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Post by severance on Jul 5, 2008 13:49:15 GMT
It would seem that the Richard Quintain books that W. Howard Baker pumped out in the late 60s/early 70s were originally Sexton Blake episodes with just a touch of adaptation. So here's a checklist of what relates to what - obviously this is far from comprehensive, but it's a start, and no doubt I'll be editing it for years to come (and Mr Boot will know it all already anyway!) SBL#421 " A Cry in the Night" by Peter Saxon dated January 1959 was adapted as the Quintain " No Place for Strangers by W. Howard Baker, Consul 1965?, Five Star 1972, and in the First Quintain Omnibus "Quintain Strikes Back", Howard Baker 1968. SBL# 491 " Terror Loch" by Wilfred McNeilly dated January 1962 was adapted as the Quintain " The Treasure Hunters" by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower 1970, Five Star 1972. SBL#504 " Studio One Murder" by W.A. Ballinger dated July 1962 was adapted as the Quintain " The Girl in Asses Milk" by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower 1967, Five Star 1972. SBL# 506 " The Reluctant Gunman" by W. Howard Baker dated August 1962 was adapted as the Quintain " Unfriendly Persuasion" by W.A. Ballinger, Consul 1964? and by W. Howard Baker in the First Quintain Omnibus "Quintain Strikes Back", Howard Baker 1968. These are the ones I know for sure but " Strike North" sounds suspiciously like SBL#400 " The Sea Tigers", " The Guardians"/" The Dirty Game" could be SBL#393 " The Violent Hours", and surely " The Rape of Berlin" is SBL#395 " The Last Days of Berlin" and " The Dead and the Damned" is SB#369 " Woman of Saigon"?
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Post by pulphack on Jul 9, 2008 10:44:12 GMT
The Sea Tigers is Strike North, and The Dead And The Damned is sort-of Woman Of Siagon - there's a lot added to this, as it's fairly long by Press Ed standards, and so it almost becomes a different book. A bit like the way some of the 4th series Blakes were added to and issued as 5th series Mayflower Blakes.
I'm sure I did something on this on the old board, back when I first joined. I've been looking for it, but can't locate it. I'll go back and look later. Also, I should cannibalise a few bits from the Press Ed piece in PF, as that covered some of this territory. Also did a paper for LOBBC about five years back on WHB which touched on this, but I can't find it on disk. I might have a hard copy somewhere.
You add some stuff, I'll add some stuff when I find it, and between us we should be able to sort out a bit more of the WHB tangle. I know not many people care except us, but it'll be peace of mind after many years of buyng the same bloody book twice!
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roger
New Face In Hell
Posts: 1
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Post by roger on May 20, 2016 8:11:00 GMT
Well, I care! I recently re-read "A Cry in the Night"/"No Place for Strangers". Baker does not always de-Blakenise quite enough - the degree of co-operation obtained by a famous sleuth like Blake is rather surprising if given to a stranger called Quintain who is an insurance investigator! I'm not sure I've read all of these, but what I used to notice is that de-Blakenised Blakes usually have a "Blake" left in somewhere. They must of course have been re-typed throughout, before the days of Search + Replace programmes. Blake 'fossils' can even appear in Jack Trevor Story's de-Blakenised books which are much more thoroughly rewritten. Delighted I'm not the only one who cares.
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Post by pulphack on May 20, 2016 14:58:04 GMT
Hello Roger! Sev & meself never did get far with this back then. I know I had real life intruding and then forgot! Maybe we should restart... Yes, indeed it must have been retyping back then, though I wonder if they sometimes used the same plates and just reset the names to try and save time/money this way, in which case the type setter is the culprit. Not sure how practical that would be, though. I suspect Baker & Mann were geting the Quintains out at such a pace that they had mss retyped and edited at such a speed that the copy editing was rushed - a look at how many titles were flung out in the matter of a few years suggests this.
I'm glad there's someone else out there who still cares about this old stuff, and that you've found us. You'll feel at home...
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Post by andydecker on May 20, 2016 18:52:29 GMT
As I have to re-read Drums of the Dark Gods for an article, is the progression of Quintain from secret agent to detective a one-off or is this kind of a parallel world Quintain? I had totally forgotten that Quintain is basically Sexton Blake.
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Post by pulphack on May 21, 2016 8:47:18 GMT
I suppose you could call it a parallel world Quintain, but that would be investing too much thought into the processes of Baker & Mann. I would say that their modus operandi would be to take Blakes they liked or by writers they had agreements with, change Blake to Quintain, and just keep the original context with little thought for continuity. Blake acted as a spy for Eustace Craille on some occasions, and as a PI most of the time. This is just kept in with little regard for anyone knowing a continuity as they did with Blake. Maybe now and again change him from PI to insurance agent, where the Blake source had him acting as an investigator for one of the concerns who had the new (4th series and after) Blake organisation under contract for security, which was part of updating him from his Holmes-clone source. As for things like Strike North, where Quintain is suddenly thrust back to WWII - well, in Blake this was taken as 'reminiscence' of his long existence, regardless of any anomaly, and accepted as such by long time readers. Odd, but explainable (sort of). With Quintain it just looks plain weird. But did Bill Baker care? What do you reckon...
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Post by andydecker on May 21, 2016 20:20:53 GMT
Ah! Thanks. Somewhere I have one or two Quintains, I have to look them up.
I always marvel that both the writers and the audience back then seemed to accept if an insurance investigator battle the mean streets of Soho or the French Rivera in one book and the forces of darkness in the next. Wheatley seemed to switch genres effortlessly in his de Richleau novels (and his other heroes), and now Baker (or McNeilly- who really wrote "Drums" will never be solved, I guess) did this too.
Somehow I don't think this would be accepted by today's audience. Can you imagine, say, Elisabeth George's Lynley&Havers hunting ghosts in the next novel?
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Post by pulphack on May 23, 2016 4:48:49 GMT
I can, and I can see it going down really badly! Id love it, but I'd be in a minority! Indeed, the idea of cross-genre in that manner is very much frowned upon, isn't it. Marketing men at publishers reckoned it was confusing the audience (I got told this once, and you've probably come across that, too). And I think audiences would initially get confused now - not because they're thick, like the marketing men think, but because they've got so used to there being clear demarcation lines in genre that they wouldn't know what to make of it - why is their fave writer doing something that wasn't expected? We all get used to these lines being there without realising it, I think. Unless you stop and think, you just wonder what the hell the writer is up to!
Back in the day, it was different. My theory is that this is because the hard and fast rules hadn't been set in stone. If you look back to DW's glory days, it was less than a hundred years since mass literacy had exploded publishing into big business, and novelty was the key in trying to make your own corner of the market - something that the fertile minds of boy's and girl's fiction editors encouraged: look at the odd things schoolboys and girls got themselves into in papers like The Magnet, Wizard, Girls Crystal, etc in the UK, and the dime novels of the US. European fiction was full of strange heroes, and I would assume their juvenile papers were the same. But there was no TV, film was new, and radio in its infancy.
Cut to the sixties and the Blake era that gave us Quintain, and the book market is shrinking in fiction terms, as film and TV - and radio to an extent, although that too was suffering by then - take over those fields. So marketing gets tighter and more targeted, and as a result what editors take on gets more - well, 'fcoused' if you're kind, 'narrow' if you're not. Baker ignored all this and so it seems odd whereas thirty years prior it would have been the norm.
I would assume that Baker & Mann, who sold these titles piecemeal to publishers at book fairs, would also figure that their scattershot sales would mean the chances of a Quintain WWII, spy, or PI novel all turning up on the same continent at the same time with the same publisher would be negligible. OK, Baker ran omnibuses of Quintain from his own house in the '70's, but he had an assured, if relatively small, audience for these.
Veering off topic slightly, it always astounds me that JK Rowling had such success with a concept that was so simple and yet so much harking back to tthe past - taking the magic story and the school story and combining it. This is not to knock her in any way, but rather the way it which it was greeted as so radical and novel by her audience - old as well as young - says to me that the rigid codification of genre fiction had deprived a generation of the kind of stories they liked, and also showed marketing men to be the tools of the trade. To go back to my first paragraph - they would be confused, but if given a chance to sit back and think, they'd probably love a bit more mixing it up.
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Post by severance on May 24, 2016 10:03:50 GMT
Welcome Roger - you're right in that me and Mr. Boot never really advanced this checklist. High time that was corrected as I've found at least one more:
SBL# 369 "Woman of Saigon" by Peter Saxon dated November 1956 was adapted (and greatly expanded) as the Quintain "The Dead and the Damned by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower-Dell 1967 and by Bill Rekab (!), Zenith 197?.
SBL# 400 "The Sea Tigers" by Peter Saxon dated February 1958 was adapted as the Quintain "Strike North by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower-Dell 1965, Lodestone 1965?, Howard Baker 1967, Lancer 1967, Mayflower 1969, Five Star 1970, and Trojan 197?.
SBL# 421 "A Cry in the Night" by Peter Saxon dated January 1959 was adapted as the Quintain "No Place for Strangers" by W. Howard Baker, Consul 1965?, Five Star 1972, and in the First Quintain Omnibus "Quintain Strikes Back", Howard Baker 1968.
SBL# 435 "Espresso Jungle" by W. Howard Baker dated September 1959 was adapted as the Quintain "The Cellar Boys" by W. Howard Baker, Consul 1965, Five Star 1973, and Priory 19??.
SBL# 491 "Terror Loch" by Wilfred McNeilly dated January 1962 was adapted as the Quintain "The Treasure Hunters" by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower 1970, Five Star 1972.
SBL# 504 "Studio One Murder" by W.A. Ballinger dated July 1962 was adapted as the Quintain "The Girl in Asses Milk" by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower 1967, Five Star 1972.
SBL# 506 "The Reluctant Gunman" by W. Howard Baker dated August 1962 was adapted as the Quintain "Unfriendly Persuasion" by W.A. Ballinger, Consul 1964? and by W. Howard Baker in the First Quintain Omnibus "Quintain Strikes Back", Howard Baker 1968.
Still not 100% certain about The Violent Hours and The Last Days of Berlin.
That just leaves a few Quintains for which the source is still unknown - The Charge is Treason, Night of the Wolf, The Judas Diary, and Traitor!
I've read The Judas Diary and still no closer to working out which SBL it is, so more work to be done. Over to Mr. Boot.
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Post by pulphack on May 24, 2016 15:56:43 GMT
You shame me, Sev. I can add very little to that. I've never read The Judas Diary, which is insane considering the number of times I've seen it over the years. I've always been convinced I had a copy at home - phantom book syndrome??
The Last Days Of Berlin was definitely a Bill Baker SBL originally, as I read it in that form when I was keeping the library for the LOBBC, but I don't have that or a checklist anymore, I'm afraid.
The Cellar Boys is one where Quintain is Costain - I was never sure why Baker & Mann changed the name. He was also Costain in Scandal Street, which is noteable as being an SBL that was never published as one - it was pulled at the last moment and replaced as it was 'too violent'. I can't see that myself, having read many SBL's from that period. It's no more or less so that them. It does however feature a very unflattering portrait of a press baron who could be construed as Harmsworth, the head of Amalgamated/Fleetway. I've always suspected that was the real reason it was axed. Which is a shame, as it's a cracking Costain/Blake and Splash Kirby story.
I'm going to have to up my game, here...
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Post by andydecker on May 24, 2016 17:37:36 GMT
Welcome Roger - you're right in that me and Mr. Boot never really advanced this checklist. High time that was corrected as I've found at least one more: SBL# 369 " Woman of Saigon" by Peter Saxon dated November 1956 was adapted (and greatly expanded) as the Quintain " The Dead and the Damned by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower-Dell 1967 and by Bill Rekab (!), Zenith 197?. SBL# 400 " The Sea Tigers" by Peter Saxon dated February 1958 was adapted as the Quintain " Strike North by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower-Dell 1965, Lodestone 1965?, Howard Baker 1967, Lancer 1967, Mayflower 1969, Five Star 1970, and Trojan 197?. SBL# 421 " A Cry in the Night" by Peter Saxon dated January 1959 was adapted as the Quintain " No Place for Strangers" by W. Howard Baker, Consul 1965?, Five Star 1972, and in the First Quintain Omnibus "Quintain Strikes Back", Howard Baker 1968. SBL# 435 " Espresso Jungle" by W. Howard Baker dated September 1959 was adapted as the Quintain " The Cellar Boys" by W. Howard Baker, Consul 1965, Five Star 1973, and Priory 19??. SBL# 491 " Terror Loch" by Wilfred McNeilly dated January 1962 was adapted as the Quintain " The Treasure Hunters" by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower 1970, Five Star 1972. SBL# 504 " Studio One Murder" by W.A. Ballinger dated July 1962 was adapted as the Quintain " The Girl in Asses Milk" by W. Howard Baker, Mayflower 1967, Five Star 1972. SBL# 506 " The Reluctant Gunman" by W. Howard Baker dated August 1962 was adapted as the Quintain " Unfriendly Persuasion" by W.A. Ballinger, Consul 1964? and by W. Howard Baker in the First Quintain Omnibus "Quintain Strikes Back", Howard Baker 1968. So, did Baker the re-writes with the permission of the unknown Saxon's and McNeilly or did they have work-for-hire contracts and no control over their work? Or did he just ripped them off? Frankly I have a hard time believing the last one. Once or twice maybe, but in this quantity? Nobody ever noticed or complained?
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Post by pulphack on May 24, 2016 18:22:25 GMT
To be honest, it's a bit of all three, Andy! Press Ed had a school of writers who worked for them consistently, partly because they had trouble picking up work elsewhere, and partly because the work was easy for them - guaranteed money up front, and certainly in Blake days a guaranteed sale from which they did receive a royalty. No struggling to build your own audience there!
Baker employed them to write new titles and tart up their own or others for republication. He didn't need permission, but they were complicit. He did own the work - part of the original Blake contracts made it work for hire - but there were royalties and advances rather than flat fees. That goes back to Amalgamated, where Blake hacks and schoolboy story writers like Edwy Searles Brooks and Charles Hamilton got reprint fees as well as their initial payments.*
At the same time, he did rip them off to a degree. He had a reputation for claiming a Blake needed rewrites and so only paying half the fee, then pocketing some or all of the rewrite fee when little was altered (Jack Adrian claims not a comma was changed in his Blake debut as a writer, The Abductors, published under the 'rewritten' house name of Desmond Reid). And for sure they didn't know about all the editions that were sold when Press Ed were independent of Fleetway. However... Jack Trevor Story reckoned that even if you knew he was fiddling you, Baker was so charming that you couldn't help liking him. And I believe Mike Moorcock once described him as a 'plausible rogue', which sounds about right from the memories of people I've known who met or knew him via the LOBBC, who - it must be said - didn't have to work with him.
So why did they put up with it? Well, hack work got harder to find as the seventies went on; many of the writers who were regulars knew that it was at least a guaranteed income; and many of them, like Martin Thomas, had come up through the mushroom jungle of paperback houses that closed without paying at an alarming rate. Even in the late sixties lovable East End businessman David Gold and his dad wound up a bankrupt Compact that didn't seem to impact on their distribution business, but did leave a number of writers out of pocket. By contrast, Baker may have skimmed the profits, but at least you got 50% or more of what you were owed. Not ideal, but if you get the chance do read Steve Holland's 'Mushroom Jungle' history of the period. It's an eye-opener and explains a lot about why Baker could still count on the loyalty of his regulars. Plausible rogue, innit?
(* pre-WWII Blake writer Anthony Parsons explained it thus: for a hardback fiction novel you'd get £50 and maybe royalties at some distant point if the publisher managed to get it attention and sales, whereas for a 60,000 word SBL he got £200 based on sales averages, the possibility of reprint fees at some point, a guaranteed readership, and he could also change the heroes name and flog it to a hardback library publisher for another £50. A quick calculation for inflation, and... Blimey! Sorted! Those were the days, eh?)
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Post by severance on May 24, 2016 18:45:37 GMT
I'm going to have to up my game, here... I need to do likewise, forgot I had another sheet with a few more titles! Take Death for a Lover, Cry from the Dark, The Guardians/The Dirty Game, The Inexpendable, Treason by Truth, and of course Drums of the Dark Gods. Had a quick look at the Quintain page at spyguysandgals.com only to find a comment from Mr. Boot that basically repeats what he said above this. We really are repeating ourselves here!
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Post by andydecker on May 26, 2016 19:50:30 GMT
Very interesting infos. Sexton Blake even found its way to Germany, but wasn't very successful. After 30 novels they cancelled it in 1963. I have a copy of one by Desmond Reid. I read a few pages today. Something about an actor's school and a blackmail.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 28, 2016 7:45:49 GMT
Another one for the list... WH Baker's Destination Dieppe, which I finally read this week after being given a copy by my chum Ian, who thought I might already have read it. Like The Judas Diary, it was one of those WWII Baker's that I always pass up with an attack of phantom book syndrome.
It's a Quintain, and definitely a Blake at some point as it features security chief 'Felix Fenner', who is obviously Eustace Craille (except with an arbitrary ginger beard added!). In this one, Quintain is sent to France to effect a mission that forms part of the abortive Dieppe raid of 1942, and along the way flush out a traitor in the French resistance. It's very downbeat and dour, and in part reads like the work of a man with a grudge against the way men were sacrificed to make a point (the raid was in part to appease Roosevelt and Stalin, and Churchill knew it could only end in disaster). A personal grudge, that is, rather than a general humanist objection - yet Baker would only have been 17 when the raid took place, and although he served in WWII surely it would have been in the latter part of the conflict? Anyway, it's an extremely tight and taut read, although the last 30 pages (of only 158) goes a bit off-piste with long journalistic descriptions of the raid that have nothing to do with the actual story. It's still compelling to read, but jars slightly, and only in the last few pages does Baker remember to drag it back to Quintain. So I suspect these sections were added to the original Blake mss when it was prepared as a Quintain (for Mayflower in 1965 - mine is a Howard Baker Press hardcover from 1968, targeted at the library market).
Another bloody mystery, though, as I have no idea what SBL it was!
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