Comic Cuts — 21 April 2023

So what have I been doing for the last two weeks? Well, I celebrated my birthday by taking it easy for a couple of days: went down the pub, ate too much cake, watched a couple of films, read a book, made a disappointing trifle, wandered around some charity shops and bought a few books, pottered around in the garden, wrote a big chunk of a new Forgotten Authors essay and worked on a couple of reprints we have planned.

A nice, relaxing couple of weeks.

We're planning to release a few more old thriller novels in a few week's time. We have the text for three proofed, and we're working on two more so that we can release them as a set — as I did with the four Hercules, Esq. novels by Gwyn Evans. I also have another book by Gwyn in the works, hence five books.

I confess that my motive for doing these is so that I have nice-looking copies of these books on my shelves. If I can sell a few copies and pay back some of the time I have put in, all the better, but that's not the main reason. (And this is also why they come out so irregularly, because they're an indulgence that I really ought not to allow myself... it's only having Mel at home at the moment that is allowing me to squeeze this in between the paying work because she's doing most of the text corrections and proofing.)

For someone trying to slim down their book collection, this might not be the most sensible move. And, as mentioned above, I did find some more books to buy on my trip into town, which you'll find dotted around this column. The Anne McCaffrey was her only solo Pern novel I was missing from my collection. This is the second time I have tried to complete a set; my partial set was sold off many years ago during an earlier purge when I sold off 500 or so SF books and magazines.

I got rid of all my Robert Harris novels during the latest mass dumping of books about five or six months ago... so why did I buy another one? Well, I do actually like his books, although I was rather disappointed by the last one I read. Munich was, unfortunately, a bit of a damp squib as far as I was concerned, although enough people seemed to like it for it to be made into a film, which I also thought a bit meh. I remember excellent adaptations of Fatherland and Archangel (my favourites amongst Harris's novels) that the BBC did way back when, the latter with Daniel Craig, and I enjoyed The Fear Index last year. It wasn't great, but it was at least thrilling in places.

The Second Sleep looks like another of his SF-nal thrillers, which have been my favourites of his books (I'll add Enigma and The Ghost Writer to my list of favourites, both fine thrillers that were turned into fine movies), and it was well reviewed. I wish I had more time to read for pleasure rather than reading for work purposes. But I'll get around to it eventually.

Ditto a collection of Bryant and May yarns by the late Christopher Fowler, London's Glory, a book about Gerald Durrell and his family and their time on Corfu — the period covered by the recent TV series The Durrell's. And a couple of others that I don't want to show because they're for other people who read these posts and I don't want to spoil the surprise. Finally, Cloud Cuckoo Land, a mainstream novel with SF elements which I picked up recently. That lot should keep my collecting bug happy for a bit.