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Post by helrunar on Jul 15, 2017 12:59:33 GMT
Hi Mr Hack,
Nice to see you here again. Did you ever read any of the Inspector Quantrill mysteries by Sheila Radley? I just read the second book in the series, The Chief Inspector's Daughter, originally published circa '81 I think. I more or less stumbled upon one of those green Penguin crime paperback editions from sometime around '89 a few weeks ago and whisked right through the book.
I don't think this sort of thing is at all Vault of Evil material. The fact that Quantrill seemed to be around my age but very much rooted in the world of Sussex villages of the 1980s was a draw--very good characterization work in this book. I pretty much saw the "twist" to the final bit coming from a good distance away but that didn't ruin my enjoyment of it.
Just felt like writing about it.
cheers, H.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 15, 2017 17:25:50 GMT
Mary Stewart on the other hand blended gothic romance elements with her thrillers and was somewhat unique. If I remember right, Jojo, you're an admirer of hers as well? I find her pretty boring too.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 15, 2017 17:58:26 GMT
Ah, I vaguely remembered you being complimentary about her somewhere on here. No matter. You and bloody MP Shiel... I should have guessed.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 15, 2017 18:07:31 GMT
Anyway, I haven't read any of those, Steve, though they do sound the sort of thing I'd like. So many books, so little time - I've gone from being one of those who grab anything that looks vaguely interesting (like Dem, who is still braving the endless mountain of paper), to one of those who are so picky that they don't buy anything much anymore. At some point, there will be an equilibrium. Probably.
CM - I fear that the era of the Scots name signalling success may have been superceded by that of the Scandinavian (which I suppose isn't that far, geographically speaking). I should adopt a generic Scandi-appelation. I did write a Mack Bolan entry that featured lots of death metal and Scandinavian shennanigans. Perhaps I should de-Bolan it, put a Finnish name to it, and try to flog it a second time. Worked for Gerald Verner, Jack Trevor Story, Bill Howard Baker et al.
Back tracking to Mr Kyle - was he another Collins author? They cornered the market in 'serious', heavily researched thriller writers - Innes, Bagley, MacLean, Kyle himself - and they did Hurd & Osmond's books, which I recall with no little fondness - especially Send Her Victorious (predicting a female PM some ten years before Douglas Hurd was in Thatcher's cabinet) and The Smile On The Face Of The Tiger (Scots nationalism, no less). As someone with a disinclination to the Tories (to say the least), I wish Dougie had stuck to his thriller career...
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 16, 2017 8:48:37 GMT
Ah, I vaguely remembered you being complimentary about her somewhere on here. No matter. You and bloody MP Shiel... I should have guessed. M P Shiel had something to say about Mary Stewart?
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Post by andydecker on Jul 16, 2017 9:05:16 GMT
Here's one for Andy, bought for a buck for no reason except the wolfy cover. Utopia seemed to translate and abridge English science fiction novels: Wolf Thanks, James! That is a nice one. Utopia was the first of these publications, running from 1953 to 1968, I think mostly bi-weekly. 596 issues. They did a lot of German writers, but also a lot of translations, mostly heavily cut for length. A bit all over the place, you had Badger books, on the other hand you had the early Aldiss, Ed Hamilton or Farmer.
Most of its novels are unreadable today. But the coverart is fabulous. This here is a Lonati. Rudolf Sieber-Lonati. He did hundreds of covers, did most of Utopia. Later he also did crime, western and horror. As an artist he is unmistakable.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 16, 2017 9:28:03 GMT
Don't ask about MP Shiel and his hatred of Mary Stewart... appalling behaviour.
No, obviously that's not it. You recommended MP Shiel, and I still haven't got past the first two chapters of The Purple Cloud (which may just be this year and me rather than the book), so it's not surprising to me that you don't get on with someone whose work I do find readable. That was all. As you probably know.
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Post by helrunar on Jul 16, 2017 12:57:06 GMT
Hi Pulphack,
I think the short story "Xelucha" by Shiel is worthy of attention. I used to have a really nice cloth edition of selected short stories by this author that bore the title Xelucha... good choice of tales, but alas, the volume was lost long ago dans les brumes de l'antiquite.
I never got anywhere near The Purple Cloud... something Moskowitz, I believe, wrote about it put me right off that book, and most of Shiel's other output. I think I happened to read "Xelucha" in an anthology and I was quite surprised at how good it was, given what I had heard elsewhere of the author.
cheers, H.
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Post by cromagnonman on Jul 25, 2017 21:07:42 GMT
If anyone was ever to ask me to explain my distinctly unfashionable enthusiasm for, supposedly, "worthless" book club editions, I don't believe I could offer any more persuasive argument than this cover: it's an absolute corker, isn't it: this is the Foyles Thriller Book Club edition of 1964. The artist signature is a bit stylised but I believe it reads C H Richard. Can't say I know who this is but he obviously had something of a fondness for the colour green as I've seen many another work of his on which various shades of it predominate. And who could knock him for it when he had a knack for using it to such dramatic effect. The whole wrapper is a triumph of design though; just clock the strip of celluloid on the spine. Far more effort was obviously expended on this than was ever invested in the Jonathan Cape original edition and yet there is no comparison between the relative values of the two versions. Know which one I prefer having though. Can't say I've ever read any of the Chester Drum series. But if this cover isn't sufficent reason to start then I don't know what is.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 26, 2017 4:59:30 GMT
It's lovely, isn't it? The Deighton, I mean, though the other is no slouch. And just look at the other titles on the back - I've only ever seen George Bellairs in Thriller Book Club editions that I can recall, so what were his sales like otherwise??
All of those Thriller Book Club editions has great spines to go with the front of the jacket, usually with some eye grabbing graphic under the title and author. One of my earliest book memories is looking along all of them behind the glass door of the bookcase and wondering just WHAT they all meant, and what thrills they hid insde. I've seen some other book club editions out of the same stable - a charity shop in Ilford had a batch of about thirty Romance Book Club editions from that era about a year back, which is unusual to see these days - and they had a similar ethic: striking and painted jacket with a single image or frame on the spine. An obvious and effective house style.
Back to Deighton - I do remember Horse Under Water and The Ipcress File retained the original publisher designs, as they stood out from the others on the shelf. I love those designs, but they looked oddly out of place with the general Book Club design, so I wonder if this was an original publisher stipulation.
I suppose Book Club editions are generally considered worthless because they had larger runs than most priginal publisher firsts? Until an author is realtively big, first run hardbacks have always been comparatively low. Memberships guaranteed a larger sale for even an unknown author in h/b, perhaps?
Over on ebay, I see some people selling huge job lots of Companion books as 'decoration' for shelves - a hundred books for a hundred pounds inclusive, for example. This has always struck me as odd, but then I was always fascinated by the bizarre volumes that decorated shelves in pubs. Where did all those engineering and medical books come from???
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Post by cromagnonman on Jul 26, 2017 12:19:21 GMT
Fascinating stuff as always Pulphack.
I wonder if you find it equally as odd as I do that a bookshop like Foyles should have been in the business of operating book clubs? One would have thought that such was effectively competing against their own vested interests. Or the interests of the publishers who supplied them with their stock at any rate.
But then Foyles always was something of a law unto itself. I can distinctly remember being taken there when Christina Foyle was still alive and it was like time travelling back into the Edwardian Age. Because she obstinately refused to allow any concessions at all to modernity and as a consequence the shop was preserved in aspic as it was in her father's day. This even extended to the bizarre ritual of having to line up with any book one wished to buy to exchange it for a sales receipt. You then had to line up all over again at a different counter to pay the receipt before lining up yet again at the first counter to collect your book. An utterly surreal experience.
Perhaps that's why so many people signed up to their clubs. It was quicker to get any book you wanted from them through the post rather than line up for it in the shop.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 26, 2017 18:35:40 GMT
Well, CM, I missed out on that Foyles experience as I never shopped much in the West End for books before my mid-twenties, being an inveterate hanger-out of Enfield, Islington and Barnet for new and second hand bookshops before then (I have no idea why, as I haunted record shops in Central London from my early teens). It sounds wonderful, frustrating, and bizarre by turns.
The question of cut-price book clubs is an odd one - Odhams being a publisher of the full-price, on sale in shops variety, you'd think they, too, would be queering their pitch much as Foyles would be: I suspect that the key to this comes from the book club buyer being a different kind of purchaser. I know for my dad, he had little time to get into town except for nights out, working Mon-Sat some weeks, so even though he lived in London a place like Foyles would be a 'once in a blue moon when he had time' experience. Getting a catalogue, subscribing, and coming home to something nice from the postie cut out a lot of hassle - a bit like buying from Amazon, really.
I would speculate that both Odhams and Foyles twigged that there were a lot of buyers who couldn't get to the shops easily - either for reasons of time, or because they lived miles from a town with a large bookshop - and so decided to grab a gap in the market that could also ensure income for the original publishers that they might not otherwise get.
As for the oddness of it being Foyles - a bookshop - running a publishing arm as such: didn't some of the Victorian circulating libraries like Mudies also print editions of popular books? I know Boots didn't, mind, in the mid-twentieth century. Do some of our more antiquarian oriented chaps have anything they can add? Please??
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Post by dem bones on Jul 27, 2017 9:02:25 GMT
If anyone was ever to ask me to explain my distinctly unfashionable enthusiasm for, supposedly, "worthless" book club editions, I don't believe I could offer any more persuasive argument than this cover: it's an absolute corker, isn't it: Very beautiful. As is ... Edgar Wallace - The Fellowship Of The Frog (Ward, lock & Co, Jan. 1961. Originally 1924) Blurb: The frogs are a kind of federated trade union of tramps, and their daring crimes become the talk of England. The Tracking down of this dangerous confederacy and the unmasking of its secret leader by the young Assistant Director of Prosecutions, and that remarkable man, Inspector Elk of Scotland Yard, make a story which is not only a piece of literary ingenuity, but is romance too.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 27, 2017 16:46:22 GMT
This is very pretty too. Alexander Alderson - The Subtle Minotaur (Thriller Book Club, undated). Blurb: Out of the past, terror returns to the life of Nigel Toler; terror for which there can be only two possible explanations; a haunting menace to civilization, or Toler‘s own insanity. Only the cold hands of death succeed in moulding the myth into the awful substance of reality as the story thrusts on, with ever-increasing momentum, from the first stab of drama in the opening pages to the final bizarre and terrible climax. Alexander Alderson is well known as a writer of short stories. This is his first full-length novel, and a most promising one.
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Post by cromagnonman on Jul 28, 2017 0:22:08 GMT
That Alderson is a cracking image Dem. Seeing stuff like this never fails to beg the question of just what on earth it is art directors today see in the homogenous horrors of photoshop? Apart from minimal expense that is. Here's the latest accrual courtesy of Baggins Book Bazaar of Rochester. You know, I really can't recommend this place highly enough. As if there weren't already incentives enough to go there Rochester is only a 45 minute jaunt from Victoria. BBB is a gold mine of vintage material. And as this stuff becomes ever harder to find in the general bibliophilic landscape so the importance of such resources increases exponentially. I must confess to being dead chuffed with the first two especially as these are early pseudonynymous efforts of Dean Koontz. The BLOOD RISK particularly is a real trophy find in its unread condition. And both were acquired for the princely investment of £2.50 each. I can't claim to have ever been an avid Matheson reader but I've generally liked what I have read. Like the Koontz BID TIME RETURN is quite a find these days. Am keen to see how it compares with the film version which I have vague memories of thinking pretty decent. I could easily have picked up plenty more but I'm already having to micro manage my available shelf space as it is (even with the recent arrival of a mobile book trolley). But even so I wasn't going to let these go begging:
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