Parker Progress Report: The Allison & Busby Editions, Part 1

So, I now have almost all of the Allison & Busby UK editions of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark's Parker novels, mostly in hardback but with a few paperbacks here and there. To recap: Allison & Busby began re-publishing the Parker novels – first published in the US in the sixties – in the 1980s in hardback. Often this was the first time the books had been available in hardback, which, along with their standardized and attractive new trade dress, made them highly collectible.

Thanks to the books' indicia, I can pretty much determine the order A&B published them in (or at least the ones before they changed the cover design; after that I'm less sure, as A&B stopped listing the previous novels at the start of each book in order of their – A&B's – publication; instead they mixed them up with various other books in their American Crime series), which, if you're remotely interested, wasn't the order they were originally published in the sixties. I'm still not entirely sure why A&B published them out of order; I know some of the reasoning was movie-related (i.e. to tie in with a new film release), but that doesn't explain all their choices. I could hazard a guess that perhaps some of the previous UK Coronet editions from the seventies were still in print, limiting A&B's options, but I couldn't say for sure.

Anyway. For anyone still reading, you have my condolences. No, I mean, for anyone still reading, here are the Allison & Busby Parker novels (some of them, anyway; note the 'Part 1' in the title. I'll get around to Part 2 some time. Maybe.), in order of publication, with scintillating notes to boot.













1) Slayground. Originally Parker #14, A&B kicked off their editions with this in 1984, to tie in with the (by all accounts rubbish) movie version of the book. As with all the A&B editions, the jacket design is by Mick Keates, about whom I know next to nothing, other than he did a fair bit of design work for A&B. But I do know his designs for A&B's Parker books, particularly the first eight they published, are rather striking. The first six of those eight used foil blocking on the (biiiiig) title and (little) illo on each cover. They might not be the most revolutionary cover designs, but with their flat colours and bold typography, they make these editions instantly recognizable. I like 'em. Slayground is set in a funfair, hence those little human targets on the cover. Neat, huh?

I picked up my copy of Slayground fairly cheap, but you'd be lucky to nab one for less than £30, and more like £40-£60. It's probably mid-range in terms of rarity – I've seen maybe ten or so for sale online. As with a lot of these A&B hardback editions (although less so with some of the paperbacks-of-hardbacks), most of the copies are in the States, as they were all distributed in the US as well as the UK, so there are less copies residing in the UK than you'd think.













2) The Rare Coin Score, 1984; originally Parker #9. This is the only one of the A&B first eight hardbacks I don't own. Instead I have a seventies Coronet paperback. So far as I can tell, all the copies for sale online are in the US. But don't you worry: I'll get one eventually. Again, this is mid-range rare. So, the question is, why did A&B decide to publish the seventh Parker novel second? You can understand them starting with Slayground because of the movie, but why not follow up with Point Blank, which spawned the best known film adaptation of all of them? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?













3) Point Blank, 1984; originally Parker #1 (duh). There are a few copies of this available online from the UK, around the £20-£30 mark, and a few more from the US. But it's a popular one, what with it being the first Parker, so copies don't hang around long. Note the slight change in trade dress: Richard Stark's name is promoted to the top of the cover, and we also get the "Donald E. Westlake writing as", to clear up any confusion. This book is brilliant, obviously. Read it. Although weirdly I think I might possibly prefer this one:













4) The Man with the Getaway Face, 1985; originally Parker #2. I think this is the most common of the A&B hardback editions – there are plenty of copies online from the UK and the US, starting around the £15 mark. Why that is I don't know, although it's possible A&B noted that sales on Point Blank were higher than the Parkers they'd previously published and upped the print run on The Man with the Getaway Face as a result. Pure conjecture on my part, but that would make sense. As I miiiiiight have just mentioned before, my copy of this lived in a library in Orkney for a large part of its life. I like to picture it sitting up there on a shelf, largely unread judging by the condition, all lonely, just waiting for me to track it down. God I'm weird. Anyway, Parker gets plastic surgery in this one, hence the face on the cover.













5) The Score, 1985; originally Parker #5. Hey! Allison & Busby published this one in the right order! Well done that publisher. Not quite as common as The Man with the Getaway Face, but there are still a good fifteen or so of 'em online, ranging from £20 to £50. I think they're all in the US though. I'm reading this one at the moment, so I'm not sure what the significance of the truck on the cover is. I do know the story follows Parker and eleven of his pals as they rob an entire town. Which, you have to admit, is a fantastic idea for a story.













6) The Split, 1985; originally Parker #7. This one's pretty rare. There's maybe four or five copies for sale online, so price-wise you're looking at around £40 and up. As noted previously, I had to get mine from the States. The story in this one follows the aftermath of an American football game heist, which is why that American football player's on the cover. You see what Mr. Keates did there? OK, it's obvious, but it works.













7) The Handle, 1985; originally Parker #8. Another rare one: you'd have to get one from America and it'd cost you at least £50-£60, probably more (I was lucky and found one in the UK for much less). I'm guessing A&B cut back their print runs again at this point. Also at this point we lose the foil blocking on the covers: it's just white on black, with no special treatment. Still a fab cover though. Although not as fab as this:













8) The Sour Lemon Score, 1985; originally Parker #12. This is the rarest of the lot. I've seen one copy for sale for about £60, but otherwise you're looking at well over £100. Again, no foil blocking on this, but it doesn't need it: I love that cracked design. Top marks that man Keates.

The Sour Lemon Score was the last of the A&B hardbacks in that style; thereafter the hardbacks looked more like this:













But that'll have to wait till Part 2, if I ever get round to it. Phew. And we're done! If you've made it this far, you deserve a prize. I need to go lie down now.

New Arrivals!

A couple more books turned up yesterday. Namely:













A US hardback first edition of Comeback. Published in 1997, Comeback was Richard Stark's first Parker novel in over twenty years, following the final book in the original Parker run, 1974's Butcher's Moon. I could've picked up a UK first hardback edition instead (and in fact I may still...), but I decided to get the US one, for three reasons. One is that the Robert Hale UK hardback didn't see light until 2001, which is four years after the US one; I don't know why that matters to me, but it does. (Actually, I probably do know why: I'm a nerd.) Another reason is I like the cover of the US edition, which I think is the only one of the later Parker US first editions to have a pictorial cover; subsequent ones went for a more typographical approach, along the lines of this:













the second 'new' Parker book. It's a design I'm not keen on, so I'll switch to the UK Robert Hale first editions after Comeback I think, which had illustrated covers. Should have one of those arriving soon, so I'll post a cover then. And the third reason is to do with symmetry. And I'll explain that one very soon...

And the other new arrival was this:













The 1985 Allison & Busby hardback edition of The Split, a.k.a. The Seventh, which, unsurprisingly, is the seventh Parker novel. This one I had to get from America; the only copy I could find in the UK was an ex-library book with one of the pages torn out. I don't mind ex-library books per se – I rather like my copy of The Man with the Getaway Face I got from Orkney Library – but I'd rather a book were complete.

And now I have The Split, I reckon it's about time for another Parker Progress Report, stuffed with lots of exciting information about Allison & Busby's publishing history with the Parker books. Exciting, that is, to no one but me. Let's do that in a separate post though.

Payback

A synchronous (or should that be serendipitous?) diversion last night: Payback was on telly. For those who don't know, Payback is the 1999 movie version of the first Parker novel, The Hunter/Point Blank, previously filmed as Point Blank in 1967. Infamously Payback was re-cut by the studio after director Brian Helgeland's version was deemed too dark; the director's cut later came out on DVD in the States (but not in the UK) and is supposed to be the better version. I still haven't seen that version; the one on telly last night was the studio version. And actually, watching it again, it held up better than I remembered.

A number of things struck me:

1) I'd forgotten the desaturated look of the film, which I rather liked (apparently this effect is removed in the director's cut).

2) I thought Mel Gibson made a pretty good Parker (or Porter, as he's called in the movie). He's too short, and he's a bit too flippant in some of the scenes, but generally he looks right and acts mean.

3) Having now read The Hunter, which I hadn't the first time I saw Payback, I was surprised by how close large parts of the film are to the novel. Sure, the movie diverges in places, but a lot of the novel is in there, and even the dialogue is often lifted right from the page. It's not a brilliant adaptation, but it's not too bad, and as a film it has its moments.

4) Mel Gibson smokes really well. Unlike a lot of movies and TV, you can really see/feel him draw the smoke in. And you can hear it in his voice.

5) That's yer lot.

Lawks a' mercy, missus, it's The List!

Well after last week's pathetic showing of one comic, which meant it wasn't even worth going to the comic shop, this week is looking... not that great either. There are only two definite buys for me:

Batman & Robin #11: Grant Morrison, Batman, a-yup.

Turf #1. This is the Jonathan Ross/Tommy Lee Edwards gangsters 'n' aliens comic book. From the previews I've seen it looks like Ross could do with an editor – some of those captions and word balloons are reeeeaally long – but it'll be interesting to wead Wossy's first comics effort.

There are a couple of other comics I might try: Avengers The Origin #1 is Joe Casey and Phil Noto's take on those original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby sixties Avengers comics, filling in the gaps between the panels; and Spider-Man Fever #1 marks Brendan McCarthy's return to comics, which should be colourful if nothing else.

I'm tired today, which is why this post might be a bit flat. Harumph.

And in a suitable coda

to the previous post, I just received a cancellation notice from Amazon for the "secret" Parker book I found. Turns out it was so secret the bookseller didn't actually have it.

Buying second hand books online

can be an unsettling, feverish experience. On the one hand, pretty much any book you care to mention will probably be available online somewhere, whether it's on Amazon, AbeBooks, Biblion, or countless other internet aggregators and dealers. On the other hand, having so much information at your fingertips is often bewildering. Quite apart from questions of cost (thanks to the interweb, old books may be more available than ever, but they can still be bloody expensive), condition (can you really trust whatever scant description of a book a dealer's bothered to offer?) and shipping (what if a book's only available overseas? Do you take the chance it'll make its way to you safely?), the sheer number of dealers online makes comparing and contrasting a logistical nightmare.

Take Amazon. You'd think that any dealer worth their salt would sell their books through the biggest online retailer. But you'd be wrong. There might be copies of a book you're looking for on Amazon, but there might also be further copies on AbeBooks that aren't listed on Amazon, despite the fact that Amazon now own AbeBooks. There might also be more copies on Biblion, or Alibris, or on some small bookshop's own website. Working out who's got what (and in the case of the non-Amazon aggregators like AbeBooks, if they even still have it; the listings on these websites don't always get updated once a book's sold), what they're selling it for, and where it is is time-consuming and frustrating. You could try BookFinder (which I've only just discovered; sigh), which aggregates results from loads of dealers, but I doubt even that will give you the whole picture.

But even simply looking on Amazon can be confusing. For instance, I've only recently discovered that there are "hidden" listings on Amazon – or at least hidden to me until I worked out they were there. When I've been searching for a book on Amazon, under the (hopefully, but not necessarily) correct edition of the book, I've been clicking straight to the "3 used" link under the title, which I've taken to mean there are only three second hand copies of the book available. But I've been missing a trick. Because if you click on the actual title of the book and go to its full listing, you might also find there are other copies available under "collectible". These don't always show up on the short listing, so unless you click on that edition's fill title listing, you'll miss them completely.

Which I have been. Until now. Luckily, with all the Allison & Busby Richard Stark/Parker novels I've been picking up, there's only one instance where I've seen a very slightly cheaper copy than the one I bought. But it's a close call on a couple of others. And I've just nabbed another A&B Parker on Amazon that I had no idea was there.

I guess I shouldn't really complain. Pre-internet, getting hold of these books would've been next to impossible. But a part of me slightly hankers after that more innocent time. Things were so much simpler then.

The Stark Cutaway

I've read four of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's Parker novels now (well, nearly; I haven't quite finished The Mourner yet), and there's a device that Westlake employs in each book, usually two-thirds or so into the story (although earlier in the first novel, Point Blank). Essentially he cuts away from Parker's story – the books aren't written in the first person, but they are largely told from Parker's perspective – and focuses instead on a different character (or characters), one he's introduced earlier in the book.

Point Blank contains the most celebrated example of this, where during Part Two we cut away to follow Mal, the Outfit man who's double-crossed Parker, and stay with Mal right up to the point Parker re-enters the story in a surprising fashion. (As an aside, and related to this earlier post, the 1984 Allison & Busby edition of the book slightly fluffs this reveal with an error, substituting a "when" for what had been a "saw". Well done again there, A&B proofreaders.) The Outfit, the third Parker novel, cuts away to follow multiple heists, while The Mourner (Parker #4) leaves Parker for dead before cutting away.

But my favourite cutaway so far, I think, is in The Man with the Getaway Face (Parker #2), and involves the unfortunate Stubbs. In its own way, the switch to Stubbs' story in Part Three is as surprising as the reappearance of Parker in Point Blank. Westlake lulls us into a false sense of security: the heist has gone well, the double-cross even better. And then the rug gets pulled out from underneath Parker's feet and everything goes to pot. End of Part Two. Then we get Part Three, and all of a sudden we're in a parallel detective tale, as we follow Stubbs on a woozy manhunt – woozy because Stubbs is the dumbest detective imaginable. A former Communist Party activist, repeated head injuries have left him in a severely befuddled state. But that only makes him and his adventure more entertaining, as he bumps into dead end after dead end and tries to keep himself on track.

And best of all it all leads up to a twist right at the end of the novel that brilliantly deflates the whole enterprise. So that's why I reckon The Man with the Getwaway Face has the best Stark Cutaway (so far, anyway).

The Black Ice Score

Another Parker novel turned up yesterday:














The Allison & Busby 1986 paperback of the eleventh Parker novel, The Black Ice Score. I did think I might get the hardback of this one for my recent birthday, but some other bugger bought the copy I'd identified before it could be bought for me. Never mind – this paperback'll do just fine.

So, that leaves three Parker novels from the first run I don't have in any edition: The Split, Plunder Squad, and Butcher's Moon. And I should have news on at least one of those soon...

I'm halfway through reading Parker #4, The Mourner, which is a little different to the previous books. There's a character in it, Menlo, who seems more like a character from a spy novel than Stark's usual hard-bitten cast. But the writing's as poetically matter-of-fact as ever, with lots of those lovely economical sentences, often broken at a rightangle halfway through by a comma, almost like really good song lyrics. I should probably write something about the previous Parker, The Outfit, at some point, but maybe I'll leave that till I've watched the movie, and then compare the two.

Deadly Edge/The Damsel/The Glass Cell

A bumper delivery today – three books, all with their own little stories (as well as the stories inside the actual books that is; oh you know what I mean).

First up, we have this:













The 1990 Allison & Busby paperback edition of the thirteenth Parker novel, Deadly Edge (originally published in the US in 1971). Take a good look at that cover. Why? Two reasons. The first is that, as of now, so far as I can tell, there are no copies of this particular edition for sale online anywhere. There were two copies available on Amazon, and therein lies the tale: this being a later Parker novel, I figured I'd collect the earlier books in the series first (in Allison & Busby editions, as noted many, many times before) and come back and pick up one of those two paperback copies of Deadly Edge down the line. (I also wasn't sure exactly which edition the two listings were; I think the publication date in both cases was given by Amazon as 1992, which, according to Fantastic Fiction – often the only decent online guide to particular editions of books – would've made them Atlantic Large Print editions, and therefore of much less interest to me. Yes, I know, I'm sad. I think we've established that already.)

But of course I forgot the golden rule: if a book is for sale online, it's for sale online, i.e. anyone can buy the bugger. And over the weekend, whilst lazily checking Amazon, I noticed that one of the copies had gone. And it was the one I had my eye on. Eek! So I put in an order for the other one sharpish, even though I wasn't sure which edition it was and the only clue to condition were the words "some creasing". Gulp. Luckily, it's fine – it's the right edition, and the creasing's really minimal, with just a few stains to the page edges.

As for the second reason for taking a good look at the cover... Well. Never having seen the cover before (there are no scans online), as soon as I had the book in my hands I realised there was something familiar about it. A quick google later, I understood why: Allison & Busby used the same cover illustration (that angular, expressionistic painting by Stephen Hall) for their 1997 Parker Omnibus Vol. 1. Regardez-vous:













Fascinating stuff, eh? Anyway, Fantastic Fiction reckon that A&B published a hardback of Deadly Edge two years after this paperback in 1992. I can't find any kind of record for that online, but even if they did, this paperback predates it, so... actually I'm not sure what my point here is. Let's move on.

So what else was in today's bumper delivery? Why, since you ask, there was also this:













The 1968 first UK edition of Richard Stark's The Damsel, published by Hodder & Stoughton (originally published in the US in 1967 by Macmillan), and sporting a lovely, rather elegant jacket designed by Michael Dempsey. Now, regular reader (hello, Martin, and welcome back from Japan) might possibly recall my having banged on about the Parker novels at length on this blog (juuuuust possibly...), but what I haven't mentioned before is that there's a parallel series of Stark novels, set in the same universe as the Parker books, and starring an occasional accomplice of Parker's: Alan Grofield. Grofield first pops up in The Score (which I haven't read yet), the fifth Parker novel (originally published 1964), then again in The Handle (Parker #8, 1966) before spinning off into his own series of four books, of which The Damsel is the first. Apparently they're lighter in tone than the Parker books, so it'll be interesting to read this one.

(For the record, the other three Grofield novels are The Dame (1969), The Blackbird (also 1969) and Lemons Never Lie (1971). He also appears in two further Parker books: Slayground (1969) – which crosses over with The Blackbird – and Butcher's Moon (1974).)

The nice man who sold me The Damsel must've only just put it online – he told me he'd just picked up slightly better condition copies of that and the other book I bought off him (which I'll come to in a moment, although I've just realised that this sodding post is approaching a fairly epic length now) for his own collection, which is why he was selling those two. At any rate I know there aren't any other copies of this edition of The Damsel for sale online in the UK. Bully for me.

And so we finally reach the third book in the bumper delivery – I'm bloody exhausted now – which is this:













My god! It's not a Parker book! No, it's my other obsession: Patricia Highsmith, and a 1965 first UK edition of The Glass Cell. I noticed the nice man who had The Damsel for sale also had a copy of this for sale, for four quid. It's ex-library, but not in too bad a shape considering. A little grubby, but you can't really complain at that price. When I first started collecting Highsmith UK firsts, this was one of the first ones I saw in a bookshop, in Cecil Court in London. It looked like a good read – I think it's about a guy in prison, which is a bit different for Highsmith, and also who doesn't like a good jail tale? – but it was too expensive, so despite fondling it on a number of visits to the shop, I never bought it.

But now I have it. So thank you to the nice man who sold me this and The Damsel – a kindred spirit by the sounds of it (he too collects both Stark and Highsmith; funny how we're both attracted to novels featuring amoral sociopaths...). And with that, this post is at an end. Sing hosanna.

News: The Outfit Next for Darwyn Cooke

Look at this, some proper news for once. Wonders will never cease. To wit: comics publisher IDW have announced that the next Richard Stark/Parker graphic novel adaptation from Darwyn Cooke (he of DC's The New Frontier fame, and various splendid Batman/Catwoman comics) will be... The Outfit. Which means that, having adapted the first Parker novel, The Hunter/Point Blank, Cooke is skipping to the third, bypassing The Man with the Getaway Face.

Ah, except he isn't, because part of that announcement is the news that seemingly The Man with the Getaway Face is being incorporated into The Outfit by Cooke (in a rather truncated form I imagine), and will also be released as a standalone chapter in an oversized comic book in July. Which is all rather exciting. If a little confusing. Anyway, here's a peek at the cover to the comic:














Woo, and indeed, hoo.

Giving Back to the Community

It's nice to be able to do one's bit for the town where one lives, er, in. This post wot I did about Lewes bookshops currently resides on the first page of hits when you google "Lewes bookshops". It's true what they say: it feels good to give as well as receive. Ooer. Mind you, anyone who reads that post might be slightly surprised by the content...