W. Howard Baker - Walk In Fear

[dem bones]

W. Howard Baker - Walk In Fear (Sexton Blake Library # 396: December 1957)

De Seta

It was a jolly house party - until the killer came!

Severance kindly sent me a trio of these slimline Sexton Blake Library goodies last year, and pulphack's splendid Press Editorial ... essay in Paperback Fanatic has made me hungry for more Howard W. Baker so now seems like the right time to dive in! Before we even get to the novel (60 two-column pages), it would be remiss not to mention the photographic content which includes a mugshot of Baker, a full page ad for companion volume The Last Day's Of Berlin by Peter Saxon ("Be with Sexton Blake when he sees: a stricken city in flames; the last desperate stand of the shattered Nazi armies, fighting beneath the mounting thunder of a world gone mad, waiting for the end; and be a witness to the last hours of Adolph Hitler. Sexton Blake Was There!) and this wonderful, if disappointingly, not so badly posed action-picture depicting the events of p. 50.

Another-bonus: I think my sight has perked up plenty of late as these are nowhere near as eyeball-torturing as I first feared.

The story begins with Harvey Innes, literary spiv, and his blonde secretary, Dolores, operating the Sure-Fire School of Successful Authorship from a dingy Bloomsbury Office. Despite the potential of the enterprise to maybe even rival the Badger set up - "Ten thousand eager editors are waiting for your story. Sure fire - NO REJECTIONS" - business isn't booming. Dolores is too scrawny and down at heel to pull off 'sexy' for the clients and Harvey, despite his intellectual super-smoothie aspirations, has to accept that "his face just looked like something which had crawled up through his collar and died." The angry young men - whose work is very much in vogue - are far from impressed by this 'one-man Senate, Dean and Faculty' and all the big names have long since been landed by infinitely more professional outfits. But then - a miracle in the form of unknown author MacDonald Hall's manuscript for instant bestseller Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye! All Harvey's dreams are about to come true overnight - unfortunately for him ....

[pulphack]

Those posed 'action' shots ran all-too briefly, sad to say, and were always cheescake based (which is good).

I love the Blakes set in TV and publishing, as they always seem to be writers (usually Baker) venting spleen at the profession.

This one was later rewritten and enlarged for the Mayflower fifth series as 'Every Man An Enemy'.

And say nothing about your eyesight until you get into the second half of the book and the print starts to get smaller as the typesetter realises they have to cram in more than they thought!

[dem bones]

pulphack said:

Those posed 'action' shots ran all-too briefly, sad to say, and were always cheescake based (which is good).

damn shame that as they look like a top selling point to me. And think of the 'krazy kaption kompetition' potential.

Here's the tasteful Last Day's Of Berlin plug while i'm here.

The print doesn't look too rough in these three until you get to the Mailbag at back of Martin Thomas's Date With Danger (coming soon) which is really minuscule, so maybe they're all letters of complaint.

Thanks for the additional info, pulps!

[dem bones]

W. Howard Baker

Harvey Innes dilemma: although he's sold Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and even set up a serialisation deal with The Daily Post, he's received no further contact from this oh-so mysterious MacDonald Hall since the MS arrived, and needs a signature on the contract before he can get his hands on his cut of the lovely loot! How's Hall going to react on learning that the book he'd only submitted for Innes' opinion has been flogged behind his back? Worse - what will scary publisher John Bovis do to Innes should he have to pulp the 50, 000 copies he's already produced?

'Splash' Kirby comes up with the solution when he encounters a suitably glum Innes in a Fleet Street drinking den. He'll run a "Who is Mac?" feature in The Post and that should lure the reclusive literary genius from the shadows! The campaign is a huge success as, £-signs in their eyes, five 'MacDonald Hall's show up at Innes' office to claim authorship and substantial riches.

They are:

Herbert Asbury, "a round puff-ball of a man", who dotes on his Siamese cat, Milly, and wears a striped winceyette nightshirt to bed.

Young Prout, a typewriter fiend and product of the East End slums. For all his hard graft he's perennially down on his luck. Allergic to cats, who all hate him.

Ex-army officer Jimmy "The findings of the Court Martial were outrageous!" MacKintosh, cad, rotter and bounder, who frequents all the best clubs and needs a small fortune in a hurry to continue his lavish lifestyle.

Lavinia Webb, a washed up, bottle-blonde hack and the terror of Fleet Street's pubs. When we catch up with her, she's off her face in The Cock - almost certainly the very same Ye Olde one where a delegation from Vault helped celebrate the 'Basil Copper: A Life In Books launch just last weekend!

Shiftiest of them all, however, is Charles Fawcett, "the man with the Seven O'Clock face":

"Dead breath, stale breath, breath of decay .... If he'd told Harvey that he'd wished to dispose of rights in an autobiography entitled I Was A Middle-Aged Ghoul, the agent would have done something about it. Immediately. He would have looked at the man's dead face and seen truth there.

But ... this monster, this horror, responsible for a sensitive, fine first-novel like Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye? Harvey might just as well claim to be MacDonald Hall himself. That would be more believable."

Harvey is wise to doubt him. Charles Fawcett makes his living penning begging letters to hand-picked likely philanthropists. he's good at it: "From the very first sentence to the last he set a mood of sorrowful resignation which harrowed and mortified his public". But now Fawcett is dead - poisoned! - and it's not unlikely that one of the other 'MacDonald Hall's is the culprit!

Time for Sexton Blake to stick his oar in .....

[dem bones]

"This mad holiday of slaughter has gone on long enough!"

'Splash' Kirby's cunning plan having led to the current state of confusion, publishing mogul Bovis decides on a master-scheme of his own: he'll invite Harvey Innes, all the 'MacDonald Hall's, Kirby, Blake and his companions to spend Christmas with he and Carla Scott his bride-to-be and saucy secretary (that's her in the photo) at his plush Marlow mansion, confident that the great detective will sort the real author from the money-grabbing impostors. Even before the claimants reach their destination, however, another of their number has been bumped off, hurled from a speeding train while sneaking a crafty swig. I don't wish to give too much away but The Cock has lost a not-entirely valued regular.

There'll be more violent deaths among the party before Blake settles the murderer's hash and reveals the identity of the real 'MacDonald Hall'. The insane killer comes over all Kenneth Williams on being outed - "You're mad! I don't know what you're talking about! You're insane!", etc. - and even one of the absolved suspects can't help but scowl at Blake "You call his detection? I call it a farce!", although to be fair, he's still in the frame at that moment in time and we can excuse him for being tetchy. He's had a miserable life.

My one slight disappointment is that Baker didn't find it in himself to have that ghastly Siamese slaughtered in the most grisly manner possible. Otherwise, this is very good fun indeed!