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Post by dem bones on Feb 29, 2008 16:57:52 GMT
Arthur Kirby - High Summer Homicide ( Sexton Blake Library # 503: July 1962) Camps "Fun and games - and murder - on the sunny Sussex coast ..." Blake's sometime sidekick, the Daily Post's Arthur 'Splash' Kirby, forsakes Fleet Street for Sussex and a quiet holiday on the coast but soon finds himself involved with beautiful blonde Ursula Kennedy - that's her looking half cut on the cover, presumably - and her insanely jealous husband, Theo, who may or may not be a bonkers killer. "A thrill-a-minute yarn told by the Daily Post's top columnist".
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Post by pulphack on Feb 29, 2008 20:32:44 GMT
she must be half-cut, as she thinks she's a blonde when she's a brunette...
arthur kirby in this case would be arthur maclean posing as the fictional journalist. this one will be a hoot, as the character of kirby was a wisecracking 'hold the front page' type of hack, and the style suits the story very well indeed.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 29, 2008 22:53:34 GMT
she must be half-cut, as she thinks she's a blonde when she's a brunette... Maybe she's another character altogether, as isn't old Splash something of a ladies man? Or does he just have a fondness for trophy secretaries? I met him in the groovy pop scene romp, Treason Remembered, although his was very much a supporting role in that one. Anyhow, here's 'Splash' as featured in the SBL Portrait Gallery series. He's got that whole sleazy gutter press scandal-monger thing tailored to a fine art, hasn't he?
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Post by Gaspard du Nord on Jul 29, 2013 0:03:56 GMT
she must be half-cut, as she thinks she's a blonde when she's a brunette... arthur kirby in this case would be arthur maclean posing as the fictional journalist. this one will be a hoot, as the character of kirby was a wisecracking 'hold the front page' type of hack, and the style suits the story very well indeed. Better late than never, but the record should be set straight here. Not really "Arthur Maclean" posing as "Arthur Kirby", but Stephen Frances (the original Hank Janson, remember?) mailing in a pretty good MS from Rosas, Spain, to Fleetway in London. First to read it was sub-editor Keith Chapman, then it went with a report to editor Bill Baker who wrote his notes in the margins and sent it on to George Mann for rewrite work. This included adding a murder rather late in the piece since the book didn't have one, which was a kind of sine qua non for the Sexton Blake Library. The book's title, back-page blurb, chapter headings etc. were supplied by Chapman as copy editor when the completely retyped version was posted back (probably chapter by chapter, day by day) by Mann. On the Fleetway accounts, payment for the book would have been split officially between Frances and Mann. Further divvying up may have been done privately. That was how things were done on the SBLs at the time ('61-'62). Desmond Reid, Richard Williams, W. A. Ballinger, Peter Saxon, even W. Howard Baker ... they were all effectively what would be called "house names" elsewhere. The distinctive cover, by Spaniard Angel Badia Camps, would have been chosen from a pile of stock crime artwork from agency Selecciones Illustradas. The criteria for the choice would have been that the illustration was the closest match available for the story.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 30, 2013 7:18:57 GMT
Brilliant! Always better late than never, and any additional information on the doings of WHB and his empire welcomed by me, at the very least. I gave up the LOBBC Blake library last year, so can't look this one up, but if I recall it had a small photo of Maclean on the title page, which may be why I thought it was him. There must have been some reason, and that's all I can think of five years later!
So George Mann was doing rewrites at this point? When did Phillip Chambers come into the picture? All else I've read fingers him as the rewrite man and receipient of the divvied-up cash. You have a good source - can you tell me at what point - if at all - Chambers appeared on the scene?
Incidentally, the hair colour crack was a joke, y'know...
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Post by Gaspard du Nord on Jul 30, 2013 9:56:37 GMT
Sorry, Pulphack, no title-page photo of "Maclean" (who for the SBL was, as I now understand it, George Paul Mann). Just looked. But never mind. Everyone's memory of these events tends to be hazy -- mainly, I think, because for reasons we needn't go into they were confused from the start. Confused even in the mind of Bill Baker himself who, especially after his lunch break, often had to rely on a staff assistant to explain to accounts people which payments under which working titles applied to which final rewrites. Contributors' payments were made progressively on a weekly basis, but the whole mess had to be sorted when a month's two books were published and the various amounts had to be "written off" the inventory. If a book's balance didn't tally with budget, various methods we might today describe as creative accounting came into the picture. A payment for a particular book (or part of) might be assigned to a different book. Yeah ... that makes a real problem for the bibliographer who relies for evidence of authorship on official paysheets if they've ever come to light!
On the reverse of the title page of High Summer Homicide a line in small print says "Story as told to Richard Williams." Most of the Stephen Frances SBLs took "Richard Williams" as their byline. Rewriting of Frances' work was usually fairly minimal -- not much more than heavy copy-editing really.
Most SBL rewrites were done by "Maclean" from 1956 onward. Philip Chambers got into this particular act very late in the Fleetway years after having written several books under his own name, the first being Bullets to Baghdad (SBL No. 450, April 1960). I don't know the date of what you've read about him elsewhere, or what he might have said about being a "Desmond Reid" re-writer. I think Baker, among his other reasons, may have given him that work to help him through a rough patch. With a girlfriend, I visited Philip Chambers and his partner at their serviced flat in St John's Wood some time in 1961. I believe he had some support from a family in Northern England that was "well off" as we used to say. At that date, he was still working on just his own material, which included TV scripts including at least one for The Avengers. He gave me a copy of it and other script stuff which I still have stored away somewhere. Sadly, I understand Philip Chambers had health problems and possibly a dependence on barbiturates. I'm told he met a young end in New York.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 30, 2013 16:54:17 GMT
I have no idea why I thought it was Maclean, then - unless it was from a house names and pseudonyms checklist. There was one that Bill Lofts did for the LOBBC Blake catalogue, and also I have one by Steve Holland in a Paperback & Pulp Collector that is somewere in a box (just moved). I don't think I've ever read anywhere that Mann was Maclean, either, so that's a very new piece of information.
I think my belief that Chambers was a big re-writer comes from letters in PPC, too - Mike Moorcock contributed some memories, and the time he worked on SBL would have been at the end run, if my maths is correct? I spoke to George Mann about this, but that was 20 years ago now and I'm going by memory alone (which is dodgy these days, as you've seen) - he never mentioned too much of his own rewriting in the conversation, which is interesting - I did ask about this matter. I wonder why he was so circumspect after what was then thirty years?
You are, I suspect, an ex-Fleetway man (if you're Keith Chapman, I claim my five pounds!) - the machinations of the finances was fascinating, and I regret never meeting Bill Baker (when I tried to contact him I found he'd died a fortnight before). An LOBBC member once recalled a launch of a HBPress book that ended in a very boozy manner with a lift home in Baker's car, which was a battered Bentley or Rolls Royce (they couldn't remember which!).
Any more like this, and I'd love to know (if no-one else) as Blake and Baker have been ever-presents on the shelves for the last quarter century.
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Post by andydecker on Jul 30, 2013 18:19:03 GMT
Fascinating stuff!
I really have to read one of those Sexton Blakes. Baker, Moorcock, Frances, Mann all hammering on their typewriters in the sixties, while half a world away Iain Fleming was writing his Bond and Brian Clemens was working on The Avengers. What a time this must have been.
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Post by Gaspard du Nord on Jul 30, 2013 20:44:39 GMT
In the lists compiled by Lofts and others for the old, duplicated Collectors' Digest magazine and its annuals, "Desmond Reid" rewrites were acknowledged virtually from day one as being the work of "A. G. Maclean". Baker would refer to "George" rather than to "Arthur" and then explain, if questioned, that George was his middle name. For more quick info, go here (Aug. 31, 2007) and read right through, including the comments (one from Steve Holland). It won't explain everything. I don't think it's possible now that anything ever will completely. mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=378Mike Moorcock quit Fleetway in the Spring of 1961, I believe, to do a stint as a wandering minstrel or somesuch in Scandinavia. He was replaced, if anyone could ever replace the wild young Moorcock, by Keith Chapman. Top of my current re-reading list is the SBL Assignment Doomsday by Martin Thomas (October '61). It features Gideon Ashley, "financier, philanthropist and occult Adept". The story climaxes in fights with "phantom figures", "ectoplasm" etc. And it opens spectacularly with a girl in flames running through Decatur Street, New Orleans. Among the watchers is an Arabelle de Montigny, "daughter of the Creole Wizard". Yes, anyone interested in the Peter Saxon horror titles of later years needs to read this stuff just to see where their inspiration probably was born. I will go on to re-read Come Dark, Come Evil (SBL March '62) by Wilfred McNeilly, which eventually became the basis of a Peter Saxon Guardians novel with appropriate name changes and not much else.
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Post by pulphack on Aug 1, 2013 6:37:05 GMT
Thanks for that link. It's true, fifty years later it's impssble to know the whole story, but what I know and have written has been pieced together from other people's memories, solicited at first hand or via writings, and as with Mann's reluctance to own up to his own rewriting, people are not always a hundred percent honest. To have some insight from someone around at the time is invaluable.
'Assignment Doomsday' - damn it, I didn't read this when I had the LOBBC library, and wish I had. I do have my own copy of 'Come Dark, Come Evil' though, and you are mostly correct in your assumptions - there are about 5-10,00 words added, some of which are very odd in context (the switch from an action scene on the first page to a faux-scholarly lecture about voodoo on virtually the next is still something that is either a brilliant contrast or a dismal failure, an opinion which has switched each time I've read it, which must be about five or six over the last 20-odd years), but it's still a great book.
Whatever his 'interesting' business practises may have been, Bill Baker did know how to knit his disparate bunch of writers together.
Andy - I have a long held belief that the spy boom of the sixties killed Blake off - there were attempts in the series to bring that in, especially in the last couple of Fleetway years and the Mayflower series, but Blake had too much history behind him. Nowadays, that's 'legacy', but back then it was just 'old hat' - Blake would have survived as a treasured brand and institution these days, but back then he'd had too many years of neglect and dodgy books in the fifties pre-Baker, and just seemed too stolid and not swinging enough for the times. Maybe, if the last years pre-Baker hadn't been so poor overall, Bill and the boys might have pulled it off.
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