Comic Cuts — 28 April 2023

The essay I have been writing these past couple of weeks is finished, although I need to read through and rewrite. It took a couple of weeks and is 20,000 words long, although that includes the bibliography. Information gathered along the way I'm planning to repurpose for various introductions, expanding on some elements of the essay depending on the book. I have one of those started, but I need to get on with them.

The longer essay will be published in full in the next Forgotten Authors volume, the fifth, which I think is getting closer to completion. As always, I'm working against myself by actually including authors whom nobody recognizes, which makes the books tricky to promote. They sell, but really slowly... which is why there hasn't been a new volume for a couple of years, as the fourth volume completed my original plan to write a book called Fifty Forgotten Authors. It wasn't meant to be the year-long slog that it turned out to be, because my first thought was that I had ten years of blog posts to draw from, so most of the book would already be written.

When I came to picking out pieces to include, I began revamping them and sometimes that meant they doubled in length. And then there were the authors I had never written up who I decided that they deserved to be included, so there was an awful lot of brand new material. The fifty essays ranged in length from 730 words to 32,700 words, and the four books totaled 264,000 words. Phew!

I'm not planning to get to work on a new volume in the near future, but I cobbled together a rough contents list to see what essays I had in hand, and the total wordage was around 70,000, which is the length of the other books. If it happens—when it happens—it will probably include a piece called 'Before the Newgate Calendar', essays on James Skipp Borlase, Alfred Duggan, a few pieces on pen-names where the author is still a mystery, a Sexton Blake writer of note, and a couple of stories of criminal antics from people who then became writers under different names.

I had another good week for finding books in boxes from people having a clear-out. There was one in particular where I found a few Alistair Maclean, Dennis Wheatley and Kingsley Amis novels that I didn't have... or, rather, I had most of them but not in those editions. I've scanned them all and updated the Alistair Maclean cover gallery... but I thought I'd use the scans to illustrate today's column. The header is from 1986, and the artist is Vicente Segrelles, who was a hugely popular cover artist in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a comic strip creator, writing and drawing The Mercenary.

The next is an oddity. This is the Continental Edition of Maclean's The Way to Dusty Death with no cover image. It was priced 40p and released ahead of the first UK paperback, which appeared in 1975, priced 50p. I suspect that this was released to mitigate the release of pirate copies in some territories.

Thirdly, we have a movie tie-in edition of The Guns of Navarone from 1978, the year that the movie sequel, Force 10 from Navarone, was released—a fact mentioned on the back of the book.

I have noticed recently that when I update some of the older cover galleries, the images cannot be altered (I tried enlarging some with zero effect). The images themselves are stored lord only knows where, so at some point I might begin re-posting some of the old galleries when I update them, stripping out and re-uploading cover images. Another task added to the list of things I need to do that I'll probably get around to in a year or five.