's Black Mafia – turning an often highly critical eye on each of them.

The opening line of the essay – "Peter Rabe wrote the best books with the worst titles of anybody I can think of" – is oft-quoted in relation to Rabe, but make no mistake: this is no bibliographic hagiography. When Westlake feels Rabe is good – Kill the Boss Goodbye (1956), say, or Anatomy of a Killer, or The Box (1962) – he's fulsome in his praise; but when he believes Rabe's writing is subpar, he doesn't pull punches. I was surprised, for instance, by the treatment meted out to Rabe's series of novels starring reluctant criminal Daniel Port; I'd always figured the Port novels had been a big influence on the Parkers in particular, but apparently not. Of the debut Port outing, Dig My Grave Deep (1956), Westlake writes:

[The book] is merely a second-rate gloss of Hammett's The Glass Key, without Hammett's psychological accuracy and without Rabe's own precision and clarity. The book flounders and drifts and postures. The writing is tired and portentous, the characters thinner versions of Hammett's.

Ouch – and the remainder of the Daniel Port series fares little better. Even so, Westlake has the gift, possessed of the best critics, to make even the duffest-sounding of novels seem interesting. His clear-eyed assessments are consistently entertaining, affording insight even when he's slating Rabe's work – and I'll be drawing on a number of those assessments over the coming weeks, as I unveil some of the Peter Rabe paperbacks I've picked up over the past year, and take a look at what Westlake had to say about them.

The Great Tom Ripley Reread, 4: The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1980)

2013-03-07T08:30:00.000-06:00

NB: This is the somewhat belated fourth instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread, which, as the overarching title suggests, entails me rereading, and then blogging about (in a prolix and frankly disturbingly gushing fashion), each of the five Patricia Highsmith novels to feature Tom Ripley, the man with no conscience.

Featured in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Of all the characters Patricia Highsmith created, Tom Ripley was the one she most identified with. After The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), she returned to him four times – the only one of her leads to be granted a sequel, let alone four of the buggers – and each time there seemed to be more of Highsmith herself visible in the characterization of Ripley. Whether it be Tom's frustration at the haphazard nature of the telephone service in France, where Highsmith lived in the 1970s (Ripley Under Ground, 1970; Ripley's Game, 1974), his thoughts on spy novels, or indeed his politics (both Ripley's Game), his opinions are often seemingly simpatico with hers. And so it proves again in the fourth novel in the Ripliad: when Tom mithers about having to do his accounts in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980; UK Heinemann first edition, Bill Richmond cover, seen above) or has a pop at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (comparing it to a blow-up doll), the passages could have been lifted directly from Highsmith's own diaries or notebooks.

Which is, in effect, what happened for the segment of the book set in West Berlin, where Tom travels with Frank Pierson, the sixteen-year-old American heir to a fortune who has latched on to (and who idolises) him. According to Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography of Highsmith, Beautiful Shadow, Highsmith travelled to Berlin expressly in order to research her fourth Ripley outing, eventually reworking her own excursions, which she documented in her notebook, for the novel. After initially being confused by Berlin, over repeated trips Highsmith had become fascinated by the city, a fascination that's almost tangible in The Boy Who Followed Ripley: even during my first reading of the novel the Berlin section felt by far the most alive of the book, and that remained the case for my second go-through.

What the rest of the novel lacks is any real sense of existential danger for Tom. Where in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground and even, to an extent, Ripley's Game, Tom had to fight for his very survival – which is to say his liberty and his idle, comfortable way of life (in Ripley's Game, his own actions lead directly to an assault on his rural French home, Belle Ombre) – in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (which, in the mutable timeline of the Ripliad, is set roughly six months on from Game), the Berlin escapade aside (I'll return to that shortly), he's preoccupied for the most part with saving Frank from himself. The teenager tracks Tom down in France having heard of him thanks to a Derwatt painting (actually a Bernard Tufts fake) Frank's father owns (see Ripley Under Ground for the story behind Derwatt/Tufts). Tom soon learns that Frank's father, who was confined to a wheelchair, was killed when he fell from a cliff behind the family mansion just before Frank fled America, and that furthermore, Frank believes he was responsible.

What Highsmith is setting up here is yet another spin on her familiar theme of two men becoming strangely fascinated by and fixated on one another. The problem is that in this instance, it's a passive relationship for both parties. What made previous takes on the theme so compelling was the manipulative, malicious – and ultimately murderous – nature of at least one of the protagonists, whether it be Bruno in Highsmith's debut, Strangers on a Train (1950), or indeed Tom himself in Talented, Under Ground and Game. Here, however, Frank – despite apparently offing his father – is utterly guileless, while Tom takes on the guise almost of a mother hen – or, perhaps more accurately given the gay undercurrent of the relationship, a bear to Frank's cub.

Because although the twisted, violent impulses inherent in so many of Highsmith's male-on-male (as it were) dynamics are missing here, the subtext of homosexuality that's also often present – not least in the Ripley novels – is brought to the fore. The question of Tom's sexuality (or lack thereof) is a constant background buzz in the Ripliad; in The Talented Mr. Ripley it was evident that he was in love with Dickie Greenleaf (or at least the idea of Dickie), and his marriage to Heloise thereafter is, if not completely sexless, then devoid of any noticeable passion. For her part, Highsmith always denied Tom was gay, although latterly she did acknowledge that he might have been suppressing homosexual tendencies. But in The Boy Who Followed Ripley, she addresses the question more directly than at any other point in the series.

Early on, when Antoine Grais, a friend of Heloise's, arrives at Belle Ombre unexpectedly, Tom – who we're explicitly informed is reading Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind – tells Frank to go upstairs in order to avoid awkward questions. Antoine catches a glimpse of Frank, apologisies for disturbing Tom, and then, with "a nasty curiosity", asks if his "friend" is male or female. "Guess," Tom replies. Frank clearly arouses in Tom a protective passion that's usually reserved for those times when he's engaged in deadly acts of self-preservation; when Frank admits to Tom that he killed his own father, uncharacteristically Tom grabs Frank by the throat and shakes him to dissuade him from running off. Not long after, Frank hides from Tom in the woods behind Belle Ombre as a kind of test; when Frank appears from behind a tree, Tom feels "relief, like an ache".

That episode is echoed by another once the action moves to Berlin, where Tom takes Frank on an impulse. Having spent an evening with Frank in a gay bar (where else?), the next day the two are walking in the woods at the edge of the city when Frank is kidnapped. Tom is shaken by this turn of events, "thoroughly shattered by the boy's – rape, in the sense that he had been snatched away". Subsequently, in order to retrieve Frank, Tom dons full drag, ostensibly as a disguise so he can follow the kidnappers who are holding Frank to ransom. Fully made-up, wearing a wig and dressed in a "very pretty" pink, white and transparent gown, Tom takes to the dancefloor of a gay club as he waits for the kidnappers, feeling "exhilarated and stronger", delighting in the freedom his disguise affords him.

Of course, this isn't the first time Tom has disguised himself: in Ripley Under Ground he assumed the identity of the painter, Derwatt, donning a fake beard and applying makeup, and his rescue of Frank – which he accomplishes still dressed as a woman – recalls some of the giddy, freewheeling insanity of that novel. And there are other nods to Under Ground besides, as well as to Ripley's Game: Ed and Jeff from the Buckmaster Gallery are mentioned, as is Murchison, the art collector whom Tom bludgeoned with a bottle of red; Tom is taking lessons for the hapsichord he bought in Game; and Tom's friend, the fence Reeves Minot, features again, along with a couple of fresh faces, two Berlin associates of Reeves's, Eric and Peter, who regard the legendary, unpredictable, mercurial – and, yes, courageous – Tom Ripley with something approaching awe.

In the end, the sexual aspect of Tom and Frank's relationship is less important than the psychological one. Because at root the book is a study of a conscienceless man who wonders if he's perhaps found a kindred spirit: a killer, like himself; not quite on the same scale – just the one murder to Tom's "seven or eight" – but even so, someone he can guide, "steer", maybe even mould. That Tom is mistaken provides the tragedy in the tale; for Tom Ripley, the "font of evil" (as he so memorably puts it in Ripley Under Ground), can never truly be anyone's saviour – quite the opposite, in fact, as the gauche American couple who decide to stick their noses into the Murchison affair in the final book in the Ripliad, Ripley Under Water, discover to their cost...

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; First Penguin Paperback Edition (Penguin #455, 1943)

2013-03-05T03:00:00.000-06:00

Back in December 2012, I intimated at the close of my month-long series of posts on vintage paperbacks that there'd be further paperback posts on Existential Ennui in the new year. Not entirely unpredictably – this is, after all, a blog about old books (although ones of the hardback variety for the most part) – so it has proved: I posted a 1962 Peter Rabe sleaze softcover at the end of last week – with plenty more non-sleaze Rabe softcovers to come – and now I have for you an even more recent online purchase, the first of a handful of random paperbacks I'll be showcasing in an intermittent fashion over the coming weeks. It's one of my favourite novels, but I've never owned it in any edition of note – until now.

It's the first Penguin paperback edition of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, published in 1943 (Penguin #455), five years after the Chapman & Hall first edition (although, curiously, the copyright line in the Penguin edition states the novel was first published in 1933). Still the preeminent "Novel About Journalists" (as the subtitle has it) – up to a point, Lord Copper; Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning (1967) is, I'd suggest, just as sublime – there have been umpteen impressions and resets of the Penguin paperback over the decades, some of them bearing very similar front covers to this iconic design. But true first impressions are quite uncommon (at time of writing there's only one other copy on AbeBooks, for example), a consequence, perhaps, of the edition's wartime provenance – apart from anything else, the book is printed on very thin paper stock and therefore prone, I imagine, to damage – and, related to that, unique features. Such as the back cover:

where an ARP warden evinces the evident benefits of Eno's Fruit Salt via a toothsome grin worthy of a Terry Gilliam Monty Python animation. Or the inside front cover and first page:

where an advert for Norvic Shoes rather overshadows the admission from Penguin that "war-time production difficulties" have buggered up their backlist. And there's one further advert to be found, on the inside back cover, promoting a confectionery that's very close to my heart:

the good old Mars Bar. Although as the ad's small print states, due to wartime zoning, at the time Mars's "sustaining", "energising", "nourishing" properties could apparently only be enjoyed by citizens in the "Southern Counties". Well, at least I'd have been OK down here in Lewes. "So here's hoping for a quick victory," it adds cheerily, "and plenty of Mars for everyone – everywhere." Hear hear.

Next: finally, the Great Tom Ripley Reread resumes, with The Boy Who Followed Ripley.

Peter Rabe and Sleaze Paperbacks, feat. His Neighbor's Wife (Beacon Signal #B542F, 1962)

2013-03-01T06:00:00.000-06:00

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

Back at the beginning of the week I posted a rather nice Westlake Score, in the shape of a 1971 British first edition of Donald E. Westlake's Adios, Scheherazade, a work of fiction about a writer trying to pen a sleaze novel – the kind of sleaze novel, in fact, that Westlake himself wrote dozens of in the late 1950s/early 1960s, under a variety of pseudonyms (chiefly Alan Marshall). It's common knowledge among enthusiasts and aficionados that a number of Westlake's friends and contemporaries toiled alongside him in the fields of sleaze, often sharing pen names with him; two of them, Hal Dresner and Lawrence Block, even published their own semi-autobiographical novels on the sleaze scene (respectively, The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books, 1965, and Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, 1971). But I only very recently realised that one of Westlake's major influences wrote a handful of sleaze novels too, a nugget of info I uncovered as a result of spotting, and then winning, this on eBay:

His Neighbor's Wife, by Peter Rabe, published in the US in paperback by Beacon Signal in 1962 (cover art uncredited). Now, this one isn't, strictly speaking, a sleaze novel; it's obviously been packaged (and possibly titled) as such by Beacon, and Rabe told George Tuttle in 1989 that he wrote it as a "quickie with pornographic overtones... when I was very short of money and simply had to knock something out". (Ooer, missus.) But it's actually more of a psychological melodrama than anything – admittedly with a bit of additional bed-hopping between the four leads, but overall not too far removed from the bulk of Rabe's crime and suspense canon.

Perhaps that's why Rabe allowed it to be published under his own name – unlike the other two novels he wrote for Beacon: Her High School Lover and New Man in the House. Published in 1963 under the nom de plume Marco Malaponte, Rabe described them to Tuttle as "absolute crap", adding "everything just deteriorated as far as the craft was concerned". In light of which, as keen on Rabe's work as I am, I probably won't be seeking them out. (An aside: Rabe again assumed an alias in 1975, that of J. T. MacCargo – not to write sleaze, but to pen two Mannix novelisations. I doubt I'll ever buy those either.)

On balance, His Neighbor's Wife might well be the most collectible – which is to say, expensive – of all of Rabe's novels; of the five copies currently available on AbeBooks, the cheapest is around sixty quid (with the more expensive more like ninety), so I was pretty pleased to win my copy – from a British seller, unusually – for much less than that, and in splendid condition too.

And there'll be much, much more from Peter Rabe on Existential Ennui over the next month or so, because I've a whole stack of Rabe paperback originals to unveil, all of which will be accompanied by commentary by none other than the aforementioned Donald Westlake (as a consequence, I'll be cross-posting them on The Violent World of Parker). In amongst those, I'll be spotlighting some other, non-Rabe, paperbacks I've acquired of late – and while I'm in a teaser-y frame of mind, let me just mention that on top of all that, next week (fingers crossed) I'll finally be returning to the Great Tom Ripley Reread, with the fourth novel in the Ripliad, The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Hope you can join me then.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré: a Review (Gollancz, 1963)

2013-02-28T03:15:00.000-06:00

Having recently read and reviewed John le Carré's first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) – it seemed only right and proper that I should tackle his third one too: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. For one thing, it's arguably le Carré's most famous book (although in recent years it's perhaps been usurped by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as a result of that later novel's 2011 film adaptation); for another, it's widely regarded as his best (although, as brilliant as it is, for my money Tinker is the better novel); and finally, it's actually a sequel of sorts to Call for the Dead – so with that novel still fresh in my mind, what better time to pluck my 1963 first edition (second impression) of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold from the shelves and give it a go.

As it turns out, it's quite a different novel to its two predecessors. Both Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality have an element of the murder mystery to them – much more so in the latter, but that strand of DNA is certainly present in the (largely espionage) genetic makeup of Call. In any case, both are very much reactive novels – British Intelligence operative George Smiley investigating the death of a civil servant and an attendant East German plot in the former, and the rather more down-to-earth death of the wife of a schoolmaster in the latter – whereas The Spy Who Came in from the Cold could be characterized as proactive. Here, the plot is propelled by the machinations of the Circus (MI6) and its head, Control, who hatches a plan to take revenge on Mundt, the East German agent-cum-assassin-turned-Abteilung bigwig who murdered two people in Call (and almost did for Smiley as well).

Furthermore, Smiley isn't the star of Spy. Instead, the man tasked with carrying out Control's fiendish scheme is Alec Leamas, a washed-up operative whose chief East German agent is killed at the beginning of the book. Leamas's assignment is to make himself into a candidate for recruitment by East German Intelligence, a goal which entails him hitting the bottle, getting kicked out of the Circus and even being sent to prison for assault. The one chink of light in this dark descent is Liz, a young librarian who becomes his lover, and who will prove instrumental both to his mission, and in his eventual undoing. (Interestingly, not the first time, nor indeed the last, that a woman will be the downfall of a man in a le Carré novel.)

But although Smiley, supposedly still retired after the events of Call for the Dead, doesn't feature much in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he's a spectral presence throughout. Control enlists his (reluctant) aid in concocting the plan, and he haunts the novel like a portly ghost: glimpsed by Leamas in a greasy spoon and at an airport kiosk; paying Liz a visit with Peter Guillam. He also pops up in the final scene, which brings the action full circle to the East/West Berlin border, but the true climax of the book comes just prior to that, and takes the unexpected shape of a courtroom drama – never my favourite form of fiction, but deployed effectively here by le Carré to lay bare the machinations of Control and the Circus and deliver a final twist which throws a new and awful light on those endeavours.

In the end, le Carré leaves us questioning not only whether the ends justify the means, but whether the ends are desirable either – questions which have as much resonance – as much relevance – today as they did fifty years ago.

Westlake Score: Adios, Scheherazade, by Donald E. Westlake (Hodder & Stoughton, 1971)

2013-02-25T12:15:00.000-06:00

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

Before I get to the final John le Carré novel I'll be reviewing in my short series of posts on the author – i.e. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which I'm still reading – let's have a Westlake Score, in the shape of this:

A UK first edition of Adios, Scheherazade, published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1971, the year after the US Simon & Schuster first. Quite an uncommon book this one: it fell out of print decades ago – in English anyway; there are more recent French editions – making it one of the scarcest of all of Donald E. Westlake's novels – either under his own name or one of his numerous nom de plumes – in any edition, especially so in this British printing. I acquired this copy – for a ridiculously low price – from famed book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, who originally acquired it from... actually I don't really know where Jamie got it from – which I guess is why he's the famed book dealer and I'm simply one of the clueless slobs wot buy books off him.

The dust jacket design is by Lipscombe, Lubbock, Ewart & Holland, doing a grand job of evoking the era, if not the specific milieu, of the novel: that of the American sleaze paperback field, in which Westlake toiled away in the late-1950s/early-1960s under a variety of aliases. Chief among those was Alan Marshall, under which moniker Westlake wrote over a dozen smutty softcovers for Midwood; I blogged about some of them towards the end of last year, inspired by Trent's series of posts over at The Violent World of Parker on the Westlake sleaze catalogue. Adios, Scheherazade is about that part of Westlake's life, and is also one of his more experimental novels; as Ethan Iverson notes in his brief precis of the book as part of his peerless Westlake overview: "here there are 10 chapters of exactly 5000 words each, just like the sex novels the hapless narrator is supposed to be writing".

Speaking of other folks' thoughts on the thing, there's a detailed review of Adios, Scheherazade over at Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books, but perhaps the best piece on the novel available online (linked previously by Andrew Wheeler, Matthew Asprey and Bill Crider) is Earl Kemp's "Nobody Can Write This Shit Forever". Kemp actually edited some of Westlake's sleaze efforts – quite heavily, if Kemp is to be believed – and his candid, gossipy reminiscences as he picks his way through Adios, Scheherazade make for entertaining and arresting reading. As Kemp drily observes: "The [Alan Marshall] manuscripts consistently rose just to almost the absolute minimum required input level."

A Murder of Quality (1962) from The John le Carré Omnibus (Gollancz, 1964)

2013-02-22T02:46:00.000-06:00

NB: A Friday Forgotten Book.

Having vowed never again to enslave myself to Existential Ennui by embarking on too many series of posts, I find myself, just three posts on from making that vow, in the midst of, you guessed it, another series of posts. But at least, to horribly paraphrase Eric Burdon, my intentions were good, in that the reason I've ended up reading, and then blogging about, two John le Carré novels in fairly quick succession (we'll skip over this interlude post – there's really no excuse for it) is because they both reside in the book I decided I most wanted to read (rather than most wanted to blog about), i.e. The le Carré Omnibus. Published in 1964 to capitalise on the success of le Carré's third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), it contains the author's first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961), and this:

A Murder of Quality (1962) – which, although it stars Call for the Dead's lead, squat spy George Smiley, isn't, unlike most of le Carré's work, an espionage novel. Instead it's a murder mystery, set in and around the fictional rural public school of Carne, where Smiley, having retired from The Circus (MI6) in Call for the Dead (the first of many retirements from the service), is sent by an old intelligence colleague to find out who killed the wife of one of the schoolmasters. Once there, he quickly discovers what a poisonous place Carne is, populated for the most part by supercilious schoolboys and masters and their equally dreadful wives (the masters' wives, that is, not the boys'; they're a bit young for marriage) and fuelled by gossip and backbiting, a toxic social stew typified by a party Smiley attends where one harridan takes great delight in reminding him of the failure of his marriage.

Indeed, Smiley's distaste for Carne – fear of the place, even – has its roots in his rocky relationship with the wayward Ann: his wife spent her childhood there. Still, George is a square peg in a round hole in most situations; early in the novel a commentator bestows upon him the memorable description "Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I'd give my eyes for" – and Smiley certainly puts that brain to good use getting to the bottom of this whodunnit-cum-tragedy. Although in the final analysis, it could be argued that it's the archaic, enervating institution of Carne itself that stands revealed as the true villain of the piece.

To a degree, A Murder of Quality reminded me of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and not merely because its school setting is echoed in the later novel's title. Like Schoolboy – like Smiley himself, in fact – A Murder of Quality is an odd fish, at least in comparison to the wider le Carré canon. Both books are slightly overlooked works sandwiched between spy fiction classics – A Murder of Quality bookended by Call for the Dead and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; The Honourable Schoolboy by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People – and yet nevertheless are rewarding novels in their own right, possessed of a genuine depth of feeling; in the case of A Murder of Quality, it seems evident le Carré was working through some quite personal issues to do with his time at Sherborne public school in the writing of the book. Furthermore, both, in their own ways, interrupt the longer narrative of their particular segments of the George Smiley series; because as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora points out in the comments on my Call for the Dead post, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is essentially a sequel to le Carré's debut.

In light of which information, it stands to reason that since I'm already immersed in le Carré's world, I might as well stay undercover and plunge ever deeper into his murky milieu, with the aforementioned The Spy Who Came in from the Cold....