Sydenham Scores; Higgins x 2: Jack and George V., Solo and Victories (Collins / Andre Deutsch First Editions)

So, the random book blogging that's been going on round these here parts for the past week – basically playing catch-up on assorted unrelated books I've bought over the last month or three (with a Notes from the Small Press throw in for a bit of variety) – will take a turn for the slightly less random this week. I'll still be catching up on stuff I've purchased, but these books will be slightly more linked – largely by author name, but also by dustjacket designer. Three of 'em were written by Len Deighton, and all three of those books boast jackets designed by Raymond Hawkey; and the other three were written by a certain Mr. Higgins... although not, as we shall see, the same Mr. Higgins...

That said, while this first post does indeed deal with two novels written by two different men named Higgins, in an odd coincidence both books feature dustjackets created by the same designer... and both were bought in the same charity shop...

What we have here are British hardback first editions of Solo by Jack Higgins – published by William Collins in 1980 – and Victories by George V. Higgins, which was published by Andre Deutsch in 1991. I picked these two books up in the south London town of Sydenham, on the same excursion a few months back when I bought Len Deighton's Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy and Mark Gatiss's Black Butterfly. And despite being published over ten years apart and presumably (although not necessarily) arriving at the charity shop from different donors, both books are wrapped in dustjackets designed by Donald – or Don, as Victories has it – Macpherson. I haven't been able to find out much about him, but his illustrations appeared on at least three other Jack Higgins covers – 1981's Luciano's Luck, 1982's Touch the Devil and 1985's Confessional (those last two starring Liam Devlin from perhaps Higgins's most famous novel, The Eagle Has Landed) – as well as on the cover of Derek Lambert's The Judas Code (Hamilton, 1983) and, in the form of maps, inside the UK first edition of Paul Theroux's The Kingdom by the Sea (also Hamilton, 1983).

Jack Higgins – real name Harry Patterson – hasn't cropped up on Existential Ennui before, but he is an author I've been meaning to try at some point, so unless and until a first edition of The Eagle Has Landed turns up in my immediate vicinity, Solo strikes me as a good a place to start as any. Mind you, the plot sounds slightly bizarre. It features a concert pianist named Mikali who also happens to be a ruthless assassin. Fleeing from the police after murdering a prominent Zionist, Mikali runs over and kills a young girl – who just happens to be the daughter of Asa Morgan, a colonel in Northern Ireland and something of an efficient killer himself. As the dustjacket flap blurb puts it (offering its own unique spin on a well-known paradox): "When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, trouble usually ensues. When Mikali met Asa Morgan there could only be one solution. Death."

George V. Higgins, on the other hand, has appeared on this blog before, although I must admit I still haven't read the book I blogged about back then: his debut – and best-known – novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Victories is a companion novel to his 1989 book Trust, and is a political tale set in Vermont in 1968. I'm not sure I'll get round to reading it anytime soon – for one thing I've got The Friends of Eddie Coyle to get through first – but this contemporaneous New York Times review is pretty positive. And it's to George V. that we return in the next post, with another politically inclined novel from rather earlier in his career...

Sydenham Score: Black Butterfly (Lucifer Box #3) by Mark Gatiss; Simon & Schuster First Edition, Ben Willsher / Mark Thomas Cover

Just two more posts to go now in Spy Fiction Fortnight. And for the penultimate entry, we have a UK hardback first edition (and first impression) which I bought in a Sydenham, South London charity shop for just two quid (on the same excursion where I got that first edition of Len Deighton's Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy). Which was a bit of a result, as hardback firsts of this one are rather thin on the ground...

Mark Gatiss's Black Butterfly was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. It's the third (and final) in Gatiss's series starring British Secret Service agent (and portraitist to the rich and famous) Lucifer Box – a kind of lascivious James Bond for the Edwardian age. Or rather, the first book in the series, The Vesuvius Club (2004), was set in the Edwardian era; the second, The Devil in Amber (2006), was set around twenty years later, post-World War I, which would bring it under the reign of George V, while Black Butterfly takes place shortly after our current Queen came to the throne, so that would be some time after 1953. Confused? Well, you're not alone. The precise settings of the novels has caused so much debate that there's a dedicated page about it all on the League of Gentlemen website (and this Independent review of The Devil in Amber professes some befuddlement, too).

However, Black Butterfly is very definitely set in the 1950s, and is therefore contemporaneous (in a retcon kind of way) with Ian Fleming's Bond novels. So while the previous incarnations of Lucifer Box referenced, respectively, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and McNeile's Bulldog Drummond – at least, that's what I infer from various online reviews – for this third outing the character assumes more of a 007 shape (a little older, perhaps). Let's let the dustjacket flap blurb fill us in further:

LUCIFER BOX. He's tall, he's dark and, like the shark, he looks for trouble.

Or so he wishes. For with Queen Elizabeth newly established on her thrown the now elderly secret agent is reaching the end of his scandalous career. Despite his fast-approaching retirement, however, queer events leave box unable to resist investigating one last case...

Why have pillars of the Establishment started dying in bizarrely reckless accidents?

Who are the deadly pay-masters of enigmatic assassin Kingdom Kum?

And who or what is the mysterious Black Butterfly?

From the seedy streets of Soho to the souks of Istanbul and the sun-drenched shores of Jamaica, Box must use his artistic licence to kill and eventually confront an enemy with its roots in his own notorious past. Can Lucifer Box save the day before the dying of the light?

Well that blurb certainly owes more than a little to Fleming, as does, seemingly, the international jet-setting espionage plot, which even takes in Jamaica – where Fleming famously lived and wrote. And that 007 connection extends to the design of the book too. The dustjacket explicitly references the late Richard Chopping's memorable designs for the Jonathan Cape editions of the Bond novels, in particular his jacket for The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), which you can see on the right there. The jacket illustration on Black Butterfly is by Mark Thomas – who does a fine job homaging Chopping's style – but the cover concept is by Ben Willsher (with, I imagine, input from Mr. Gatiss), a comics artist and illustrator who's done quite a bit of work for 2000 AD.

But the attractive and witty design doesn't stop at the cover. Because inside the book, on the front and back endpapers, Gatiss and Willsher have cooked this up:

A number of spoof newspaper strips depicting the adventures of Lucifer Box, sellotaped onto the pages of an exercise book, schoolboy-style. It's always nice when publishers go the extra mile on often-overlooked book elements like endpapers, but here Gatiss and Willsher have gone above and beyond the call of duty: you can even see the edges of adverts and a reverse article on a folded corner. And if you know your Bond publishing history, you'll spot the reference straightaway:

Namely the James Bond strip which ran in the Daily Express from 1958, with John McLusky artwork and Henry Gammidge scripts (subsequently written and drawn by, respectively, Jim Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak, whose take on 007 I much prefer). All of those newspaper stories are available from the lovely people at Titan Books, by the way; indeed, in my previous role at Titan I actually senior-edited a fair few of their Bond newspaper strip collections, securing some of the celebrity forewords in the process. (Might as well blow my own trumpet, eh?)

Mark Gatiss is of course rather better known for his television and radio work, especially The League of Gentlemen, various Doctor Who scripts, and the brilliant Sherlock, which he co-created with Who head honcho Steven Moffat. I haven't read Black Butterfly yet – deranged completist that I am, I can't very well read the third book in a series without having tried the others first (which, needless to say, means I'll have to find first editions of those, too) – but my estimable friend Steve Holland – whose opinion in such matters I trust implicitly – has, and reckons it's aces.

Just thought I'd sling an image of the book's case in as well, so you can see the lovely white debossing on the front. Right then. On to the final post, which will see the return to Spy Fiction Fortnight of Graham Greene...

Sydenham Score: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy by Len Deighton (Jonathan Cape First Edition, Raymond Hawkey Cover Design)

For this second of three posts on books with covers designed by Raymond Hawkey, we turn to a novel I picked up on a recent sojourn to Sydenham in South London, near where my folks live:

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy was first published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in 1976. I bought this rather nice copy in the Kirkdale Bookshop, over the road from Sydenham Station; should you ever find yourself in those insalubrious parts, it's well worth popping in (to the bookshop, not to Sydenham Station – unless of course you're intending on getting the hell out of Sydenham, in which case, you would have both my sympathy and my understanding). New books are displayed in the front half of the shop, and then towards the back and down in the basement is a sizable selection of second hand fare, with a couple of bookcases-worth of modern firsts and an impressive stock of books on cricket, gardening, history, cinema, theatre, and so forth. The prices are very reasonable too.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy may or may not be an entry in Len Deighton's first-person series starring the unnamed British spy subsequently monikered Harry Palmer in the films adapted from the novels. Even the main Len Deighton website can't make up its mind whether it is or not, which only goes to highlight the problem of not naming your lead character. Apparently if you've read the previous books in the series – from 1962's The Ipcress File to 1967's An Expensive Place to Die, although there's also some doubt over whether it's the same unnamed spy in that last one – you'll be able to draw your own conclusions as to whether Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy is part of that run. But since I haven't, it's not a poser I need to trouble myself with particularly.

Raymond Hawkey designed the jackets for many of Deighton's novels, working with different photographers to achieve his vision. Props such as a gun or a skull would be placed in intriguing and suggestive arrangements, and then type incorporated with the finished photo. The photographer on Twinkle, Twinkle was Adrian Flowers, who was a key figure at influential illustration agency Artist Partners; aside from photographing book covers he also took pictures for this article on "A Day in the Life of Len Deighton", which was penned by Deighton himself.

Deighton and Hawkey were contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s; Hawkey was employed to design the jacket for Deighton's debut, The Ipcress File, at Deighton's request, and Deighton was a designer himself before he found success as a writer, creating covers for UK editions of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1956) and a 1960 Penguin cover for Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, among others. For his part Hawkey also wrote, producing four well-received thrillers: Wild Card (1974), Side-Effect (1979), It (1983) and End Stage (1988). And as we'll see in the third and final post on him, he also created covers for spy novels by other writers – seemingly reusing props in the process...