Random Paperbacks: The Moonraker Mutiny by Anthony Trew (Fontana, 1973)

Boy, talk about yr ‘tough guy literature’… I found this one at a charity donation stand in the foyer of a branch of Tescos in South West Wales recently, and couldn’t say no. It’s in terrible condition, effectively unreadable – looks as if it’s led a harder life than any paperback deserves (stashed next to the whisky and the chart books on somebody’s yacht, I’d like to think), but… that cover.

I think this one is up there with Three Day Alliance in my Awkwardly Staged Cover Photos Hall of Fame. Just imagine all the trouble they must have had to go to to recruit these two salty sea-dogs (a challenging assignment for the modelling agency), to mock up a background with a convincing porthole, to sort that chap on the right out with his string vest and fake tattoo, to find a prop rifle from somewhere…. at some point I would bet, some harried editorial assistant must have been heard to declare, “..remember the good old days when we’d just hire some nice man to paint a picture and pay him twenty quid?! Jesus wept!”

Faro Pulp Haul, Part #2:Germany.

Following on from our previous post, here are some German language crime pulps I picked up whilst in Faro last year.

(KriminalRoman / Ullstein Bucher, 1969)

Originally published in English, 1966.

No translation needed here, as “Cade” is the name of the protagonist. Quoth Wikipedia: “Cade was lucky. He was famous, wealthy, sought after, and his creative talent for photography set him in a class of his own. Success hadn't spoiled him. He remained generous and unselfish, a simple man with a brilliant talent, and a champion of the unfortunate and the persecuted.”

I love this iconic yellow and red “K” series design here. (I couldn’t help noticing a spinning rack of them in the background during a recent viewing of the Berlin-set ‘The Quiller Memorandum’ (1966).) Exceptionally cool design / illustration combo all round on this one, actually.

(Kelter, 1978)

Nice, nasty late ‘70s vibe on this German original, part of an ongoing “Mr Brooklyn” series that we might assume fall more into the ‘Executioner’-style action-pulp category than traditional detective/crime stuff. (More covers from the series – most of them exceptionally cool - can be seen here.)

Title translates as “The Snooper of New York”, and cover blurb possibly reads “A JOB FOR LIFE and Mike Callagan is tired of it”, or something along those lines.

(Bastei Lübbe, 1973)

Originally published in English as ‘The Flower Covered Corpse’ in 1969.

Another one of those wonderfully awkward paperback cover photo shoot moments to enjoy here (I should make a tag for them really). [UPDATE: done!]

The German title literally translates as “Flower-Child Not Murder”, so make what you will of that.

Random Paperbacks: A Woman in Spaceby Sara Cavanaugh(Ace/Stoneshire books, 1983)

When I added this early ‘80s romance paperback to my library, certain parties questioned my decision.

All I can do in response was to draw their attention to the cover photograph and back cover blurb, and to paraphrase Electric Wizard: you think you’re civilised, but you will never understand.

Research-wise, any chance I may have had of finding a brief history of the ‘Tiara’ series of books via google has been effectively obliterated by a popular children’s manga series of the same name, and the internet also gives us nada on ‘Sara Cavanaugh’ beyond a few cover scans and broad mockery of this novel, suggesting either a one-off house pseudonym or an unsolicited manuscript that got… well I hesitate to say “lucky”.

SF columnist & humourist David Langford obviously made his way through ‘A Woman in Space’ at some point however, as he picked out the following passage as part of a collection of sci-fi goofs & howlers:

“A few hours had passed since they had been pulled away from the moon. A few hours and millions of miles. The moon was no longer visible, not even as a star. The whole thing was so crazy, weird and far-out. It was as though they were floating in a giant vacuum.”

Random Paperbacks: All Night Stand by Thom Keyes (Mayflower/Dell, 1967)

Ah, we haven’t had any beatniks on this blog for a while, have we? Yeah, THE BEAT SCENE! Mercurial, untamed, straight from the fridge, da… hang on a minute, a pop group? That doesn’t sound like the sort of endeavour any self-respecting beatniks would get involved in. What year was this thing published again? 1967!? Oh my.

I don’t suppose young Thom Keyes had any aspirations to become the next Hemingway, but he must at least have thought he’d made a solid early entry in the inevitable paisley shirt / groupie rampage “rise and fall of a rock group” paperback sub-genre… and as such, we can only imagine the sheer level of face-palm he must have experienced when he saw what the design team at Mayflower/Dell did to it.

Still, the physics students and the pub stripper they roped in for the photo shoot look like they’re having fun. (Check the upside down painting in the background – because life in our society is, like, UPSIDE DOWN, man!)

Seemingly slightly better known for his SF work, Thom Keyes (1949-1995) is “mainly remembered as the writer of the ‘Space: 1999’ episode ‘The Taybor’”, it says here, and he also contributed to New Worlds.

In and of themselves, the sections of ‘All Night Stand’ I read prior to this post are no great shakes, but for a novel published before its author’s eighteenth birthday it’s a reasonably impressive achievement, I think it’s fair to say.

Random Paperbacks:The Inquisitor: Last Rites For The Vulture by Simon Quinn (Dell, 1975)

Until I randomly pulled this one off the shelf in a branch of Oxfam last weekend, I was entirely unfamiliar with Dell’s ‘Inquisitor’ series of books. Nonetheless, regular readers will appreciate that it took all of 0.5 seconds for me to decide that it was coming home with me, even if I had to fight someone for the privilege of ownership. (Thankfully I didn’t.)

Reading the back & interior cover blurb as I queued at the counter to pay made me all the more excited to get stuck into the extraordinary bit of gutter pulp lunacy I had apparently unearthed, but, I’m sad to report, a quick skim read on the bus home proved slightly underwhelming.

Despite the blatant horror / witch-smut come-ons of the cover and the papal evil-hunting nature of it’s protagonist, ‘Last Rites of the Vulture’ is a more or less generic globe-trotting, Bond-esque action adventure story, very much in line with other mid/late ‘70s ‘action’ series like the ‘Enforcer’ or ‘Destroyer’ books. There are plentiful exotic locales, daring crimes, gratuitous pop history info-dumps and cartoon tough guy antics... but very little hint of any supernatural/ or occult elements, insofar as I could tell. Oh well.

Then again though, it certainly has its moments. The following extract comes from chapter # 7:

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“She sat up while he pushed on the door. It didn’t occur to him that they could simply dive off the trunk. As soon as he did manage to shove the door open, fifty pounds of water rushed in, and a dark form seized his pants. Killy pulled the door tight and pulled his leg back as far as he could.

‘It’s a shark, isn’t it?’ he asked Alexandra with disgust.

‘Yes.’ She squinted into the water. ‘The whole place is full of them, especially in the cannery when they dump the fish tails. They’ve probably been circling us ever since we landed.’

‘Jesus Christ, sex on the brain, and a shark on my leg.’

‘You’re lucky, he’s a small one, push him out.’

‘You push him out.’

‘He’s your shark.’

‘Look, get the bottle. We didn’t lose the bottle, did we?’

She fished the tequila bottle from the back, carefully making sure the cap was tight.

‘Oh good’ – he applauded her – ‘we don’t want to lose any of that.’

The thing on his leg began wrestling with his pants. Its head came out of the water, showing a saucer-shaped mouth full of teeth and eyes on long gray bars that extended from the head.

‘Great, a hammerhead shark. How the hell do you push a hammerhead shark out a car door?’

‘Hit him between the eyes. That shouldn’t be so hard,’ she giggled.

He pulled his leg up. He hit his ankle first, but his second swing scored where Alexandra had suggested. As soon as his leg was free, Killy grabbed her and rolled over the seat in to the back of the car.

‘I thought you were going to throw him out,’ she complained.

‘He wants to come in, let him come in.’

‘Oh well, the tide’ll go out in the morning. We’re stuck here until then.’

‘We’re not stuck, I saved the bottle.’

She sighed, smiled, and opened her arms for him.”

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Shortly thereafter, Chapter # 9 begins with the sentence “He woke up still inside her.”.

There are no words.

A few seconds of googling reveals that ‘Simon Quinn’ was a pseudonym of American writer Martin Cruz Smith, who went on to slightly more legitimate acclaim after his novel ‘Gorky Park’ was published in 1981. Be warned: trying to square the inebriated, shark-punching mayhem outlined above with the photo on the author’s wikipedia page is quite a trip.

The Three Day Alliance by Howard R. Simpson (Ensign, 1975)

 From a distance, this might look the very essence of ‘70s retro-cool spy movie chic, but the closer one looks, the shoddier it gets. That one-piece, full-body knitted romper suit the girl seems to be wearing? That horribly forced, unnatural pose against the blank photo studio backdrop? And just take a good look at our super-spy himself - jesus, how many sit-com bank manager and Hammer bartender auditions did that guy fail before he was reduced to this? See the hatred in his eyes, and shudder.

Still, love those bright-yet-muted colours, and the simple-yet-elegant design, I suppose. Loved it enough to drop an astonishing *£3* on it in a Herne Hill vintage emporium recently, anyway.