Comics Novelisations & Tie-Ins part 4

For previous posts, follow this link.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA

Original Novels

Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant. New York, Pocket Books, Feb 2001.
Wonder Woman: Mythos by Carol Lay. New York, Pocket Books, Jan 2003.
The Flash: Stop Motion by Mark Schultz. New York, Pocket Books, Mar 2004.
JLA: Exterminators by Christopher Golden. New York, Pocket Books, Jul 2004.
Green Lantern: Hero's Quest by Dennis O'Neil. New York, Pocket Books, Apr 2005.
Superman: The Never-Ending Battle by Roger Stern. New York, Pocket Books, Jun 2005.

LUCK OF THE LEGION

Original Novels

Luck of the Legion by Geoffrey Bond. London, Hulton Press, 1953.
Sergeant Luck Takes Over by Geoffrey Bond. London, Hulton Press, 1954.
Carry On Sergeant Luck by Geoffrey Bond. London, Hulton Press, 1956.
Luck of the Legion's Secret Mission by Geoffrey Bond. London, Hulton Press, 1956.
Luck of the Legion's Desert Adventure by Geoffrey Bond. London, Hulton Press, 1958.
The Return of Sergeant Luck by Geoffrey Bond. London, Max Parrish, 1964.

MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN

Movie Novelisation

Mandrake the Magician by Howard Ashman. New York, Ace Books, 1979.

MARSHAL LAW

Original Stories

The Day of the Dead by Pat Mills, illus. Kevin O'Neill. London, Titan, Mar 2004.
Origins by Pat Mills, illus. Kevin O'Neill (contains: "The Day of the Dead", "Cloak of Evil"). London, Titan, 2007.

MARVEL SUPER HEROES ADVENTURE GAMEBOOK

Note: Series of original Plot-your-own Adventure titles. Covers can be found under the individual characters but I'm listing the series here as the UK numbering differed from the US series.

US series (published by TSR Hobbies)
1 The Amazing Spider-Man: City in Darkness by Jeff Grubb. Sep 1986.
2 Captain America: Rocket’s Red Glare by Kate Novack. 1986.
3 Wolverine: Night of the Wolverine by Jerry Epperson & James M. Ward. Mar 1987.
4 Doctor Strange: Through Six Dimensions by Allen Varney. Apr 1987.
5 The Thing: One Thing After Another by Warren Spector. Jul 1987.
6 The Uncanny X-Men: An X-Cellent Death by Kate Novack. Nov 1987.
7 The Amazing Spider-Man: As the World Burns by Peter David. Feb 1988.
8 Daredevil: Guilt by Association by Matthew J. Costello. Feb 1988.

UK series (published by Puffin)
1 The Amazing Spider-Man: City in Darkness by Jeff Grubb. Sep 1987.
2 Captain America: Rocket’s Red Glare by Kate Novack. Sep 1987.
3 Doctor Strange: Through Six Dimensions by Allen Varney. Apr 1988.
4 Wolverine: Night of the Wolverine by Jerry Epperson & James M. Ward. Feb 1989.
5 The Thing: One Thing After Another by Warren Spector. Feb 1989.
6 The Amazing Spider-Man: As the World Burns by Peter David. Jun 1989.
7 The Uncanny X-Men: An X-Cellent Death by Kate Novack. Jun 1989.

THE MASK

Movie Novelisation

The Mask by Steve Perry. New York, Bantam, Aug 1994; London, Boxtree, Aug 1994.

MODESTY BLAISE

Note: the Modesty Blaise novels have gone through countless editions and only one edition of each title is shown here. For a fuller collection of covers, see here.

Original Novels (all by Peter O’Donnell)

Modesty Blaise. London, Souvenir Press, 1965; New York, Doubleday, 1965.
Sabre-Tooth. London, Souvenir Press, 1966; New York, Doubleday, 1966.
I, Lucifer. London, Souvenir Press, 1967; New York, Doubleday, 1967.
A Taste for Death. London, Souvenir Press, 1969; New York, Doubleday, 1969.
The Impossible Virgin. London, Pan, 1971; New York, Doubleday, 1971.
Pieces of Modesty (collection). London, Pan, 1972; New York, Mysterious Press, 1986.
The Silver Mistress. London, Souvenir Press, 1973; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Archival, 1982.
Last Day in Limbo. London, Souvenir Press, 1976; New York, Mysterious Press, 1985.
Dragon’s Claw. London, Souvenir Press, 1978; New York, Mysterious Press, 1985.
The Xanadu Talisman. London, Souvenir Press, 1981; New York, Mysterious Press, 1984.
The Night of Morningstar. London, Souvenir Press, 1982; New York, Mysterious Press, 1987.
Dead Man’s Handle. London, Souvenir Press, 1985; New York, Mysterious Press, 1986.
Cobra Trap (collection). London, Souvenir Press, 1996.

Tyrone C. Barr

Split Worlds by Tyrone C. Barr (Digit Books D248, Apr 1959) Cover by C. Stewart.

The red flash disappeared as quickly as it had come and became as that on the right, a mushroom of coloured cloud. Dick Adams's first thought was that a fire had broken out simultaneously in New York, perhaps, and somewhere near the Baltic. Even as the thought occurred to him, however, there were several similar happenings in Britain, France, Spain, in the Atlantic itself, and between Norway and Sweden. Then Derek came in to report.
__'Bombing in progress,' he said in an agitated, frightened voice.
__Dick Adams's heart sank. His first impulse was to descend at once, to get down there and find out what the hell it was all about.

__Here is science fiction at its most amazing!
__Nine men and five women go up in an experimental Space Ship. Whilst they are away from Earth, a war breaks out, H-bombs being used, and the Earth goes up in flames.
__The members of the party are isolated in space... the only survivors of a global holocaust.
__The rivalries and conflicts that result between them, largely due to the uneven numbers of the sexes, make dramatic reading indeed!

Split World by Tyrone C. Barr (Digit Books R563, Feb 1962)

A mixed group of fourteen people are stranded on the Wheorld—"she is in fact just what you thought she was, a giant wheel"—when the world's powers destroy each other.

The small surviving population includes five women: "Every ship will carry them. The jobs they're wanted for are jobs for women—earth contact, secretary, cook, nurse and stewardess," the professor Trevor Wellis tells pilot Dick Adams, although the news isn't greeted to warmly. "Don't tell me our armies of the future are going into battle with a lot of screeching females at their elbow?".

When nuclear war breaks out, the inhabitants of the Wheorld quickly degenerate into petty bickering. Two years later, the "sulphuric-like" smoke clears over the planet and they find that it has tilted on its axis. The women are mostly cooped up together leaving a crew of randy men to play cards and discuss who they fancy (except the chaplain assigned to the Wheorld who spends his time comparing Christianity and Islam). Another two years pass and tensions are growing: some of the men mutiny, believing that Adams is running a private harem. The mutiny is soon quelled.

More years pass. Almost out of food, Adams decides to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and plans have to be made for a possible future. Adams introduces a No Marriage law and there is much philosophising over the notions of love and marriage. Back on Earth they find food supplies in the shape of giant, clawless lobsters. With shelters built, the small community begins, naturally, to pair off and the No Marriage ruling is dropped when one of the girls falls pregnant.

The ending is surprisingly dark as one of the crew, and then a second, is murdered. In fact, Split World is quite a surprising book—although not wholly in a good way: clearly, the initial set-up (five women, nine men) is deliberately designed to create tensions and the book eschews action for discussions about love and marriage. Potentially intriguing, except that all the sexual barriers broken in the 1960s are still firmly in place in this late 1950s novel and for the most part the attitudes towards women of fifty years ago are on show—the women stay in their quarters while the men discuss what should be done with them. The only twist is that the character through whose experiences most of the story is told is the first to be killed and one of the female characters, Martha, is one of the strongest in the book.

However, the book doesn't live up to the hype offered in an American edition (The Last 14, Chariot Books, 1960), where Barr was described as "the new British Science Fiction discovery" and the book as "a brilliant novel by a writer destined to join the ranks of the greats" comparable with On the Beach (Nevil Shute) and The High and the Mighty (Ernest K. Gann).

The Last 14 by Tyrone C. Barr (Chariot Books CB150, 1960).

Interestingly, the first edition was © Tyrone C. Barr, rather an oddity with Brown Watson/Digit Books, adjusted to © Brown Watson in the second edition. It would be interesting to know what the copyright notice in the US edition said.

Ben-Hur part 20

(* Ben-Hur artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Comic Cuts - 27 November

For me the good news is that I've broken the back of the artwork for Eagles Over the Western Front. Volume 1 is done and I should have volume 2 finished in a few days. Of course, when I say finished, I don't mean finished; I mean I have a set of master pages, cleaned, cropped, title panels and lettering all tidied up, original artwork incorporated (25% of the two books are scanned from original art) and ready for the next step. I haven't even started writing the introductions and there are other trifling tasks still to do, like designing covers...

But I'm getting there!

Which is good because we're already planning the next couple of Book Palace titles, which will include the Thriller Comics Index, another project that seems to have been a long time coming.

When I did my little round-up of releases last week, I forgot to include the latest Big Finish Judge Dredd Crime Chronicles audio adventure. Blood Will Tell, written by James Swallow, stars Toby Longworth as Dredd and Paul David-Gough as Garris Hale, an old foe of Dredd's condemned to the radioactive wilderness of the Cursed Earth. Now he's back in Mega-City1 and possesses a secret that could plunge the entire city into anarchy and chaos. John Ainsworth directs and the story runs for around an hour.

And I note that Amazon are now shipping copies of Charley's War: Underground and Over the Top.

Talking of Titan Books, they've just released the first issue of Tank Girl: Skidmarks, a 4-issue, monthly mini-series, revised ("now with added swearing") and re-coloured from its Judge Dredd Megazine appearance. Shoot me down in flames if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first actual honest-to-god American-sized monthly comic Titan have published since the heady days of Eagle Comics in the early 1980s? I know they've reprinted loads of US comics in graphic novel form and rebranded many hundreds more, and they run original comic strips in their magazines (and I emphasise magazines), but this is their first comicbook-sized comic in 25 years!

Three years ago I tried to discover what I could about artist Racey Helps without a huge amount of success, although we got some interesting and useful comments. Three years on and he has his own dedicated website, run by his family. I'm told that there has been some attempts made to get some of his work back into print. No news yet, but the family have recently put together five cards from never-before-seen original artwork. "At the present time we can offer five different greetings cards. Four are blank inside to enable a personal message to be inserted, one of which has a Christmas theme, and the other also has a Christmas theme with a seasonal greeting inside. We have also printed 100 only perpetual calendars and a selection of digital prints on canvas." You can find more details here.

Something I don't often mention is that I'm always tinkering with cover galleries that I've posted in the past and add to them whenever I can. Most recently I've added three images to the James Blish and four to Gavin Lyall. Above is the Chris Foss cover for The Seedling Stars which I'm particularly happy to have found as it's one of the first SF books I bought... and what made me want it was the cover. It also contains one of Blish's finest stories, "Surface Tension", but I didn't know that when I was gawping at the cover in Clarke's bookshop thirty-five years ago. Happy days!

Ben-Hur comes to an end tomorrow, so I'll have to think about what to run next. During next week we'll also have the usual recent releases and coming attractions columns, another "mysteries that have me mystified" column and whatever else I can cram into a 24-hour day.

(* Our column header is a page of original artwork from "Eagles Over the Western Front" drawn by Bill Lacey; a big Thank You to Geoff West of The Book Palace for the loan. "Eagles" is © Look and Learn Ltd. )

Robert Ayton

An interesting query arrives from Rupert Ayton, nephew of Eagle artist Robert Ayton: he's in the process of compiling a biography and has found some sketches amongst his uncle's work that he can't identify. Below I've compiled as best a listing of his illustrated books as I can, but perhaps an Ayton fan with copies can identify the sketches here. They have the feel of book illustrations... perhaps for the historical books he illustrated for Oxford University Press in the early 1980s?

PUBLICATIONS

Illustrated Books
The Story of Flight by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1960.
Great Inventions by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1961.
Railways by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1961.
Ships by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1961.
The Story of the Motor Car by David Carey. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1962.
The Ladybird Book of the Weather by F. E. Newing & Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1962.
The Story of Houses and Homes by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1963.
The Story of Clothes and Costumes by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1964.
The Story of Churches and Cathedrals by Richard Bowood. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1964.
The Night Sky by Mary T. Bruck. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1965.
The First Ladybird Key Words Picture Dictionary by J. McNally. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1965.
The Story of Our Rocks and Minerals by Allen White. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1966.
The Ladybird Book of Toys and Games to Make by James Webster. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1966.
A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments by Ann Rees. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1966.
A Ladybird Book of Your Body by David Scott-Daniell. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1967.
The Story of Oil by W. D. Siddle. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1968.
The Story of Lighthouses, Lightships and Lifeboats by Olwen Reed. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1968.
The Story of Radio by F. G. Goodall. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1968.
Tricks and Magic by James Webster. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1969.
The Story of Printing by David Carey. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1970.
The Story of Furniture by Edmund Hunter. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1971.
The Story of Arms and Armour by Edmund Hunter. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1971.
The Story of Nuclear Power by E. H. Childs. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1972.
The Story of Medicine by Edmund Hunter. Loughborough, Wills & Hepworth (Ladybird), 1972.
Prehistoric Animals and Fossils by Michael Smith. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1973.
The Stars and Their Legends by Roy Worvill. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1973.
A First Book of Aesop's Fables retold by Marie Stuart. Loughhborough, Ladybird Books, 1974.
A Second Book of Aesop's Fables retold by Marie Stuart. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1974.
Aesop's Fables retold by Marie Stuart (omnibus; contains: A First Book of Aesop's Fables and A Second Book of Aesop's Fables). Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1975; revised with text by Audrey Daly, Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1983.
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp by Marie Stuart. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1975.
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves retold by Marie Stuart. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1975.
Famous Legends Book 1: Theseus and the Minotaur [and] Perseus and the Gorgon's Head by J. D. M. Preshous. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1975.
Famous Legends Book 2: The Labours of Heracles [and] Jason and the Golden Fleece by J. D. M. Preshous. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1975.
Aladdin [and] Ali Baba retold by Marie Stuart (omnibus; contains: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1976.
Tales of King Arthur: The Deeds of the Nameless Knight by Demond Dunkerley. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1977.
Tales of King Arthur: The Knights of the Golden Falcon by Demond Dunkerley. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1977.
Tales of King Arthur: Sir Lancelot of the Lake by Demond Dunkerley. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1977.
Tales of King Arthur: Mysteries of Merlin by Demond Dunkerley. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1977.
Talkabout Holidays by Margaret West; illus. with Martin Aitchison. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1977.
Great Civilisations: The Aztecs by Brenda Ralph Lewis. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1978.
Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals by Graham Welfare (adapts earlier titles Dinosaurs by Colin Douglas and Prehistoric Animals and Fossils by Michael Smith); illus. with Bernard Robinson. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1978.
The Ladybird Colouring Book of Soldiers and Castles, illus. with Frank Humphris. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1978.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, retold by Fran Hunia. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1978.
Read It Yourself: William Tell retold by Fran Hunia. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1979.
The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Anderson, retold by Vera Southgate. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1979; revised text by Nicola Baxter. Ladybird Books, 1993.
The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids by the Brothers Grimm, retold by Vera Southgate. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1979.
Beauty and the Beast retold by Vera Southgate. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1980; revised text by Audrey Daly, Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1993.
Oxford Junior Readers series by Mike Samuda, illus. with others. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980-81.
Junior Science: Air by John Paull. Loughborough, Ladybird Books, 1982.
Stories From History Book 1 by David Oakden. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982.
Stories From History Book 2 by David Oakden. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982.

Ben-Hur part 19

(* Ben-Hur artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Ben-Hur part 18

(* Ben-Hur artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Donald Cresswell

Here's another of my "mysteries that have me mystified" columns: Donald Cresswell was a prolific writer of crime novels under the pen-name Ross Angel in the 1950-54 period, writing primarily for Scion Ltd., who had a top-flight range of gangster writers (Vic Hanson, Dail Ambler, Bevis Winter, Michael Barnes). I'm pretty sure Cresswell, who was writing a book a month for Scion, used other pen-names or had his work tucked away under house names (created by the company and used by a number of different authors). Pierre Cresson was a Cresswell pen-name; he definitely also wrote at least one novel under the Nat Karta house name and I have a notion he may have also written as Hans Vogel and Bram Casson.

So, a prolific writer. But come the collapse of the paperback market in early 1954 he disappears as a novelist. A big surprise was to find him tucked away in the pages of Tarzan Adventures, the comic, a few months later. Tarzan is probably best-remembered as being the title that young Mike Moorcock took over editing in 1957, but Cresswell's handful of tales—three in all—predate that, appearing between July and September 1954.

After that, nothing. The appearance in Tarzan makes me think that he was looking for new markets for his writing... but where did he go? Maybe the romance market where he was disguised under a female pen-name, or the anonymous world of D. C. Thomson's many magazines.

So there are a number of mysteries here: for starters, I've never been able to find out anything about Cresswell—he seems to have left no trace at all; I'm sure there are novels that he wrote that have never been identified as his work; and what happened to him after the collapse of the paperback market?

From the evidence of the couple of Ross Angel novels I have, he was a reasonably slick writer of gangster yarns. And with at least thirty-two novels under his belt, one wouldn't expect him to quit writing. But despite many, many hours spent looking, I cannot find a single trace of him.

PUBLICATIONS

Novels as Ross Angel
Tomorrow—the Chair. London, Scion, 1950.
Dead Easy. London, Scion, Jun 1950.
KO for Keeps. London, Scion, Oct 1950.
Over My Dead Body. London, Scion, Oct 1950.
Smile Baby—Smile. London, Scion, 1951.
Hot Ice. London, Scion, Mar 1951.
Excuse My Gun. London, Scion, Mar 1951.
I’ll Fry Yet!. London, Scion, Mar 1951.
It’s Murder She Says. London, Scion, Apr 1951.
Bullet Proof. London, Scion, Jul 1951.
Mister Forty-Five. London, Scion, Jul 1951.
Drop That Gun!. London, Scion, Aug 1951.
Let’s Sort This Out. London, Scion, Aug 1951.
So-Long, Johnny!. London, Scion, Sep 1951.
Lugar Lullaby. London, Scion, Oct 1951.
To Sleep No More. London, Scion, Nov 1951.
Give Me a Gun. London, Scion, Jan 1952.
Get Out and Stay Out. London, Scion, Mar 1952.
It’s All Yours. London, Scion, Mar 1952.
You Don’t Die Twice. London, Scion, Mar 1952.
The Dame Came Late. London, Scion, Aug 1952.
Live Till You Die. London, Scion, Aug 1952.
Jail Bait!. London, Milestone, Dec 1952.
Call Me Sometime. London, Scion, Jan 1953.
Dame Trouble There (by Pierre Cresson, in English by Ross Angel). London, Scion, Feb 1953.
Dames Don’t Dictate. London, Scion, Feb 1953.
One-Way Trip. London, Scion, Apr 1953.
Voice of Vice. London, Scion, Oct 1953.
No Percentage in Death. London, Scion, Nov 1953.
Misguided Angel. London, Scion, Jan 1954.
Reckless. London, Scion, Feb 1954.

Ben-Hur part 17

(* Ben-Hur artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Paperback Cover Cavalcade 7

Into the Darkness by A. G. C. Clarke (Digit Books R550, 1961)

One very hot day, we had had a bathe in the harbour to cool ourselves. As we were dressing, on the concrete hard, an unusual sound from the sky made us both look up.
__At first it was difficult to see anything. Then I noticed a small, brilliant silver flash, then another, and yet another, and the humming sound which had first attracted us became louder.
__The heavens seemed to be filling with bright silver discs, rather like the old "half crowns" in my father's collection. They grew larger as we watched, and their numbers rapidly multiplied.
__The men coming in from the wheat-fields stared up in amazement. Then, as the flying discs descended, they ran in all directions, shouting to us: "Take cover! It's an invasion."

Erroneously credited to A. G. C. Clarke on the cover and title page, the brief introduction by the author is signed Alfred C. G. Clarke (note the middle initials changing place). Such a combination of names and initials should be unique, one would think, but there were two A. C. G. Clarke's born two years apart in 1912 and 1914.

I believe our author is Alfred Charles George Clarke, born in Southampton on 6 March 1912. Through the phone book I've traced various addresses: 22 Cobbett Road, Bitterne Park, Southampton [1960/72], 60a Pentire Avenue, Shirley, Southampton [1975/81], then 25 Kenson Gardens, Sholing, Southampton [1982]. He was married to Margaret Campbell in 1934 and his death registered in Winchester, Hampshire, in June 2002.

The only clue the book above offers is that the introduction claims that the story came to the author when he was lying in a hospital bed in Tripoli, North Africa, during the latter part of 1944. Perhaps it is only part of the story, but it has the ring of autobiography to it. It's also worth noting that the introduction is dated January 1957, yet the novel was not published until 1961. A second SF novel, The Mind Master, followed from Digit in 1962. Beyond the Grave (Chard, Somerset, Avon Books), a 32-page booklet is Clarke's only other known work. He would appear to have been a part-time writer, his main occupation was as a road haulage contractor, being a Director of Clarke Bros. (Southampton) Ltd., a business he ran with his brother, Frederick J. Clarke until 1969; he was subsequently Secretary of the G. P. Trailer and Engineering Company Ltd. until 1975.

Martian Enterprise by Clifford C. Reed (Digit R638, 1963)

A violent group of renegade convicts escape from Earth's penal colony and capture a space-ship. They land by chance on a distant planet and found a new life there.
__A hundred and thirty years soon pass and their descendants fight their last battle against each other for the chance to once again ride the star lanes back to Earth.
__A gripping and action-packed novel, full of the ingredients we expect from modern science-fiction.

...and actually not such a bad book in comparison with many Digit titles from British authors. Like Ken Bulmer, F. G. Rayer and Lan Wright, Clifford C. Reed was a regular contributor to New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures, with 15 stories between 1958 and 1965, although his first appearance was in Authentic SF in November 1954 with "Jean—Gene—Jeanne" and another early sale was to Nebula.

Clifford Cecil Reed was born in Durban, South Africa, on 13 May 1911 and worked in a variety of jobs: civil servant, brush salesman, storekeeper, school teacher and cashier. He served with the South African artillery in World War 2 and immigrated to the UK with his wife (Dorothy Mary) and son (Jeremy Clifford) in 1950. Here he worked for an engineering firm. His interest in science fiction was fed by Wells, Doyle, Kipling, classical mythology and American pulps, and he sold stories to South Africa, the UK and USA.

The above novel was based on three long, connected stories—"Children of the Stars", "Forgotten Knowledge" and "The Road Back"—that appeared originally in Science Fiction Adventures in 1959-60.

The Forgotten Race by Julius P. Newton (Digit Books R747, 1963)

A button was pressed. A whole fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, armed with the biggest, latest and best thermonuclear warheads, left their underground silos and rose higher and faster, higher and faster. They speared their way towards the upper atmosphere and towards their targets on the earth beneath...
__This was it. The "impossible" war had been possible after all. The "absolutely unthinkable" had been so easily thinkable after all. For now, oddly enough, this was the only thinkable thing—the only course of action to take; insane and hopeless though it all seemed.

Scientists from the planet Llamchys (which, we are told in a footnote, is pronounced Klamchys) mount an expedition to the red planet Kampa, convinced they will find intelligent life; the expedition becomes a colony and, years later, the Martians (as they are now) try to help Earth, revealing to a Terran expedition that Llamchys, once the fifth planet of our solar system, had destroyed itself in nuclear war—the fragments of the planet were now the asteroid belt. The book has a twist in the tail, in that the head of the Earth expedition to Mars questions the veracity of what the Martians tell him: perhaps it is simply a story to frighten Earthmen back from the brink of their own nuclear war.

The Forgotten Race tries hard—a little too hard—to be a worthy novel, and ends up too earnest for its own good. At least the science is a little more plausible (staged rockets, for starters) than in the books of Ranzetta, De Timms & Co. who clogged up Digit's SF list. Although it wouldn't win any prizes, The Forgotten Race did manage a hardcover edition, from Arcadia House in the USA in 1967, and a further paperback edition from Ambassador in Canada. I've no idea whether Julius P. Newton is the author's real name or a pen-name.

Ben-Hur part 16

(* Ben-Hur artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Comic Cuts - 23 November

Charts for week ending 14 November 2009. Please note that figures are very approximate. Last week's position in brackets.

Top 9 Annuals
1 (1) Beano Annual (approx. 15,000)
2 (2) Peppa Pig: The Official Annual (approx. 13,900)
3 (3) Hannah Montana Annual (approx. 12,000)
4 (4) Ben 10 Alien Force Annual (approx. 11,500)
5 (6) Top Gear Annual (approx. 11,000)
6 (7) The Official Doctor Who Annual (approx. 10,500)
7 (5) Horrid Henry's Annual (approx. 10,300)
8 (8) WWE Annual (approx. 9,000)
9 (9) High School Musical Annual (approx. 8,750)