I promised last time that I'd be doing a full cover reveal this week... and there it is above these words. A remarkable image based on a drawing by Mike Western, interpreted by the highly talented Martin Baines.
By a lucky coincidence, I have found a scan of the original artwork in an old Fleetway Press Pack put out at the time to coincide with a party celebrating the success of various Sexton Blake ventures that was held on 14 December 1967 — just ahead of the appearance of Blake in Valiant issue for 13 January 1968.
By then, Blake was almost 75 years old and was struggling in his natural form — the short novel — that had been his forte since almost the beginning; Blake had run through Union Jack (37,000 words) and the Sexton Blake Library (50,000 words) but had stumbled, with Mayflower bringing their paperback series to an end in 1968 after 45 novels. Editor W. Howard Baker picked up the series again and published a few novels in hardback in 1969, and in a series of omnibus editions until 1972.
Blake's brief flourishing began in 1965 with the first Mayflower paperback replacing the defunct Sexton Blake Library; the BBC broadcast a 17-week run of Blake adventures on the Home Service and Rediffusion launched a Blake TV show in September 1967; you could get bubblegum cards and even a 'Sexton Blake Detection Kit'.
Sadly it was all over too soon, the comic strip lost to a relaunch in May 1970, and the last of the TV shows broadcast in January 1971. Blake made it back onto the TV in 1978 in an ill-conceived 6-parter, and almost made it back into comics had IPC not licensed the publishing rights.
This was unfortunate for me, as I had been reading and enjoying the comic strip for only a few months before it came to an end. Thankfully, when I began going to comic marts up at Westminster and doing a few deals with people to fill out my Valiant collection, I was able to pick up the issues in that 1968-69 period fairly quickly and was able to indulge myself, reading some of those stories for the first time.
That would have been some time in the mid-1980s, and they've stuck with me ever since. Forty years on I'm incredibly happy to have put together the complete series — not only the weekly adventures but stories from Valiant Annual and The Valiant Book of Sexton Blake — for everyone to enjoy. The two volumes will appear about six or seven weeks apart to give me a chance to recover some of my costs before the second volume comes out. But I'll be offering an early order discount as usual, on both volumes, and will have them both available from my usual outlets (directly from me, Ebay) before Christmas, if you're struggling to think of a present for your partner.
I've been keeping an eye on the books I've been reading as I want to read more. It's ridiculous that I continue to bring more books into the house at a way faster rate than I could ever read them. And there are many old books on the shelves here that I want to re-read. Over the past two months I've finished eight books, including the seventh Slough House novel by Mick Herron, which was an improvement over the previous book (I'm saying that the previous book, Joe Country, was bad, but there have been better books in the series, including this one).
I wanted to get it read before the new TV series—based on those two book—started. I love the TV series and would happily watch all six episodes of each season in one sitting.
I wasn't as impressed by Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis as I expected to be. She's an exceptionally good writer and has interesting ideas for stories; the first of her stories I would have read in Asimov's in 1982, but a change of circumstances around that time meant I didn't get to read much for the next five or so years so I didn't get to follow up as I had done in the late Seventies with authors like John Varley, Joe Haldeman and George RR Martin. I had her Best of on my tablet but had only read a couple of stories before it died, so I asked Mel to pick up the SF Masterworks edition for my birthday.
I've dipped into it over a period of six months and, while I recognise the quality of the writing, I wasn't always excited to pick it up to read another couple of stories. I'll jump ahead here because I have just today finished reading Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny and that I read because a shorter version appears in The Best of Roger Zelazny, another SF Masterworks volume I got for my birthday. I started reading a couple of stories last week and was immediately hooked—I should say hooked again—by Zelazny's writing, which I was enamoured with in my teens and twenties. All the books I have of his date from the late 1970s/early 1980s.
The Best of includes a couple of short novels. I noticed that the version printed in the book was abridged, so I ended up reading my old paperback. Cost me 30p and I probably read it in two days. I'm looking forward to revisiting more of his short stories and that second novel.
After Time is the Fire, I turned to an old favourite: Mission of Gravity. Again, this is the copy I bought second hand in around 1977. I've read it three or four times now, and I'm still captivated by the scientific wonder that is the planet Mesklin and its tubular. caterpillar-like inhabitants. Barlennan and his crew set off on a journey to help the human explorers extract data from a rocket that has crashed near the pole, where gravity is a crushing 600g.
I have this beat-up old reading copy, but I also have it in a hardcover omnibus along with its sequel and a couple of short stories, which I'll get around to in the not-too-distant future.
The Spike Milligan was a book found in the wild and it's great for when you need a laugh. I also found myself dipping into an old volume of The Perishers and immediately sent back to childhood when I read this and Garth every day in my Dad's paper. We had to wait almost a year for the appearance of the crabs in the crab pool and I was looking forward to revisiting them in this volume... only to find that they weren't included, dammit! They do appear in volume 16, so I'll be reading that soon.
Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake appears on numerous lists of best modern space operas, and I just fancied reading something modern and potentially fast-paced and trashy. It didn't quite live up to the hype or my wishes. He's a good writer and I still have unread MacLeod's that I'll get to; this one just wasn't what I wanted.
Instead I read an absolutely fast-paced piece of trash, Pinday and the "White Slaver" by Ben Sarto (F. Dubrez Fawcett), a 1947 British gangster novel about young girls being hired as dancers and then being trafficked to Panama's dance clubs for the entertainment of greasy, disgusting men. I read a load of Fawcett's novels years ago and he was, to my mind, one of the most outrageous and entertaining of the gangster novelists. This one was a bit hum-drum compared to Fawcett at his best.
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