Jack Trevor Story / Sexton Blake

Two attractive British pulps from Jack Trevor Story. He wrote at least 20 Sexton Blakes -there are those who say he wasted his talent on them -having written the state of the nation novel Live Now Pay Later (1963) and also the story on which Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble with Harry is based. The Nine O'Clock Shadow title from 1958 qualifies as a rock and roll novel and is quite early in the canon. The other novel belongs in the murder in the suburbs category and is set among the amateur dramatic community… The Jack Trevor Story website has much on this prolific writer and its main  quotation from his works comes from a slightly later Sexton Blake Danger's Child (1961) --

There is a sadness which grows from the seeds of remembered happiness; there is a weariness which springs unrequested from the remembered fountains of youth; there is a nostalgia conjured from faraway places and gone people and moments which have long since ticked into the infinite fog. 

Some curious changes in book titles

Found - an article by Ellery Queen -Some curious changes in book titles in the omnibus Carrousel for bibliophiles, a treasury of tales, narratives, songs, epigrams and sundry curious studies relating to a noble theme by William Targ (Duschnes, New York 1947.) The book is a late example of one of those bibiophilic tomes that were published in such numbers at the end of the 19th century (Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, Autolycus of the Book-Stalls, Shadows of the Old Booksellers, The Souls of Books, Book Song, Behind my Library Door, The Romance of Book Collecting etc., etc.,) and are now almost unknown. Queen's article is about changes of title of British editions of (mostly) detective fiction when published in America.

Thomas Burke. The Pleasantries of Old Quong (Constable 1931) became A Tea-Shop in Limehouse (Little Brown 1931)

W. W. Jacobs. Sea Urchins (Methuen 1899) became
More Cargoes (Copp, Clark 1899)

R.Austin Freeman. Dr. Thorndyke's Casebook (Hodder 1923) became The Blue Scarab (Dodd, Mead 1924)

Arthur Morrison The Green Eye of Goona (Eveleigh Nash, 1904) became The Green Diamond (Page, 1904)

J.S. Fletcher Paul Campenhaye: Specialist in Criminology (Ward, Lock 1918) became, 21 years later, The Clue of the Artificial Eye (Hillman-Curl 1939)

E.W. Hornung The Black Mask (Grant Richards 1901) became
Raffles:Further Adventures Of The Amateur Cracksman (Scribner's Sons, New York, 1901)

E. Phillips Oppenheim The Game of Liberty (Cassell 1915) became An Amiable Charlatan (Little, Brown 1916)

Baroness Orczy The Old Man in the Corner (Greening 1909) became The Man in the Corner (Dodd Mead 1909). A change of which Ellery Queen says "only a slight change…but to those  who cherish the memory of the first true armchair detective of detective literature that 'slight' change makes all the difference in the world."

Edgar Wallace The Mind of Mr J.G. Reeder (Hodder 1925) became The Murder Book of J.G. Reeder (Doubleday 1929)- another lamentable change according to EQ as  it emphasises sensationalism which is not actually in the book and a 'phase' of writing at which Wallace " was - surprisingly - inept."

Arthur B. Reeves The Black Mask (Eveleigh Nash 1912) was published, slightly  earlier, in America as The Silent Bullet (Dodd, Mead 1912)- demonstrating that British publishers were not immune to sensationalism.

'Waters' (William Russell) Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (Brown, 1856) rated by John Carter as 'the most important of the early yellowbacks' became in an America re-issue The Secret Detective: or One Night in a Gambling House.

Pulp fiction art

This original artwork was one of three covers created for a number of 1940s pulp magazines published by a British company. The series was called the ‘Headline series’ because each story was built around a newspaper headline-- to be found sketchily depicted at the bottom left hand corner of each cover. The other two pieces of artwork were for Road to Nowhere and Road to Revenge—both stories by someone called Max Foster. There seem to have been at least 20 tales in this particular series.

In the ultimately futile three hundred year old debate that has raged regarding ‘high ‘ and ‘ low art’, such ‘ low’ art as these pulp fiction covers, is often derided for the poor quality of the  draughtsmanship, whereas the simple truth is that for pure draughtsmanship, as opposed to piercing originality or ‘ vision’, this art is often more impressive than that of many ‘ high’ artists. Next time you visit Tate Britain wander around the many rooms devoted to Turner and study the groups of figures that inhabit the foregrounds of his huge oil landscapes. You might be surprised at how inept our greatest painter could be at depicting the human figure.

Then return to the work of ‘low’ book illustrators and marvel at how well most of them could draw. [RMH]

The Ghost Man - a blurb from the 1930s

Found in the massive and unending Donald Rudd collection of detective fiction -a Gerald Verner thriller The Ghost Man (Wright and Brown, London 1936) in its sensational jacket.
Gerald Verner was the pseudonym of John Robert Stuart Pringle. He had over 130 books published under four names during his lifetime and was hugely popular with his audience and a favourite of the Duke of Windsor, who was presented with an especially bound set of 15 of Verner's thrillers. He attempted to take over the mantle of the prolific (and wealthy) Edgar Wallace after his death in 1932. The jacket has elements of Wallace, even down to the style of the logo. The blurb on the inside flap reads:

Who was the man called Conner, bank robber and murderer, who was hanged at Wandsworth Prison? What connections did he have with the murderer of the Shabby Peddler in the garden of Janet Lacey's country cottage? Why did he search the place so thoroughly before he was killed? And what was the significance of the stanza from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? Mr Gerald Verner's new mystery is  so full of excitement, his plots so ingenious, mysterious, and so subtly unfolded that it will be impossible
to put the book down until the last word has been read.

The book is not listed by Bleiler (Supernatural Fiction) or George Locke (Spectrum of Fantasy)which would indicate the ghost is rationally explained. It is, however, an Omar Khayyam item..

Ruscovitch - forger and criminal apologist

Found in a thriller from  the Donald Rudd collection of detective fiction, this preface to The Poison and the Root (Jarrolds, UK 1950) by Richard Savage. It is a sort of apologia or plea for the criminal by one G. Ruscovitch, 'professional forger'. I had thought this person was fictitious or possibly a character in the book (which is not about forgery) but in fact there was a forger of this name. He is mentioned by Havelock Ellis in The Criminal (1890) and appears to have flourished in the mid 19th Century. He may also have been a murderer but Ellis describes him thus:
'...a prince among forgers, the accomplished student of science, the perfect master of half-a-dozen languages..' He then quotes the same piece as Savage. Possibly this was spoken from the dock in mitigation:

 Too often it is forgotten that criminals are members of society. These bodies, sometimes abandoned by all except the satellites charged to guard them, are not all opaque; some of them are diaphanous and transparent. The vulgar sand that you tread underfoot becomes crystal when it has passed through the furnace. The dregs may become useful if you know how to employ them; to tread them underfoot with indifference and without thought is to undermine the foundations of society and fill it with volcanoes. The man who has not visited the caverns, can he know the mountains well? The lower strata, for being situated deeper and farther from the light, are less important than the external crust? There are deformities and diseases among us to make one shudder; but since when has horror forbidden study, and the disease driven away the physician?

Crime Fiction by Setting

Hubin's Comprehensive Bibliography of Crime Fiction 1749-1990 lists crime novels by their 'setting' in its second volume. This is mostly places, countries, states and towns with a few other settings like the past, the future, aircraft and academia. Naturally there is an emphasis on America  e.g. under 'Massachusetts' Hubin lists 200 thrillers but at the next entry 'Mauritius' just one - J.C. Shill's Murder in Paradise. The section on the Canary Islands is of interest with just these 5:

P. Attlee. Silken Baroness.

R. Harding. Appointment in Tenerife.

R. MacLeod. Legacy from Tenerife.

D. Serafin. Port of Light. 

J.M. Walsh. Danger Zone.




Madeira has these:

M. Farnsworth. Castle that Whispered.

E. Ferrars. Skeleton Staff.

E. Ferrars. Witness Before the Fact. 

R. Goddard. Past Caring.

Alicen White. Watching Eye.

The sparsely populated Azores throw up just one novel:

Denis Wheatley. They Found Atlantis.

Badinage

'Badinage' - sent in by an old jotter (who once met Marty Feldman) who notes that even in 1961 the old thought that young people had no conversation... From Michael Innes detective novel Silence Observed about a forger intent upon  forging forgeries of great literary forgeries. Echoes of Major Byron etc., Inspector Appleby, having briefly referred to La Dolce Vita, his interlocutor 'old buffer' Sir Gabriel Gulliver says:

"I tell you I've never spent a winter in Rome."

"You'd find it overrated, I don't doubt. Better just to read about it in a nostalgic way in Edwardian novels. The reality would be disenchanting. I understand there's a great deal of snow, and that the natives have never studied to accommodate their lives to it. Moreover in Winter Rome is full of Romans, just as in Spring London is full of Londoners. And you know how tiresome that is. No capital city is tolerable except when voided of its inhabitants."

Sir Gabriel Gulliver received this with appropriate amusement. Entering the smoking room, he dived into a corner to ring a bell…" Nice of you," he said, "to talk to an old buffer in what you conceive of as his own antique conversational mode. A good many of you youngsters, you know, have no conversation at all…'

Peter Baron - 'Who?' (1927)

Peter Baron was the pseudonym of thriller writer Leonard Worswick Clyde (1906 Nov 21 - 1987 Nov 16). He wrote 4 now scarce crime / detective novels. The dust jacket pictured is from his 1927 novel 'Who?' The artist of this striking jacket is unknown and very little is known about Worswick Clyde. Hubin's Bibliography of Crime Fiction, 1749-1975 lists the following:

Who? [1927]
Jerry The Lag (US: Murder In Wax) [f|1928]
The Poacher [1929]
The Opium Murders [f|1930]