Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,328MI6 Agent
edited January 2025
Very nice collection there, @Shady Tree. I now have all of the UK Boysie Oakes first editions apart from the final one, A Killer for a Song (1975). I'm working on it though. I also have most of the US first editions for the Oakes novels too. Yes, I'm mad when it comes to JG. 😃
Here's a snapshot of my Boysie Oakes hardback collection so far.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Much more impressive than my feeble efforts detailed above, @Silhouette Man. I have a question, though- "The Assassination File" is perhaps with another part of your collection since IIRC that was a paperback original, and it's rarely discussed. What are your opinions on that one, since it's a short story collection that's not totally about Boysie?
It has taken me quite a while to acquire these and they can be pretty expensive with their dust jackets and especially signed too. Not all of those pictured are signed though. I did recently acquire a US proof copy of Understrike which was nice. It's the earliest Gardner proof I have so far. It's the third copy of Understrike in the photo above. I thought that The Assassination File was good. There's only it and Hideaway in terms of short story collections from Gardner. My own personal research has uncovered that both Gardner short story collections were thought up as an idea initially by one of his friends and researchers who suggested the stories should all be linked together by a common thread. You're right in that both were only printed in paperback form and had no hardback edition first. I imagine this was because short story collections are notoriously difficult to sell in hardback, especially when the author usually produces full-length novels as was the case with Gardner. Many readers kind of feel like they're being short changed and so they wait for the less expensive paperback edition to appear instead before purchasing.
I have more recently found out that there were since then three other Gardner short stories not part of a book collection, only one of which I was previously aware of. I've managed to track down copies of the other two stories I didn't have. I might attempt to write a book about John Gardner and his works at some point as I have been researching a lot over the last year using paid access to the British Newspaper Archive to find out some new details from Gardner interviews, book reviews and general pieces in the press over the years. Old newspapers are a great source as they often help to fill in the blanks and add more meat to the bare bones of what we already know. As John Gardner doesn't have any Collected Letters (unlike other Bond authors such as Ian Fleming and Sir Kingsley Amis) these vintage newspaper clippings are all the more valuable.
A snapshot of some of my Gardner paperbacks, including his two short story collections.
Nice collection, @Silhouette Man - as always - esp with Gardner. One point - and it is a really small point and nothing to do with you as a collector, just something esthetic - I hate that with many of these authors we love and admire it sometimes becomes impossible to purchase a complete set of novels in the same type face, cover style colour etc. While this doesn't both me much regarding hard covers as I do not collect them [that is a storage space issue] it does for soft covers.
One of the things I enjoy about the Pan series - and others - of Fleming soft covers is that [after a while] the whole series was [and is now] reproduced with exactly the same look and visual atmosphere. There is a sense of obtaining something important and worthwhile. I took great pains to ensure my collection of Gavin Lyall paperbacks all run with the same cover format; ditto my James Hadley Chase espionage set; and so on. This becomes harder to do, I guess, when soft covers are not reprinted, but I always wonder from a marketing point of view why a publisher would choose to change a visual format and thus disturb reader recognition. With a long running saga - Leasor's Jason Love series, for instance, or the last Modesty Blaise book - I can see they may want to relaunch and potentially 'forget' the previous formats, tucking into a more modern visual look, but when novels are published closer together, as many of the Boysie Oakes sagas are, this baffles me.
On that note, all this chat about Mr Gardner has made me consider buying The Liquidator and dipping my toe back into the espionage water. There is only so much Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton and man can take.
@chrisno1 and @Barbel One of the biggest moans that my customers had was that the covers in series were not uniform. I’m presuming that they’re trying to attract a new audience as time goes on. Mind you, as a seller, I didn’t mind that much, many dedicated collectors want to own every cover produced of certain titles or series. With the Bond series I had many collectors who not only wanted every different cover, but every printing, as well. Happy days!
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Thanks @chrisno1. You raise a good point about the hardbacks and paperbacks in book series often not having matching covers. With reference to the Gardner Boysie Oakes novels one reason for the covers not matching is that the last two novels, The Airline Pirates (1970) and A Killer for a Song (1975) were actually published by Hodder and Stoughton and not Frederick Muller who had published the first six Boysie Oakes novels as well as Gardner's autobiography Spin the Bottle (1964). Also, by the 1970s photographic covers were much more in vogue than the older and often more aesthetically pleasing and imaginative painted covers of old. So between these two factors (and no doubt others like changing tastes and changing cover art staff at the publishers) we didn't get a uniform set of the Boysie Oakes novels in hardback. The change from painted cover art to photographic art also affected the run of the original paperback covers.
However, in the 1970s and 1980s there were in fact two matching sets of Boysie Oakes novels reprinted, one with painted covers and one with photos of Oakes usually either holding or firing a gun. The 1980s paperbacks also came with an introduction by Gardner explaining how he came to create Boysie Oakes in the first place. You should be able to find these two sets of covers quite cheaply on eBay or perhaps in a second hand bookshop (if you're particularly lucky!). 🙂
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Yes, those are the photographic cover Star paperback ones from the 1980s, @chrisno1. I've posted an example of the Corgi 1970s paperback ones below which all shared similar cover art making up a complete (and numbered) series:
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I have been attempting to sample more women novelists to balance things out but like many well-intentioned idealistic endeavours, it hasn't worked out well. I started Patricia Clarkson's Postmortem about chief examiner Kay Scarpetta - I picked it up for a quid in my local library - but gave up around page 80. It's about a serial killer of women and while the murders are naturally deplored by the first-person narrative, and the nosy sensationalist antics of the local journalist - a woman - are scorned, the description of how the victims are found and what they were subjected to read sadistically nonetheless, like you the reader are meant to secretly enjoy it a bit. I didn't want that side of me to be prodded so I gave it up. As one didn't know the identity of the villain, and as it's not a whodunnit in the Agatha Christie sense where you know all the suspects, a substitute villain is introduced - a sexist cop whom the main protagonist has to work with/tolerate. It's all a bit obvious and the prose wasn't so great - don't get me wrong, it was a page turner but I didn't care for the grisly details either. I don't know, guess it was the 90s when this sort of thing seemed edgy and a bit sexy - Basic Instinct, for instance - but now I feel the world is nasty enough thanks.
It took the best part of a year for Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaity to come in on order to my local library 'It's a very popular book,' said the librarian but I think the reason it took so long to arrive is that it's 500 pages and it's not a page turner. I wouldn't say it's a slog either, though.
It's set in 1920s London and its decadent nightclubs (the book's title comes from them), run by family matriarch Nellie Coker who we see leaving jail at the start of the novel, witnessed by a policeman accompanied by a young woman and former librarian whom he hopes to persuade to join her clubs as a spy, to find out if she's linked to the disappearance and/or murders of young women who are possibly employees of her clubs.
Throw in an internecine family ripe with weakness and betrayal and you're about ready to go so it's surprising to find that while this is an amiable read, I was quite ready to give it up at page 100, also at page 200,. and page 300 and only in the final stint did it really engage me. Despite the plot, there really is no jeopardy to speak of, nobody we meet seems to be under threat and we are introduced to so many characters they can only be depicted thinly. So Nellie Croker puts me in mind of 'dear old Aunt Neillie', the fictional relative of Charlie Croker in The Italian Job who promises via Noel Coward's privileged jailbird on day release at her funeral to 'leap out our the grave and kick you in the shins' should they fail. As this is set in the era of Coward and Hayfever et al I suppose that namecheck is deliberate. Her son is a 30-year-old who distinguished himself in the Great War - the novel is good at referring back to that tragedy - and is dashing and handsome with a sports car - he's called Niven as if in tribute to the much-loved, rakish English actor but it's a bit cavalier, the character doesn't quite seem consistent and like his mother seems not quite fully rounded. The whole set up seems a MacGuffin for Atkinson's research - though the London paper is called the Evening Standard, surely it was the Evening News back then? - and many of the characters mere ciphers. It almost reads like a screenplay, where the actors can round out the characters themselves.
I continued to read it however because the prose was crisp and enjoyable and largely despite of or because there wasn't much jeopardy or anything - it's all written in that detached style that sums up 1920s culture - Noel Coward or the sitcom You Rang M'Lord - it's all a bit coy and superficial. You feel it might almost work better as a comedy, sort of Thoroughly Modern Millie which dealt with a simliar theme. Praise on the back cover says the book is 'As vividly filthy, populous, dangerous as anything described by Dickens' but it really isn't, that said it's not a slog like Dickens can be. But there are no paragraphs of great descriptive writing either, which seems to be a male thing, a sort of showing off. Still, as bedtime reading before you turn in, a couple of chapters or so, I enjoyed it because it didn't give me nightmares or bad, depressing dreams, save for the last 40 pages when events come to a head.
Unfortunately the murder mystery is tied up in a perfunctory, unconvincing 'will this do?' way which is borderline insulting, and along the way there are way too many coincidences to be plausible - I know London in the 20s was less populous than it is now, especially after the war, but the times people just happen to bump into friends by chance is too much, not to mention Atkinson's narrative trick of holding back important information about what some characters actually know, which turns repetitive... The finale sees a main protagonist behave in way that is wholly out of character and some of it really doesn't make sense even by its own standards. That said, it's 500 pages, I enjoyed it, and finished it, so that's something. It's just not nearly as juicily scurrilous, sexy, exciting or revelatory as it ought to be, however.
I cannot find my copy of "A Killer For A Song", the last Boysie Oakes novel. I know it's here somewhere, but I bought it about 50 years ago and have moved house a few times since then. I'll probably find it in the loft at the bottom of a box of Bond books with different covers, or likewise.
So, I decided to simply buy a copy from ebay until I saw the prices they wanted 😵. Since I know I definitely have a copy somewhere I'm reluctant to pay those prices, so I'm currently keeping an eye for it at a more reasonable price.
Meantime I've bought a copy of Gardner's "Hideaway" since @Silhouette Man mentioned it above and I'll read that when I finish "The Airline Pirates" if I haven't got the right book by then.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,328MI6 Agent
edited January 2025
I take it that was a first edition, @Barbel? I've been holding off buying the UK first edition on eBay as it's very expensive even for an ordinary unsigned edition. I'll try to get it as soon as I can though as I want to complete my Boysie Oakes hardback collection. I'm trying to collect them all now before they go up in value any more! I've read that some of the Oakes novels had quite small print runs in hardback (I suspect some of the later novels moreso) so this may account for the inflated prices for the last one, A Killer for a Song.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
That's a crazy price for just a paperback edition. You could get the first edition cheaper than that! It's madness. I think some sellers get carried away with the value they think some books are worth. I'd imagine that they don't sell too many copies at that hugely inflated price though! God loves a trier, I suppose, and there is one born every minute. Still...
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,328MI6 Agent
As an update I finally bit the bullet and bought a first edition of John Gardner's A Killer for a Song from eBay yesterday. It's in the US so that makes it more pricey. Sadly the only available copies all seem to be in the US. It will be nice to have a complete set of the UK first editions of the Boysie Oakes novels though. It took a while to assemble but I got there! 🙂
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Congratulations, I trust it will bring you pleasure! 🤩
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,328MI6 Agent
edited January 2025
Yes, they definitely will. And I managed to complete the set cheaper than this set from Adrian Harrington. I believe it was previously for sale at £695:
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
I had the pleasure of reading this as a first edition recently sent to me by Shady Tree, for which many thanks.
Boysie Oakes continues to become more serious with each novel. Gardner frequently tells the reader how cowardly and unintelligent Boysie is, but his actions belie that as he deals with tough guys, handles tricky situations, and so on. This one is a very enjoyable romp with lots of puns and in-jokes, but what stuck out to me was how much this would be suited for a film directed by Lewis Gilbert with Ken Adam doing the production design. There’s an oil tanker which isn’t what it’s purported to be and a Saturn V rocket is central to the plot, which is bonkers in the best sense.
TRAITOR’S EXIT John Gardner
If “Founder Member” was YOLT the Eon film, then “Traitor’s Exit” is TSWLM the Fleming novel – not the one with the steel-toothed giant and stolen submarines but the one with the motel and the Canadian girl on a scooter. Not that there’s any similarity in plot or characters, the comparison being that in both books the author tells the story in first person through the eyes of a previously unknown character while the series hero plays a supporting part.
The narrator is one Rex Upsdale, a washed-up spy writer who might be taken as a cynical view of Gardner himself. The number of likenesses is clear to the reader, but Gardner’s sense of humour is very much to the front. Upsdale is very likeable and as with TSWLM seeing our usual hero through the eyes of a different character brings a fresh dimension to the story.
I’m deliberately not going into details of the plot for either of these books to avoid spoilers.
Looking forward to reading all of these Boysie Oakes titles. Now that my copy of 'A Killer For A Song' has arrived from a US retailer - see below - it's only 'Traitor's Exit' that I don't yet have as a hardback. (Looks as if 'Traitor's Exit' in hb is scarcely available and inordinately expensive.)
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,328MI6 Agent
edited February 2025
I must've bought my copy of A Killer for a Song right after you, @Shady Tree. I noticed someone had bought a copy as I knew there were three listed but only two were left when I looked. I then saw that one had sold. My copy was expensive too but I was just glad to complete my collection of the Boysie Oakes UK first editions. I can't wait for my copy to arrive.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Possibly Eliot’s masterwork, four extended poems that comment in a highly personal manner on history, war and the purposes of time remembered, to come and now, all wrapped up with a healthy dose of religion. East Coker is the most famous, but it is Little Gidding, with its allusions to the English Civil War and a lack of religious and societal tolerance that resonates most today. Generally impenetrable unless you start to research every line and nuance of the text. Very well intentioned, but probably too intellectually challenging for the lay person. That sounds terribly superior, but this kind of poetry isn’t for the lazy or easy day reader. Eliot binds his poetry through tone and sound; there is almost no specific melodic rhyme or rhythm, no uniform stanzas, no metre. Occasionally, but way of abstraction he does exactly what you do not expect and becomes formal and structured; these moments usually come in the second section of each poem, when he is no longer speaking of those big subjects but creating a moment of calm before the intellectual storm.
Eliot’s reputation has suffered mightily since his death in 1965, usually because everyone only thinks about The Waste Land or Lloyd Webber’s Cats, and ignores his contributions to literary criticism and modernist poetry. Four Quartets is a giant achievement of modern British poetry and deserves revisiting, although perhaps one should have Wikipedia to hand to check every word in every line for its possible meaning(s).
LoeffelholzThe United States, With LovePosts: 8,984Quartermasters
edited February 2025
A biography of Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, GCB (19 April 1757 – 23 January 1833).
What a remarkable life. Thirty-six years at sea, on 23 different ships - perhaps the most famous being HMS Indefatigable.
Highly recommended 🍻
Check out my Amazon author page!Mark Loeffelholz
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
John Burke was a journey man author of thrillers, sci-fi and various television or cinema adaptations and spin offs. He was well-regarded at the start of his career, but seems to have taken a left turn in the 1960s when the adaptation game took over his writing. He was the man who wrote the multimillion selling novelisation of A Hard Day’s Night as well as a foray into Ian Fleming territory with a novelisation of the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I have no idea if Burke reproduced the songs in the novelisation or if he simply expanded on the Fleming original and matched it to the movie. Not sure I want to know on this reading…
The Protectors was an early seventies Gerry Anderson Production about an international trio of crimefighters loosely described as ‘bodyguards’. Robert Vaughn, Nyree Dawn Porter and Tony Anholt make up the American, British and French sections. Porter’s female operative is the widow of an Italian Count, so she is constantly introduced as the Contessa di Contini. Vaughn’s Harry Rule is the top man. Anholt’s Paul Buchet is a makeweight Q. The series was cheap looking and economical with the budget. It was also hopelessly constrained by only running for twenty-five minutes per episode [less once you took out the credits]. Character and plot exposition were as good as nil. I have seen a few episodes and while it isn’t terrible, the show isn’t terribly good either. The best thing is the theme tune, sung by Jack Jones. I understand it was the last show of its kind to run at that length; after this ITC ensured all detective / adventure / thriller series would run for the standard, and more manageable, 52-minutes. Odd that many shows of this ilk now run for double that length or an interminable 2 parts or even worse a whole six-episode run.
Back to John Burke.
Under the pseudonym Rober Miall, Burke wrote several ITC spin offs: two Jason King novels, two UFO novels, one for The Adventurer and this effort, a lacklustre affair if ever their was one. Miall draws together three episodes from the series, providing a broad overarching theme that was not originally present. To do this he provides linking scenes and dialogue not featured in the originals. I am not certain how much else of the dialogue has been invented for the purposes of the novel but I would suggest not a fait amount. Each segment takes about forty-five minutes to read, which probably equates to twenty or so minutes screen time.
The stories are Dennis Spooner’s The Bodyguards, Brian Clemens’s Disappearing Trick and Ralph Smart’s The Numbers Game. All stem from the first season of The Protectors. Part One sees Rule and the Contessa in London guarding a corpse. Part Two has the Contessa – who in this adaptation is a new recruit to the Protectors and is having to demonstrate her attributes to Harry Rule – being menaced by a homicidal rich kid in France. Part Three has the trio busting a Spanish drug gang. There is nothing of any interest in any of the stories baring the occasional fun turn of phrase. Like the television show the novel is a harmless product that entertains and is as forgotten as swiftly as the minutes pass watching it.
Comments
Very nice collection there, @Shady Tree. I now have all of the UK Boysie Oakes first editions apart from the final one, A Killer for a Song (1975). I'm working on it though. I also have most of the US first editions for the Oakes novels too. Yes, I'm mad when it comes to JG. 😃
Here's a snapshot of my Boysie Oakes hardback collection so far.
Much more impressive than my feeble efforts detailed above, @Silhouette Man. I have a question, though- "The Assassination File" is perhaps with another part of your collection since IIRC that was a paperback original, and it's rarely discussed. What are your opinions on that one, since it's a short story collection that's not totally about Boysie?
Wonderful! Lovely collection of JG 😁
It has taken me quite a while to acquire these and they can be pretty expensive with their dust jackets and especially signed too. Not all of those pictured are signed though. I did recently acquire a US proof copy of Understrike which was nice. It's the earliest Gardner proof I have so far. It's the third copy of Understrike in the photo above. I thought that The Assassination File was good. There's only it and Hideaway in terms of short story collections from Gardner. My own personal research has uncovered that both Gardner short story collections were thought up as an idea initially by one of his friends and researchers who suggested the stories should all be linked together by a common thread. You're right in that both were only printed in paperback form and had no hardback edition first. I imagine this was because short story collections are notoriously difficult to sell in hardback, especially when the author usually produces full-length novels as was the case with Gardner. Many readers kind of feel like they're being short changed and so they wait for the less expensive paperback edition to appear instead before purchasing.
I have more recently found out that there were since then three other Gardner short stories not part of a book collection, only one of which I was previously aware of. I've managed to track down copies of the other two stories I didn't have. I might attempt to write a book about John Gardner and his works at some point as I have been researching a lot over the last year using paid access to the British Newspaper Archive to find out some new details from Gardner interviews, book reviews and general pieces in the press over the years. Old newspapers are a great source as they often help to fill in the blanks and add more meat to the bare bones of what we already know. As John Gardner doesn't have any Collected Letters (unlike other Bond authors such as Ian Fleming and Sir Kingsley Amis) these vintage newspaper clippings are all the more valuable.
A snapshot of some of my Gardner paperbacks, including his two short story collections.
Thank you, @CoolHandBond. I try my best when it comes to John Gardner. 🙂
Nice collection, @Silhouette Man - as always - esp with Gardner. One point - and it is a really small point and nothing to do with you as a collector, just something esthetic - I hate that with many of these authors we love and admire it sometimes becomes impossible to purchase a complete set of novels in the same type face, cover style colour etc. While this doesn't both me much regarding hard covers as I do not collect them [that is a storage space issue] it does for soft covers.
One of the things I enjoy about the Pan series - and others - of Fleming soft covers is that [after a while] the whole series was [and is now] reproduced with exactly the same look and visual atmosphere. There is a sense of obtaining something important and worthwhile. I took great pains to ensure my collection of Gavin Lyall paperbacks all run with the same cover format; ditto my James Hadley Chase espionage set; and so on. This becomes harder to do, I guess, when soft covers are not reprinted, but I always wonder from a marketing point of view why a publisher would choose to change a visual format and thus disturb reader recognition. With a long running saga - Leasor's Jason Love series, for instance, or the last Modesty Blaise book - I can see they may want to relaunch and potentially 'forget' the previous formats, tucking into a more modern visual look, but when novels are published closer together, as many of the Boysie Oakes sagas are, this baffles me.
On that note, all this chat about Mr Gardner has made me consider buying The Liquidator and dipping my toe back into the espionage water. There is only so much Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton and man can take.
I'm glad to read that, cos it shows that I'm not totally crazy in wanting the same thing!
@chrisno1 and @Barbel One of the biggest moans that my customers had was that the covers in series were not uniform. I’m presuming that they’re trying to attract a new audience as time goes on. Mind you, as a seller, I didn’t mind that much, many dedicated collectors want to own every cover produced of certain titles or series. With the Bond series I had many collectors who not only wanted every different cover, but every printing, as well. Happy days!
I went through a spell of wanting every cover, but it didn't last.
Thanks @chrisno1. You raise a good point about the hardbacks and paperbacks in book series often not having matching covers. With reference to the Gardner Boysie Oakes novels one reason for the covers not matching is that the last two novels, The Airline Pirates (1970) and A Killer for a Song (1975) were actually published by Hodder and Stoughton and not Frederick Muller who had published the first six Boysie Oakes novels as well as Gardner's autobiography Spin the Bottle (1964). Also, by the 1970s photographic covers were much more in vogue than the older and often more aesthetically pleasing and imaginative painted covers of old. So between these two factors (and no doubt others like changing tastes and changing cover art staff at the publishers) we didn't get a uniform set of the Boysie Oakes novels in hardback. The change from painted cover art to photographic art also affected the run of the original paperback covers.
However, in the 1970s and 1980s there were in fact two matching sets of Boysie Oakes novels reprinted, one with painted covers and one with photos of Oakes usually either holding or firing a gun. The 1980s paperbacks also came with an introduction by Gardner explaining how he came to create Boysie Oakes in the first place. You should be able to find these two sets of covers quite cheaply on eBay or perhaps in a second hand bookshop (if you're particularly lucky!). 🙂
Something like this... @Silhouette Man
Yes, those are the photographic cover Star paperback ones from the 1980s, @chrisno1. I've posted an example of the Corgi 1970s paperback ones below which all shared similar cover art making up a complete (and numbered) series:
I have been attempting to sample more women novelists to balance things out but like many well-intentioned idealistic endeavours, it hasn't worked out well. I started Patricia Clarkson's Postmortem about chief examiner Kay Scarpetta - I picked it up for a quid in my local library - but gave up around page 80. It's about a serial killer of women and while the murders are naturally deplored by the first-person narrative, and the nosy sensationalist antics of the local journalist - a woman - are scorned, the description of how the victims are found and what they were subjected to read sadistically nonetheless, like you the reader are meant to secretly enjoy it a bit. I didn't want that side of me to be prodded so I gave it up. As one didn't know the identity of the villain, and as it's not a whodunnit in the Agatha Christie sense where you know all the suspects, a substitute villain is introduced - a sexist cop whom the main protagonist has to work with/tolerate. It's all a bit obvious and the prose wasn't so great - don't get me wrong, it was a page turner but I didn't care for the grisly details either. I don't know, guess it was the 90s when this sort of thing seemed edgy and a bit sexy - Basic Instinct, for instance - but now I feel the world is nasty enough thanks.
It took the best part of a year for Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaity to come in on order to my local library 'It's a very popular book,' said the librarian but I think the reason it took so long to arrive is that it's 500 pages and it's not a page turner. I wouldn't say it's a slog either, though.
It's set in 1920s London and its decadent nightclubs (the book's title comes from them), run by family matriarch Nellie Coker who we see leaving jail at the start of the novel, witnessed by a policeman accompanied by a young woman and former librarian whom he hopes to persuade to join her clubs as a spy, to find out if she's linked to the disappearance and/or murders of young women who are possibly employees of her clubs.
Throw in an internecine family ripe with weakness and betrayal and you're about ready to go so it's surprising to find that while this is an amiable read, I was quite ready to give it up at page 100, also at page 200,. and page 300 and only in the final stint did it really engage me. Despite the plot, there really is no jeopardy to speak of, nobody we meet seems to be under threat and we are introduced to so many characters they can only be depicted thinly. So Nellie Croker puts me in mind of 'dear old Aunt Neillie', the fictional relative of Charlie Croker in The Italian Job who promises via Noel Coward's privileged jailbird on day release at her funeral to 'leap out our the grave and kick you in the shins' should they fail. As this is set in the era of Coward and Hayfever et al I suppose that namecheck is deliberate. Her son is a 30-year-old who distinguished himself in the Great War - the novel is good at referring back to that tragedy - and is dashing and handsome with a sports car - he's called Niven as if in tribute to the much-loved, rakish English actor but it's a bit cavalier, the character doesn't quite seem consistent and like his mother seems not quite fully rounded. The whole set up seems a MacGuffin for Atkinson's research - though the London paper is called the Evening Standard, surely it was the Evening News back then? - and many of the characters mere ciphers. It almost reads like a screenplay, where the actors can round out the characters themselves.
I continued to read it however because the prose was crisp and enjoyable and largely despite of or because there wasn't much jeopardy or anything - it's all written in that detached style that sums up 1920s culture - Noel Coward or the sitcom You Rang M'Lord - it's all a bit coy and superficial. You feel it might almost work better as a comedy, sort of Thoroughly Modern Millie which dealt with a simliar theme. Praise on the back cover says the book is 'As vividly filthy, populous, dangerous as anything described by Dickens' but it really isn't, that said it's not a slog like Dickens can be. But there are no paragraphs of great descriptive writing either, which seems to be a male thing, a sort of showing off. Still, as bedtime reading before you turn in, a couple of chapters or so, I enjoyed it because it didn't give me nightmares or bad, depressing dreams, save for the last 40 pages when events come to a head.
Unfortunately the murder mystery is tied up in a perfunctory, unconvincing 'will this do?' way which is borderline insulting, and along the way there are way too many coincidences to be plausible - I know London in the 20s was less populous than it is now, especially after the war, but the times people just happen to bump into friends by chance is too much, not to mention Atkinson's narrative trick of holding back important information about what some characters actually know, which turns repetitive... The finale sees a main protagonist behave in way that is wholly out of character and some of it really doesn't make sense even by its own standards. That said, it's 500 pages, I enjoyed it, and finished it, so that's something. It's just not nearly as juicily scurrilous, sexy, exciting or revelatory as it ought to be, however.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
More about John Gardner -
I cannot find my copy of "A Killer For A Song", the last Boysie Oakes novel. I know it's here somewhere, but I bought it about 50 years ago and have moved house a few times since then. I'll probably find it in the loft at the bottom of a box of Bond books with different covers, or likewise.
So, I decided to simply buy a copy from ebay until I saw the prices they wanted 😵. Since I know I definitely have a copy somewhere I'm reluctant to pay those prices, so I'm currently keeping an eye for it at a more reasonable price.
Meantime I've bought a copy of Gardner's "Hideaway" since @Silhouette Man mentioned it above and I'll read that when I finish "The Airline Pirates" if I haven't got the right book by then.
I take it that was a first edition, @Barbel? I've been holding off buying the UK first edition on eBay as it's very expensive even for an ordinary unsigned edition. I'll try to get it as soon as I can though as I want to complete my Boysie Oakes hardback collection. I'm trying to collect them all now before they go up in value any more! I've read that some of the Oakes novels had quite small print runs in hardback (I suspect some of the later novels moreso) so this may account for the inflated prices for the last one, A Killer for a Song.
Most, but not all. I know my own isn't, wherever it is.
Ah, I see. Are even paperback copies of it expensive online then? To be honest I wouldn't be surprised with the way things are going!
One was over £100!
That's a crazy price for just a paperback edition. You could get the first edition cheaper than that! It's madness. I think some sellers get carried away with the value they think some books are worth. I'd imagine that they don't sell too many copies at that hugely inflated price though! God loves a trier, I suppose, and there is one born every minute. Still...
As an update I finally bit the bullet and bought a first edition of John Gardner's A Killer for a Song from eBay yesterday. It's in the US so that makes it more pricey. Sadly the only available copies all seem to be in the US. It will be nice to have a complete set of the UK first editions of the Boysie Oakes novels though. It took a while to assemble but I got there! 🙂
Congratulations, I trust it will bring you pleasure! 🤩
Yes, they definitely will. And I managed to complete the set cheaper than this set from Adrian Harrington. I believe it was previously for sale at £695:
FOUNDER MEMBER John Gardner
I had the pleasure of reading this as a first edition recently sent to me by Shady Tree, for which many thanks.
Boysie Oakes continues to become more serious with each novel. Gardner frequently tells the reader how cowardly and unintelligent Boysie is, but his actions belie that as he deals with tough guys, handles tricky situations, and so on. This one is a very enjoyable romp with lots of puns and in-jokes, but what stuck out to me was how much this would be suited for a film directed by Lewis Gilbert with Ken Adam doing the production design. There’s an oil tanker which isn’t what it’s purported to be and a Saturn V rocket is central to the plot, which is bonkers in the best sense.
TRAITOR’S EXIT John Gardner
If “Founder Member” was YOLT the Eon film, then “Traitor’s Exit” is TSWLM the Fleming novel – not the one with the steel-toothed giant and stolen submarines but the one with the motel and the Canadian girl on a scooter. Not that there’s any similarity in plot or characters, the comparison being that in both books the author tells the story in first person through the eyes of a previously unknown character while the series hero plays a supporting part.
The narrator is one Rex Upsdale, a washed-up spy writer who might be taken as a cynical view of Gardner himself. The number of likenesses is clear to the reader, but Gardner’s sense of humour is very much to the front. Upsdale is very likeable and as with TSWLM seeing our usual hero through the eyes of a different character brings a fresh dimension to the story.
I’m deliberately not going into details of the plot for either of these books to avoid spoilers.
Looking forward to reading all of these Boysie Oakes titles. Now that my copy of 'A Killer For A Song' has arrived from a US retailer - see below - it's only 'Traitor's Exit' that I don't yet have as a hardback. (Looks as if 'Traitor's Exit' in hb is scarcely available and inordinately expensive.)
I must've bought my copy of A Killer for a Song right after you, @Shady Tree. I noticed someone had bought a copy as I knew there were three listed but only two were left when I looked. I then saw that one had sold. My copy was expensive too but I was just glad to complete my collection of the Boysie Oakes UK first editions. I can't wait for my copy to arrive.
Yup, I guess that was me! I hope yours arrives okay...
Thanks. Me too. 🙂
FOUR QUARTETS – T.S. Eliot (1944)
Possibly Eliot’s masterwork, four extended poems that comment in a highly personal manner on history, war and the purposes of time remembered, to come and now, all wrapped up with a healthy dose of religion. East Coker is the most famous, but it is Little Gidding, with its allusions to the English Civil War and a lack of religious and societal tolerance that resonates most today. Generally impenetrable unless you start to research every line and nuance of the text. Very well intentioned, but probably too intellectually challenging for the lay person. That sounds terribly superior, but this kind of poetry isn’t for the lazy or easy day reader. Eliot binds his poetry through tone and sound; there is almost no specific melodic rhyme or rhythm, no uniform stanzas, no metre. Occasionally, but way of abstraction he does exactly what you do not expect and becomes formal and structured; these moments usually come in the second section of each poem, when he is no longer speaking of those big subjects but creating a moment of calm before the intellectual storm.
Eliot’s reputation has suffered mightily since his death in 1965, usually because everyone only thinks about The Waste Land or Lloyd Webber’s Cats, and ignores his contributions to literary criticism and modernist poetry. Four Quartets is a giant achievement of modern British poetry and deserves revisiting, although perhaps one should have Wikipedia to hand to check every word in every line for its possible meaning(s).
THE HUMS OF POOH – A.A. Milne (1929)
Kid’s stuff.
A biography of Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, GCB (19 April 1757 – 23 January 1833).
What a remarkable life. Thirty-six years at sea, on 23 different ships - perhaps the most famous being HMS Indefatigable.
Highly recommended 🍻
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
This is a bit more low-brow...
The Protectors by Robert Miall
John Burke was a journey man author of thrillers, sci-fi and various television or cinema adaptations and spin offs. He was well-regarded at the start of his career, but seems to have taken a left turn in the 1960s when the adaptation game took over his writing. He was the man who wrote the multimillion selling novelisation of A Hard Day’s Night as well as a foray into Ian Fleming territory with a novelisation of the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I have no idea if Burke reproduced the songs in the novelisation or if he simply expanded on the Fleming original and matched it to the movie. Not sure I want to know on this reading…
The Protectors was an early seventies Gerry Anderson Production about an international trio of crimefighters loosely described as ‘bodyguards’. Robert Vaughn, Nyree Dawn Porter and Tony Anholt make up the American, British and French sections. Porter’s female operative is the widow of an Italian Count, so she is constantly introduced as the Contessa di Contini. Vaughn’s Harry Rule is the top man. Anholt’s Paul Buchet is a makeweight Q. The series was cheap looking and economical with the budget. It was also hopelessly constrained by only running for twenty-five minutes per episode [less once you took out the credits]. Character and plot exposition were as good as nil. I have seen a few episodes and while it isn’t terrible, the show isn’t terribly good either. The best thing is the theme tune, sung by Jack Jones. I understand it was the last show of its kind to run at that length; after this ITC ensured all detective / adventure / thriller series would run for the standard, and more manageable, 52-minutes. Odd that many shows of this ilk now run for double that length or an interminable 2 parts or even worse a whole six-episode run.
Back to John Burke.
Under the pseudonym Rober Miall, Burke wrote several ITC spin offs: two Jason King novels, two UFO novels, one for The Adventurer and this effort, a lacklustre affair if ever their was one. Miall draws together three episodes from the series, providing a broad overarching theme that was not originally present. To do this he provides linking scenes and dialogue not featured in the originals. I am not certain how much else of the dialogue has been invented for the purposes of the novel but I would suggest not a fait amount. Each segment takes about forty-five minutes to read, which probably equates to twenty or so minutes screen time.
The stories are Dennis Spooner’s The Bodyguards, Brian Clemens’s Disappearing Trick and Ralph Smart’s The Numbers Game. All stem from the first season of The Protectors. Part One sees Rule and the Contessa in London guarding a corpse. Part Two has the Contessa – who in this adaptation is a new recruit to the Protectors and is having to demonstrate her attributes to Harry Rule – being menaced by a homicidal rich kid in France. Part Three has the trio busting a Spanish drug gang. There is nothing of any interest in any of the stories baring the occasional fun turn of phrase. Like the television show the novel is a harmless product that entertains and is as forgotten as swiftly as the minutes pass watching it.
Not very good at all.