Well, I reckon it's about bleedin' time I pulled me bleedin' finger out and posted something at The Violent World of Parker, yeah? I mean, it's not like I've exactly been prolific on Existential Ennui of late, but at VWoP I haven't posted anything since October of last year. (I suppose I do have the excuse of a work-related upheaval at the tail end of 2014 and into 2015, but that's only going to get me so far as a defence.) I have, however, still been (sporadically) collecting Donald E. Westlake books, with the consequence that I've built up a bit of a backlog of Westlake Scores. Case in point:
God Save the Mark, first published in hardback in the UK by Michael Joseph in 1968 (the year after the US Random House edition). The fourth of Westlake's comical 'capers' (the preceding three being 1965's The Fugitive Pigeon, 1966's The Busy Body and 1966's The Spy in the Ointment), God Save the Mark is a curious entry in Westlake's British publishing backlist in that it was the only one of his books to be published in the UK by Michael Joseph. Up to this point his principal British publisher had been T. V. Boardman (who issued all eight of the prior novels penned under his own name in hardback in the UK); after this point his principal British publisher would be Hodder & Stoughton (heralded by Hodder's paperback imprint, Coronet, picking up the rights to the Richard Stark-written Parker novels in 1967 with Point Blank). But for one book, Westlake's principal British publisher was Michael Joseph, making Westlake a very brief stablemate of, among others, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, Ira Levin, John Wyndham, Adam Diment and Len Deighton (whose Only When I Larf is advertised on the back cover of God Save the Mark).
Why Joseph only published the one Westlake I couldn't say, but the transitory partnership did at least produce rather a nice dust jacket – not as striking perhaps as Denis McLoughlin's ones for Westlake's Boardman-published books, but certainly better than anything Hodder would come up with. The jacket design is credited to Carol Smith, about whom I can establish virtually nothing other than she possibly designed the cover for the 1965 Viking Press edition of Michael Faraday's The Chemical History of a Candle (originally published in 1861), bizarrely enough; but I've added her simple, stylishly typographical God Save the Mark wrapper to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s nonetheless.
I've yet to read the novel itself, so I'm afraid I can't offer a review, but anyone wishing to read such a thing can always head over to The Westlake Review, which continues to do a sterling job in reviewing Westlake's oeuvre at length (sometimes extreme length). But I have read, and so can review, the next Westlake Score I'll be unveiling: the only one of those aforementioned Boardman-published Westlake novels that's heretofore been missing from my collection.
I've been a fan of Westlake's comic caper novels since the Sixties. They're always clever and original.
ReplyDeleteAh, so this is where all those hits for that old review of mine have been coming from.
ReplyDeleteI rather like that cover as well.
One man's 'extreme length' is another's 'due diligence', I always say. ;)
You can find my review here: http://kevintipplescorner.blogspot.com/2012/02/ffb-review-god-save-mark-by-donald.html
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