Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (Pan, 1968)

No. 9 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do. NB: linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

What is it?
The 1968 first Pan paperback printing of Patricia Highsmith's 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train.

Who designed the cover?
I'm not sure, but from the mid- to late-1960s (and onwards) Pan's covers changed from being largely illustrative in nature to largely photographic, at the behest, according to the Pan Paperback Collectors site, of editor David Larkin, so it's likely Larkin had something to do with it. The same styling, incidentally – a photo of a collection of objects to do with the novel's plot – can be seen on the 1967 Pan printings of Highsmith's The Glass Cell and A Suspension of Mercy.

Where and when did I buy it?
I didn't. My mum bought it in, I believe, a charity shop, and gave it to me when she last visited a couple of weeks ago.

Why did my mum buy it?
To read it; like me she's a Highsmith admirer, although she didn't get on with this one. Mind you, it's by no means my favourite Highsmith either, even among the non-Ripley books. Still, as Highsmith's debut, and arguably the template for much of her work, Strangers on a Train is an important novel in the writer's oeuvre, and certainly deserves its own dedicated post on Existential Ennui, something that, remarkably given my Highsmith obsession, it hasn't had heretofore.

Have I read it yet?
I have, a few years back, in its 1952 Corgi first British paperback edition.

Peter Cheyney's Dark Series Book Cover Gallery: From Dark Duet (1942) to Dark Bahama (1950)

From 1942 until 1950 (the year before his death), British hard-boiled crime writer Peter Cheyney published an eight-book series of spy novels – the "Dark" Series. The novels detail the exploits – both wartime and postwar – of a rotating cast of counter-espionage agents of British Intelligence, notably Michael Kane and Ernie Guelvada, along with their boss, Peter Quayle. All were first published in hardback by Collins in the UK, as follows:

1. Dark Duet (1942)
2. The Stars are Dark (1943)
3. The Dark Street (1944)
4. Sinister Errand (1945)
5. Dark Hero (1946)
6. Dark Interlude (1947)
7. Dark Wanton (1948)
8. Dark Bahama (1950)

I blogged about a signed limited first edition of the fifth one, Dark Hero, last week, as part of a periodic run of posts on signed books, but I've also been picking up first and other editions of some of the other instalments in the series here and there over the past couple of years. I'm still missing two of them – The Stars are Dark and Dark Interlude – but since I'm not in any special hurry to plug those gaps in my collection, and seeing as I'm on the subject of Cheyney, I thought I'd gather the ones I do own together in a "Dark" Series gallery post, with links in each instance to the relevant pages on the Official Peter Cheyney Website. Like so:

Dark Duet, Collins hardback, 1942
The Collins first edition/first impression of the debut "Dark" novel is quite a rare book; I nabbed this copy on eBay a couple of years ago, but there are at present fewer than half a dozen copies of the Collins first edition/first impression available online. The dust jacket design is uncredited, in common with all the Collins editions of the Cheyney novels I own, but that's a great photo of Cheyney and, I believe, his second wife, Kathleen Nora Walter (nee Taberer), on the back.

The Dark Street, Pan paperback, 1963 (originally Collins, 1944)
This is the first Pan Books paperback edition of the third "Dark" novel, cover art by J. Oval (alias Ben Ostrick); I found this copy in a stack of paperbacks in Lewes (the picturesque East Sussex town in which I live and work) secondhand bookshop A & Y Cumming, paying, I think, a pound for it.

Sinister Errand, Collins hardback, 1947 (originally 1945)
I have a feeling I was under the impression when I bought this copy of the fourth "Dark" novel a few years ago online that it was a 1945 first edition. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a 1947 edition (printed in the Netherlands); note the reviews of the novel itself on the jacket flaps – always a giveaway that a book is a later impression.

Dark Hero, Collins hardback, 1946 / Collins paperback, 1950
Dark Hero I blogged about last week, but as well as the wrapper of the Collins first edition I've also included here the cover of the 1950 Collins paperback, published as part of their White Circle "pocket" range. Splendid Bravington Rings advert on the back cover there.

Dark Wanton, Collins hardback, 1948
This copy of the Collins first of the seventh "Dark" novel came from Badger's Books in Worthing – a fine secondhand bookshop to spend an hour or two in, if you're ever that way. The jacket has seen better days, but then I don't think I paid more than three or four quid for the book.

Dark Bahama, Collins hardback, 1950
Finally, there's this, my most recent Cheyney acquisition: a first edition of Dark Bahama, which I bought last year in Othello's in Essex at the start of the Jones–Day family holiday; follow this link for the first in an interminable series of increasingly daft posts about that holiday.

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water, the Hunt for the 1958 Heinemann First Edition, and a Review; a Friday's Forgotten Books Special

When Patti Nase Abbott announced a month or two back that this Friday's Forgotten Books round-up would be devoted to Patricia Highsmith, one book sprang immediately to my mind. I've read a lot of Highsmith – not all her work, not by any means (I haven't tried many of her short stories), but certainly well over half of her novels, including all five of the Tom Ripley books – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water, collectively known as the Ripliad, which I recently finished rereading – and almost all of the novels she published in the first half of her career, from Strangers on a Train (1950) to The Glass Cell (1964). (See the bottom of this post for links to some of my previous Highsmith missives.) With, until very recently, one glaring, early exception (well, two actually – I still haven't read 1952's pseudonymous The Price of Salt, but I consider that a less glaring exception than this one): 

Deep Water. Highsmith's fifth novel (including the aforementioned The Price of Salt), it was originally published in the States in 1957 by Harper & Brothers, and the following year in the UK by Heinemann, but the edition seen here is the 1961 Pan first British paperback edition (lovely cover art by Sam Peffer), which for a long time was the best I could do in terms of my collection. (Note to those readers not remotely interested in matters to do with book collecting: you might consider skipping the next few paragraphs and instead heading straight to the review of Deep Water further down the post; although, that said, if you really aren't remotely interested in matters to do with book collecting, one wonders what on earth you're doing reading Existential Ennui in the first place.)

See, although I've been collecting Patricia Highsmith in British hardback first edition for over five years (and reading her for a lot longer), I'd pretty much resigned myself to probably never owning dust-jacketed firsts of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley – all published in the UK by Cresset Press in, respectively, 1950, 1956 and 1957 – or Deep Water, due to their being prohibitively expensive (not to mention scarce). Instead I'd collected (less valuable but arguably scarcer) Corgi and Pan paperbacks of those four books and resolved that if I ever won the Lottery, I'd revisit the situation.

Still and all, Deep Water, being the first of the sixteen Highsmith novels published by Heinemann in the UK (not counting their later reissues of Strangers, Blunderer and Talented), and the only one I didn't own, remained a tantalising prospect. Despite being the rarest of all the early Highsmith British firsts (I suspect Heinemann underestimated their print run in the wake of Talented; the book was reprinted in the year of publication), historically prices haven't been too astronomical, floating somewhere around the £250–£300 mark for a first impression – still out of my range, obviously, but given a little luck... And so I'd check the likes of AbeBooks and eBay periodically, wondering if an affordable copy might somehow hove into view (I thought I was in with a chance when a first appeared on eBay one time, but then bidding went north of £100) – until, quite unexpectedly, one did:

A genuine 1958 Heinemann first edition/first impression. It popped up on AbeBooks a month ago, and even though I didn't have an alert set, I happened to be looking, and after establishing that it was indeed a first impression – as evidenced by the dust jacket back flap (which on the same-year reprint carries reviews of the novel itself) and the interior copyright line – I snapped it up. The only real fault is there's a small chunk missing from the wrapper, but considering I paid a fraction of the going rate, I can live with that. The dust jacket, by the way, was designed by Stein, who also designed the wrapper for the 1959 Heinemann edition of A Game for the Living, and it's now taken its place in the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery (increasing the number of covers therein to 120).

So, having at long last acquired a Heinemann first of Deep Water, and knowing that the Patricia Highsmith Friday's Forgotten Books special was imminent, I figured the least I could do was read the damn thing. And happily, after all the time and effort I put into getting my hands on a first edition (actually not that much effort, but a fair amount of time), I'm pleased to report that it's good. Not quite The Tremor of Forgery or Ripley's Game good, but maybe This Sweet Sickness or The Cry of the Owl good. Bloody good, in other words.

Highsmith's point-of-view character – her sole point-of-view character, unlike Strangers on a Train and The Blunderer (where there are two perspectives), but like The Talented Mr. Ripley and This Sweet Sickness – is Victor Van Allen, a well-to-do small-town small-press publisher in his late thirties, and a cuckold in all but name. Vic's wife, Melinda, has been merrily carrying on with a succession of men while Vic affects an air of studied indifference, seemingly content to breed snails (also a pastime of Highsmith's) and read terribly dull-sounding books about installing stained glass in church windows. But beneath the surface the tension is building: first Vic boasts (untruthfully) to one of Melinda's paramours that he killed a previous beau, and then matters boil over when a party the Van Allens attend ends with Melinda's latest lover, a cocktail bar pianist, floating face down in the swimming pool.

Highsmith's stated aim with Deep Water, as recounted in Andrew Wilson's 2003 biography Beautiful Shadow, was to convey the "sniping, griping, ambushing" of a loveless marriage, the "ballet of the wearing of the nerves", as well as to show how "repressed emotions can become schizophrenic" and "explore the diseases produced by sexual repression". All this she does with aplomb, greatly assisted by adhering doggedly to Vic's viewpoint, forcing us to empathise with him even as we pity him and are eventually appalled by him (a trick she performed previously in Talented and would go on to deploy in three of the four Ripley sequels, among others).

Andrew Wilson notes in Beautiful Shadow that the inhibited, remote Vic "shares quite a few characteristics" with Highsmith's most famous outsider, Tom Ripley, and indeed he does; but Tom never cuts quite so tragic a figure as Vic, even in his more impulsive incarnation in Talented. Tom's goal was to attain the kind of idle, comfortable existence he coveted in Dickie Greenleaf, at which he succeeds; Vic, worn down by his wayward wife, desires nothing more than a quiet life with his sodding snails (or at least thinks he does), and can't even manage that. Both are driven to murder, but though neither displays much in the way of a conscience ("Vic's guilt did not materialize," Highsmith narrates drily), Tom proves rather better at the act than Vic, especially the getting away with it.

Still, as Highsmith retorted when the critic Craig Brown called Vic a weak man, "At least he HAD A GO." It's clear where her sympathies lie: not with flighty, flirtatious Melinda, who suspects her cold fish husband and schemes to bring about his downfall; not with the private detectives she employs, or Don Wilson, the "humourless", "hack" writer of western, detective and romance stories who assists her; not with any of the bores in the Val Allens' stultifying suburban circle; but with Vic; poor, doomed, snail-watching Vic, whose final, furious explosion is an arresting, unforgettable testament to the dangers of bottling up one's feelings.

Head to Patti Nase Abbot's blog this Friday, 27 September, for a bunch more Patricia Highsmith missives, and click here and here for Highsmith bonus posts, and here to visit the newly established Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery.

Previous Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith Posts

The Great Tom Ripley Reread

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

Other Ripley Posts

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1973)
The Tom Ripley Novels

Other Novels

Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Blunderer (1954)
The Price of Salt (1952), alias Carol
A Game for the Living (1958)
This Sweet Sickness (1960)
The Cry of the Owl (1962)
The Two Faces of January (1964)
The Glass Cell (1965)
The Tremor of Forgery (1969)

Short Stories

Little Tales of Misogyny (1977)

Non-Fiction

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1981 revised edition)

Collecting Highsmith

The Secret Bookshop
Ripley's Claim
New Arrivals
To Arundel and Chichester
Knock knock, it's a New Arrival
Patricia Highsmith Shelf Porn
Patricia Highsmith First Editions, Part 1
Patricia Highsmith First Editions, Part 2
Patricia Highsmith Shelf Porn (Slight Return)

Odds and Sods

I've realised
Looking for the Perfect Bond (and Ripley too)
Ripley's Flicks
Ripley Under Ground Movie Review

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

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...

Travis McGee in The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald (Pan Paperbacks, 1968)

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

Next in this series of posts on vintage softcovers, a pair of paperbacks I was basically badgered into buying by one of the regular commenters on Existential Ennui and The Violent World of Parker (where I'm co-blogger) – which is why I'm posting them over there as well as here (that and the fact that there's a certain amount of fan crossover between these books and Donald E. "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels):

The first British paperback editions of John D. MacDonald's The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink, both published by Pan in 1968 (and both originally published in the US by Fawcett/Gold Medal in 1964, the former as The Deep Blue Good-by), with cover artwork by Sam Peffer – among the last covers that the prolific Pan artist must have created for that publisher (I believe he left Pan in 1967). They are, respectively, books one and two in MacDonald's twenty-one book crime fiction series starring finder of lost fings, Travis McGee, a series that EE and TVWoP regular David Plante reckoned I would find rewarding.

Now, I have tried a John D. MacDonald novel before – The Only Girl in the Game, which I liked a lot – but I'd never read any McGee. But given that Kingsley Amis was an admirer of MacDonald's, and I am, in turn, an admirer of Amis's; and that another writer I love, Elmore Leonard, put it on record that MacDonald was "the best first-person writer I've ever read", adding, "Travis McGee's 'I' was never intrusive"; and that David bloody Plante clearly wasn't going to give it a bloody rest or give me a moment's bloody peace until I relented and cracked the spine of a bloody McGee (figuratively speaking – because as we all know, cracking the spines of books – even ones already bloodied – is WRONG), there was nothing else for it but to dive in.

Of course, that begged the question: which editions of the early McGee novels (I'm not worrying about the later ones just yet) to begin collecting? The original Gold Medal paperbacks would be the obvious choice; not so easy to come by for someone living in the UK, but not impossible. In truth, though, those are in relatively plentiful supply if one can be arsed to order online from the States – and anyway, when have I ever plumped for the obvious choice? That left, to my mind, two options: the British hardback editions of the novels, published by Robert Hale in the 1960s and '70s, which, with their miniscule print runs and beautiful Barbara Walton dust jackets, are prohibitively expensive these days, running into the hundreds if not thousands of pounds per book; or the British paperback editions, issued by Pan, which, when you can find them (and I found these two copies online and on a table outside a secondhand bookshop in Brighton), are fairly cheap. Naturally, skinflint that I am, I opted for the Pan paperbacks.

And I'm pleased to report that David was perfectly justified in his persistent pestering, because The Deep Blue Goodbye at least – I haven't made it as far as Nightmare in Pink yet – is terrific: tough, but also surprisingly tender, especially once Travis McGee, who's been hired to trace a twisted sort named Junior Allen and recover the loot Allen stole, visits Allen's former mistress and, finding her in a dreadful state, casts aside his affected nonchalance and decides to stay and nurse her back to health. In his essay "A New James Bond", Kingsley Amis noted that MacDonald "is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?", but on the evidence of The Deep Blue Goodbye – and indeed The Only Girl in the Game – I'd say that MacDonald could do "human-heart" as well as anyone – and he was no slouch at the thrills either, as demonstrated by a gripping and violent final encounter at sea.

Pan had largely switched to photographic covers by the late 1960s, and while the first Pan printings of The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink could boast Sam Peffer cover art, subsequent printings, and subsequent McGees, sported photographic designs. So, having started collecting the Pan paperbacks, I'm not sure I'll stick with them... and serendipitously, just the other day I chanced across a different edition of the next book in the series, A Purple Place for Dying...

A Patricia Highsmith 1950s and '60s Corgi and Pan Paperback First Edition Cover Gallery

NB: see also the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery.

With the science fiction segment of this run of posts on paperbacks done, it's back to the crime fiction, and a Patricia Highsmith paperback cover gallery, which I've assembled by way of an apology for the non-appearance of the next instalment in the Great Tom Ripley Reread. That series of posts, you might recall, stalled at the midway point of the Ripliad, Ripley's Game, back in September; I do still intend to finish off the Reread, but it'll have to wait till next year now. To tide us over, then, I thought I'd showcase the first five Highsmith novels to be published in paperback in the UK.

All of these British paperback first editions have appeared on Existential Ennui before, in various permutations, but they're worth showing off again, I feel, especially as I've rephotographed them all from previous appearances. Additionally, this time out I've included some bibliographic details: the unique Corgi or Pan number for each title, along with cover artist (if known), original UK publisher, and pub date. Enjoy.

Strangers on a Train, Corgi #905, 1952; originally published in hardback in the UK by The Cresset Press in 1950. Highsmith's debut novel, her abiding theme of two men becoming inexplicably and dangerously fascinated by one another is established right from the outset, as well as her fondness for chance and coincidence in her plotting. I've never been able to establish who the cover artist is on the Corgi paperback, but I can tell you it's an uncommon edition – certainly a lot scarcer than the Cresset Press or US Harper & Brothers first editions.

The Blunderer, Pan G153, 1958; originally published in hardback in the UK by The Cresset Press in 1956. The cover art here is by James E. McConnell, a selection of whose work can be found over at Pulp Covers. I'm not as keen on this, Highsmith's second novel (under her own name; as Claire Morgan she published The Price of Salt in 1952), as I am others of her works, but the game of cat and mouse between Walter Stackhouse and bookshop owner Kimmel does have its suspenseful moments. From here until Penguin picked up her softcover rights in the 1970s, Highsmith would be published in paperback in the UK by Pan, and the Pan editions of her next three books boast, to my mind, some of the best covers ever to grace her novels.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Pan G397, 1960; originally published in hardback in the UK by The Cresset Press in 1957. David Tayler is the cover artist here, doing a terrific job of depicting Tom Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf and the fateful murder in the boat. As fellow Pan cover artists Sam Peffer and Pat Owen reveal in this interview, the Pan stable of artists always read the novels they were slated to illustrate the covers of, and were pretty much left to their own devices in choosing which scenes to depict.

Deep Water, Pan G435, 1961; originally published in hardback in the UK by Heinemann in 1958. A glorious cover painting by the aforementioned Sam Peffer for this, Highsmith's fourth novel under her own name – one of only a handful of Highsmiths from the 1950s and '60s I've yet to read. I really must rectify that soon.

A Game for the Living, Pan G548, 1962; originally published in hardback in the UK by Heinemann in 1959. Highsmith's fifth novel wasn't by any stretch the final Highsmith to be published in paperback by Pan, but it was the last to sport a fully painted cover, which again is by Sam Peffer. By this point, Pan covers were starting to become either more photographic in nature or more design-led; painted illustrations still appeared, but usually incorporated into an overall design, as on the next two Highsmiths that Pan published in paperback: This Sweet Sickness, which they issued in 1963, and The Cry of the Owl, in 1965. By the time of the Pan editions of The Glass Cell and A Suspension of Mercy in 1967, Highsmith's covers too had become photographic.

Even by the late 1960s, however, Sam Peffer was still painting the odd Pan cover, as I'll demonstrate in the next post, with a pair of John D. MacDonald paperbacks...

Cross of Fire (Pan, 1992): Author Colin Forbes's Handwritten Notes for the Novel

Compared to the previous two books in this short run of posts on thriller writer Raymond Sawkins, better known under the nom de plume of Colin Forbes, this third and final tome isn't, on the surface, that special. It doesn't, like the copies of Tramp in Armour and A Wreath for America (written under one of Sawkins's other pseudonyms, Richard Raine), boast a signed inscription to his wife, and it dates from much later in his career, when Forbes was writing longer novels that weren't to everyone's taste (although they sold by the bucketload). But it does contain a unique piece of paraphernalia related to the book...

Published in hardback in the UK by Pan in 1992, with a dust jacket illustration by David Scutt (who would go on to illustrate the jackets of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy), Cross of Fire is one of Sawkins/Forbes's twenty-four novels featuring Tweed of the British Secret Intelligence Service and his colleagues. It's a beast of a book, clocking in at over 500 pages, and if its Amazon reviews are anything to go by, it's either "dreadful", "dire" or an "excellent thriller" (although the review that last quote was taken from is suspiciously PR-like). However, its relative merits are by the by in this instance, because the really interesting thing about the book is what was secreted inside it:

An incomplete typewritten manuscript page. Far as I've been able to establish this is from an early draft of the novel, as the scene doesn't seem to appear in the book itself (although there is a scene that's quite close). Which might lead one to conjecture that perhaps it wasn't written by Forbes at all – that it's an unfinished piece of fan fiction or something. Except for what's on the reverse side:

Forbes's handwritten notes for the novel. If you compare the handwriting here (click on the image to enlarge) to that of the inscriptions in A Wreath for America and Tramp in Armour:

It's does appear to be the same hand, albeit looser, as befits scrawled notes as opposed to a heartfelt inscription. All three of the Forbes books I've showcased came from the same batch acquired by book dealer Jamie Sturgeon – and then acquired from Jamie by me – so it's a fairly safe bet that the manuscript page and notes in Cross of Fire are indeed Forbes's.

Of course, quite what the notes mean is another matter entirely. It looks as if it's mostly a way for Forbes to keep track of who drives what in either the story or a particular scene – BMW, Renault and so forth – but what the ticks next to Tweed and some of the other characters' names signify I've no idea. There's also what may be a scrawled line of dialogue on the right hand side about "permanent solitude", which, when I shared the notes with spy novelist Jeremy Duns on Twitter, prompted Jeremy to recall that according to the late Iwan Morelius – who had a cameo in one Forbes novel – Forbes reportedly never let his wife, Jane, enter his study. (There's an interesting piece by Morelius on his friendship with Forbes over on Mystery*File.) As ever, if anyone has read Cross of Fire and can shed further light on the notes, do please leave a comment or drop me a line via the email address in the right-hand sidebar.

That's yer lot from Colin Forbes for the moment, but seeing as this series of posts on signed books has now veered into the realm of ephemera, let's take a look at an extraordinary letter next, one written by a British thriller novelist – a firm favourite of mine – to another author, on the ins and outs of publishing in the 1980s...