Hugh Munro

A little mystery has been raised by my mate John Herrington. Hugh Munro, the author of the Clutha detective novels, has an entry in Contemporary Authors in which he says "I have been beating a typewriter ever since my youth, turning out articles and short stories—and also adventure serials for boys' weeklies—but only within the last five years have I attempted novel writing."

As his first novel appeared in 1958 it strikes me that Munro could have been one of the anonymous contributors to the likes of Adventure, Rover, Hotspur and Wizard for D. C. Thomson, as they were among the few regular boys' adventure story papers being published in the 1950s.

Munro, who first names are variously given as Macfarlane Hugh or Hugh Macfarlane, was born in Glasgow, the son of George Michele Monro (a riveter) and his wife Margaret (nee Robinson). His year of birth is unknown but he was married on 16 September 1939 to Elizabeth Baird, implying he was born no later than 1923 and probably in the 1910s.

He was educated at Scottish schools, leaving at the age of 14 to work as a newsboy, farm hand, in shipyards and factories before becoming a freelance writer. "In a rather misspent youth my chief interests were chasing girls, playing soccer, playing the Highland bag-pipes and dancing, including Highland dancing. Nowadays fiction writing leaves little time for anything other than an occasional game of chess," he told Contemporary Authors, where he described himself as a Christian who was suspicious of all politics.

As well as writing articles, short stories and serials, Munro also contributed to radio and wrote plays for amateur drama festivals. He was also the editor of Scottish Bagpipe Magazine.

In his 1958 debut novel he created the character of Clutha, "as hard as a chunk of Aberdeen granite and as knobby as a tree root. Clutha was Scotland's answer to Philip Marlowe, a tough, bowler-hatted, uncrushable detective who worked for a Glasgow shipyard. He had a nice turn of sentimentality and a thorough knowledge of all kinds of infighting and trickery.

Clutha appeared in seven of Munro's ten novels, the last of which appeared in 1978. Whether Hugh Munro is still with us I've no idea (he'd be in his mid-eighties at least if he were). His last known address was in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, Scotland.

Update:

Jamie Sturgeon has located Munro's dates in a copy of The Glasgow Novel: A Survey and Bibliography by Moira Burgess (Scottish Library Association, 1986) where they are given as 1909-1982.

Novels (series: Clutha)
Who Told Clutha. London, Macdonald & Co., 1958; New York, Washburn, 1958.
Clutha Plays a Hunch. London, Macdonald & Co., 1959; New York, Washburn, 1959.
A Clue for Clutha. London, Macdonald & Co., 1960.
The Clydesiders. London, Macdonald & Co., 1961.
Tribal Town. London, Macdonald & Co., 1964.
Clutha and the Lady. London, Hale, 1973.
Get Clutha. London, Hale, 1974.
Evil Innocence (Clutha). London, Hale, 1976.
The Brain Robbers (Clutha). London, Hale, 1977.
The Keelie. London, Hale, 1978.

Note: Crime Fiction Bibliography lists Hugh Munro as one of the authors behind the house name Jason, which was used on a series of hardboiled crime novels featuring the character J. C. Jason. Munro set all his novels in Glasgow, bar one which took place in Italy (Get Clutha); Jason was a world traveller whose adventures had titles like High Litre Lolita, Honolulu Slay Ride and Three's a Shroud. They were published in 1958-59 by Webster of Sydney, Australia, and I cannot for the life of me see a connection.

Comic Cuts

I've just looked at the clock and I'm declaring 11:17 the official moment I finished writing about the Trigan Empire. I've spent the past week and a half working pretty solidly on the introductions for the final two volumes, although I took a couple of evenings off to map out a bit of the next project I'll be starting (tomorrow! No rest for the wicked!) and I've had a couple of visitors, including a rambling conversation yesterday afternoon with Mark Towers who runs the Roy of the Rovers website and is currently working on a book. Some very interesting details about the history of Roy came out of the conversation; on my side I was able to resolve some of the mystery about why so many changes were happening with the strip in the late 1950s/early 1960s; Mark had some fascinating behind the scenes stories which I'll leave for him to tell.

A little oddity that I was reminded of during our conversation was that I had a novel by Roy's long-time writer Frank S. Pepper. Shortly after the war, when comics were appearing fortnightly due to the paper shortage, a lot of authors had to find other outlets for their work. Pepper wrote a number of stories for a little firm called Paget who churned out comics for a couple of years. He also wrote the short (64-page) novel with the title The Riddle In Wax which you can see at the head of this column.

The back cover tells you all you need to know about the story:

When Marvo and his magic ray made a girl disappear on the stage, that was entertainment, but when Marvo made Sir Hubert Harward vanish into thin air and demanded £100,000 to make him visible again, it was time for Steve Bradshaw to take a hand. Here is a mystery story with plenty of action, with a private detective hero you will want to read again, written in a crisp style that carries you along from the curious discovery of a dismembered wax dummy, through a series of baffling murders to the hard-punching climax.

Without giving too much of the game away, Harward has staged his own disappearance because his company is about to collapse. I was about to ask why that kind of thing doesn't happen in real life, especially with the fat-cat bosses of companies that have caused the credit crunch with their reckless greed, but then I remembered the not-quite-the-same case of the guy who disappeared from his canoe and escaped to Panama. Which reminded me of a guy called Percy Griffith who was at one time the editor of The Magnet, home of Billy Bunter, who similarly skipped the country and disappeared off to South America owing money to many, including Bunter creator Charles Hamilton. Bunter has also been on my mind as I was asked to supply some pics. for an upcoming article in Saga and spent some time digging through old Howard Baker collections looking for suitable images. I get a lot of this kind of request. I think people must imagine I wouldn't know what to do if I suddenly found myself with some spare time.

Lack of spare time has meant that I've a pile of interesting books and magazines building up. Two fine magazines arrived in the post today: Eagle Times (Autumn 2008 issue) and Crikey! 7 (October 2008). Eagle Times has had a rocky couple of years, with subscriptions slipping due to a lack of direction after running for twenty years (longer than the original paper!). Volume 21 has picked up admirably, with quite a few fascinating articles. The discovery of a dummy issue 2 prepared a month or so before the paper launched in 1950 was the centrepiece of the last issue, and this issue contains a look at some of the contents by Richard Sheaf. A couple of the other authors from this issue' have also contributed to Bear Alley: Jeremy Briggs has the first part of a long look at the work of Ian Kennedy and Stephen Winders reviews the Virgin Dan Dare comic and Orion's Dan Dare audio dramatisation. Another highlight of the issue are a pair of articles by Alan Vince, one on Frank Hampson's days at the NE Surrey College of Technology and a second on the career of artist Tony Weare.

Subscriptions to Eagle Times are available from Keith Howard, 25A Station Road, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 2UA. £22 UK, £34 overseas (up due to airmail costs, although I gather that subscriptions made before 31 December will be honoured at the old rate of £32.) Further information about the magazine can be found at the Eagle Times blog.

A big bonus with Eagle Times is that 20 of the 52 internal pages are now printed in colour. Crikey! would definitely benefit from colour, and we are promised just that with the upcoming Christmas issue. That's not to knock the black & white reproduction which, for the most part, is crisp and clean and, even where full pages are printed quite small you can still read the lettering on the story. Which is handy because Crikey! covers a wide range of comics and some I've never seen before and want to get a taste of how they read.

I've often found myself approaching Crikey! with mixed feelings. It wears its heart on its sleeve: Crikey! loves comics. All fine and dandy but in trying to keep the coverage broad in 48 pages, some of the articles barely have enough space to scratch the surface of a title; great if all you fancy is a stroll down memory lane (they cover a lot of titles I, too, remember) looking for a view of the countryside, but not so good if you want to know the names of the plants you've just passed and where that gate leads to. Brief and breezy is OK but I wouldn't mind seeing a few longer, more in-depth articles even if its means serializing them over a couple of issues. If they're good people will forgive the wait (and I can point to the Ian Kennedy piece in Eagle Times as a good example, and ET is quarterly).

Again, my favourite parts of the magazine were the interview (with Graham Bleathman) and the 'Nutty Notions' column which dips into some of the dafter entertainments that appeared in children's comics.

Subscription details can be found at the Crikey! website.

More tomorrow if I have the energy. It's now 2:24 in the morning and this is what I do in my spare time!

Diary of a Spaceperson Identification Guide

A while back I posted a couple of galleries of illustrations from old 1970s SF paperbacks. At the time I mentioned that I was a huge fan of Chris Foss who was responsible for me picking up and reading a wider range of authors simply because he was the cover artist. When I was working on the SF Art book, I dug out as many old SF paperbacks as I could find in the house. Although I could recognise most of the work that appeared in 21st Century Foss, there was quite a few images in Diary of a Spaceperson that I didn't recognise. After trawling the internet, I compiled the gallery below. Most of the scans are from various sites around the web, amongst them Foss's own website where you can find some interesting variations on the artwork that appeared in Diary. I've identified what books I can and I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who spots a cover I'm not aware of. I've made a few educated guesses in places.

Diary of a Spaceperson, for those of you who haven't seen a copy, is essentially a collection of Foss's artwork from the 1980s, a lot of colour plates threaded together with a linking storyline and a lot of black & white sketches of the female lead who appears in the text (the illustrations are new to the book).

I had a fantastic time putting this together... a real trip down memory lane to the days when you could wander into Clarks in Chelmsford and find 250 paperback SF novels and collections and anthologies on their shelves. Nowadays, thanks to publishers wrongly believing that every book has to be a 'blockbuster' with the dimensions of a brick, bookshops can barely squeeze 50 titles in the same shelf space. I miss the days when every novel and collection Isaac Asimov wrote was in print, not just a movie tie-in edition of I, Robot. Surely I'm not one of the last generation who had the chance to read Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, John Brunner and dozens of others whose titles you rarely see nowadays outside of one of the 'SF masterworks' type series. Heinlein should be up there on the shelves next to Hemingway and Sturgeon on the same shelf as Steinbeck.

But that's a rant for another day.

Each image has the page number from Diary immediately below it, with an i.d. of where it originally appeared where known. I've noted variations where I've spotted them.

(* I'd like to thank everyone who has posted suggestions of where these pieces appeared. My thanks especially to Mark Applin who supplied a great many titles and details that I wouldn't have otherwise known.)

00 (cover) (extract from illustration on pp. 30-31)

10-11 Farmer, Philip Jose, Dayworld Rebel, Grafton 0246132663, 1988 h/c , and 0586201084, 1989 p/b (aka Venice / La Towers). Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

13

14-15 Futuristic Oil Tanker, 1970, a.k.a. Red Oil Tanker. Lower image from Chris Foss Net.

18-19 Pringle, David, Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction: An A-Z of Science Fiction Books, Grafton 026123159, 1990 h/c, Grafton 0246136359, 1990 p/b (aka Icebergs in Space). Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

20 Ernsting, Walter & Kurt Mahr, Perry Rhodan 4: Invasion from Space, Futura 7805, 1974.

22

25 Dick, Philip K., I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, Grafton 0586074155, 1988.

26-27 Turner Spaceship. Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

28 Anderson, Poul, Conquests, Grafton 0-586-05041-8, 1981.

30-31 Travelling Cities (1981), first published as an illustration to a Sunday Times supplement article. Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

36 Asimov, Isaac, Earth Is Room Enough, Grafton [1980s edition]

40-41

42-43 Nicholls, Peter, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Granada/Panther 0586053808, 1981. p/b edition.

45 Asimov, Isaac, The Naked Sun, Granada 1016, 1985.

46 Asimov, Isaac, "X" Stands For Unknown, Grafton 0586059427, 1986 (aka X Is For the Unknown). The lower version, from Chris Foss Net, differs greatly from the DSP version.

48-49 Harrison, Harry, In Our Hands, The Stars, Arrow [poss. 1981 printing] (aka Our Hands in the Stars).

55 McCollum, Michael, Antares Passage, Grafton 0586205276, 1989.

56 Dying of Light (possibly Dying of the Light by George R. R. Martin, Panther 4613, 1979). Image from Chris Foss Net.

58-59 Asimov, Isaac, The Stars Like Dust, Grafton 0246129204, 1986 h/c (aka Captain Nemo's Castle).

62-63 (Floating Cities) first published in a Sunday Times supplement.

64

66-67 (first published in a Sunday Times supplement)

68-69 Anderson, Poul, The Trouble Twisters, Panther 0586028714, 1974 [or possibly a later edition?]

70 Smith, E. E. with Stephen Goldin, The Omicron Invasion (Family d'Alembert vol.9), Panther 058604342X, 1984 (aka Shooting Zero). Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

72 Smith, E. E. with Stephen Goldin, Planet of Treachery (Family d'Alembert vol.7), Granada 0586043403, 1981.

73 Lupoff, Richard A., Sun's End, Grafton 0586070982, 1987. Cropped in DSP. The lower version is from Chris Foss Net.

74-75 (Untitled). Lower image from Chris Foss Net.

76-77 Blue Space Wreck.

78 Smith, E. E. with Stephen Goldin, Revolt of the Galaxy (Family d'Alembert vol.10), Grafton 0586043438, 1985. Image from Chris Foss Net.

79 Smith, E. E., Second Stage Lensman, Panther 3846, 1973.

80-81 Asteroid Collision. Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

82 Heinlein, Robert A., Orphans of the Sky, Grafton, 1987.

88 Asimov, The Subatomic Monster, Grafton 0586058443, 1987 (aka Sub Atomic Monsters). Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

89 Campbell, John W., The Best of John W. Campbell, Sphere (aka Sub-Atomic Monsters II). Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

90-91 Vance, Jack, The Killing Machine, Grafton 0586073086, 1988. The DSP version, the lower of the two, is cropped.

92-93 (b/w)

94-95

96-97 Vance, Jack, Star King, Grafton 058602476X, 1988. The upper (DSP) version is cropped. The second version is from Chris Foss Net.

98-99 Atlantis 1. Image from Chris Foss Net.

100-101 (Fireball, 1989)

102 O'Donnell, Jr., Kevin, Ora:cle, Grafton 0586066772, 1986.

103 Asimov, Isaac, The Winds of Change, Panther 0586057439, 1984 [possibly also Granada h/c 0246119241, 1983]

104 Antares Dawn II ("originally painted as a poster" -- Chris Foss net); Cooper, Edmund, The Overman Culture, Coronet 0340178604, 1974.

105 Asimov, Isaac, The Caves of Steel, Granada 0835, 1985.

108 Asimov, Isaac, Robots and Empire, Granada 2367, 1985.

110 Wilson, Colin, Spider World: The Delta, Grafton

111 Asimov, Isaac, The Robots of Dawn, Grafton 2304, Feb 1984.

112-113 Wilson, Colin, Spider World: The Tower, Grafton 7288, 1988.

114 Blish, James, The Night Shapes, Arrow 918400, 1978.

115 Mahr, Kurt, Perry Rhodan 10: The Ghosts of Gol, Futura 7869, 1975. Lower image from Chris Foss Net.

116 Dick, Philip K., The Preserving Machine, Grafton 6938, 1987. Cropped for DSP. Lower image from Chris Foss Net.

117 (b/w)

118 (b/w)

119 Asimov, Isaac, Nine Tomorrows, Granada 0246125330, 1985 h/c.

120 Asimov, Isaac, Pebble in the Sky, Grafton 0586069526, 1986. [poss. also Grafton h/c 0246129190, 1986]

121 (Untitled). Image from Chris Foss Net.

122-123

124-125

126-127 The Probe. Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

128-129

132 Asimov, Isaac, The Complete Robot, Granada 1923, 1982 [h/c ?]

133 Smith, E. E. & Stephen Goldin, Eclipsing Binaries (D'Alembert vol. 8), Panther 4341, 1984.

134

135 Mace, David, Demon-4, Panther 0586058559, 1984.

136 Clarke, Arthur C., The Sentinel, Panther 6343, 1985.

137

139 Mace, David, Fire Lance, Grafton 6453, 1986. Lower version from Chris Foss Net.

140-141 Scheer, K. H. & Kurt Mahr, Perry Rhodan 1: Enterprise Stardust, Futura 7008, May 1974. Lower version, in which the image is reversed (and entitled First Spaceship on Quator), is from Chris Foss Net.

142

END

Unidentified Pieces found at Astrona blog
The following pictures I found here. I've no idea what books these relate to, so if you can identify any of the covers, please let me know.

McCollum, Michael, Antares Dawn, Grafton 0586205268, 1989.

Napoleon's Submarine, 1972

Plowright, Teresa, Dreams of an Unseen Planet, Grafton 0586209328, 1990 (aka Voyage to the Forbidden Planet)

Easter Island, 1988. Lower version is an alternate version from Chris Foss Net.

Asimov, Isaac, The Bicentennial Man, Panther 0586047255, 1978 (aka Gargantua).

Anthony, Piers, Ghost, Grafton 0586200401, 1988

Vance, Jack, The Book of Dreams, Grafton 0586200231, 1988 (aka Beyond the Hills of Peace)

Untitled (Breaker's Yard)

Smith, E. E. & Stephen Goldin, The Clockwork Traitor, Panther, 1977.

Untitled (Space Exhausts) (This is concept artwork for the unproduced Dune movie which appeared in 21st Century Foss)

Untitled (Fleeing Snow-Cat)

Gargantua, Untitled (Breaker's Yard), Clockwork Traitor and untitled (Fleeing Snow Cat) all originally appeared in Science Fiction Art, a poster portfolio of Foss's work published in 1976 by Hart-Davis MacGibbon with an introduction by Brian Aldiss. Two (Gargantua, Clockwork Traitor) were subsequently used as book covers; the other two were not.

(* All artwork © Chris Foss.)