Showing posts with label Hodder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hodder. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

The Toff Goes Gay by John Creasey (Hodder and Stoughton, 1955)

All right, I bought this one solely for its title.  Childish, I know!

Why was a terrified French girl found wandering in London's East End?  Was she really frightened or was she pretending?  The Toff was called upon to answer both questions. . . .
      A man who knew the truth was murdered in the East End.  A Mayfair woman, afraid for her life, yielded up a part of the answer.  But the Toff had to go to Paris and be furiously gay in the face of death before he fitted the final piece into the grim puzzle.

Also: is it just me, or does the girl on the front cover only have one leg?

Monday, October 30, 2017

The Blind Side by Patricia Wentworth (Hodder and Stoughton, 1955)


Ross Craddock had not been on the best of terms with his relations.  More than one of them had reason to wish him dead, as Ethel Bingham was pleased to inform Detective Abbott and considering the number of residents of Craddock House, who, for one reason or another , withheld information, this prying old maid was just the answer to a policeman's prayer.
Lots of people wanted Ross Craddock dead... and sure enough, he's murdered by page 49!

It's a truth universally acknowledged, that the victim in a Golden Age whodunnit is invariably a loathsome person.  This serves two purposes.  Firstly, it lets the reader enjoy the puzzle without worrying about the person who has been murdered.  Secondly it gives the author plenty of suspects to bamboozle the readers with!

Monday, August 7, 2017

Holiday for Inspector West by John Creasey (Hodder, 1959)


"Handsome" West of the Yard is enjoying a well-earned holiday at the seaside with his wife and young family when news breaks of the murder of an M.P.  In spite of Janet's protests, Roger hurries back to London "to take a look around", and contrives to be given official charge of the case.
Even a preliminary inquiry into Riddel's death opens up a vast number of complications to West.  The pursuit of a small package, for example, leads him into many dangers and strange places.  Slowly a pattern begins to emerge . . .
John Creasey gave his detective hero the nickname "Handsome", but in book after book also has him brawling and/or getting beaten up.  Maybe by this stage in the series he should be called "Cauliflower Ear" or "Broken Nose" West instead!

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

The Toff Takes Shares by John Creasey (Hodder, 1965)

A local bookshop obtained a lot of vintage paperbacks by John Creasey, and all in near-mint condition!


An unexpected female passenger introduces the Toff to one of the most complicated and violent cases of his career.  The shares of a large London store are crashing, and amidst gripping excitement the Toff turns stockbroker to find out why.
And no wonder the shares in this "large London store" are crashing!  There are many and varied problems behind the scenes--including blackmail, embezzlement, kidnapping and murder.  In addition to all this--the book being originally published in the post-War austerity year of 1948--the owner is up to his neck in the black market.  How will the Toff manage to sort out the victims from the villains? 

Monday, April 10, 2017

Fool the Toff by John Creasey (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954)


Was "Love's Matrimonial Agency" a racket shop?  Jane Abbott met her husband there and he vanished--her money with him.  The Toff went to see Miss Love and found a most remarkable woman.  Then there was Jeremiah Matt, an equally remarkable man.  In fact the Toff met many new acquaintances and one of them made a fool of him.  Others... died.
This blurb is taken from the half-title page, as the back cover is filled with an advertisement:


Every once in a while I stumble across one of these on a secondhand bookstall.

As for the Toff--as the title of this book says, he is indeed fooled!  In the end, all the mysteries contained therein are  solved by his "man", Jolly--which is not what you expect of a story with a crime-fighting gentleman hero!

Monday, March 6, 2017

The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart (Hodder, 1964)

Found in a Salvos Store this weekend:


Now this is awkward!  The blurbs on the back of this book tell us what the Daily Express said about this book, and gives us a paragraph in praise of the author, but it has nothing at all actually about the book:
The Ivy Tree
"has the ideal thriller blend of plot, suspense, character drawing and good writing... it opens with the impact of a rifle report on a calm summer's day and drives to its climax of action with compelling urgency."
 Daily Express

Mary Stewart
author of 'The Moonspinners', has found success with every word.  Her books have been translated into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish and enjoy enormous success in America where they appear regularly on the bestseller lists.
This kind of thing is not uncommon with Hodder paperbacks!


(From memory, The Ivy Tree contains a heroine (in peril), a case of mistaken identity, an isolated house and a family with a secret.   In other words, fairly standard ingredients, but mixed by a master of the genre!)


Monday, February 13, 2017

Anna, Where Are You? by Patricia Wentworth (Hodder and Stoughton, 1959)

Another find from the Lifeline Bookfair:


about this book


The twentieth ' Miss Silver ' mystery.
Anna sounds a dull, uninteresting girl, but when she stops writing after three years of intensive post-school correspondence, Thomasina becomes anxious about her old school-friend.  In her last letter Anna spoke of a new job without giving any details, and then, to quote Thomasina, she disappears.  The case is put before Miss Silver... "Just a girl who has stopped writing."
 Here we have a dynamic cover illustration (Who is that girl?  And who or what is menacing her?) paired with a downright clunky piece of prose on the back of the book.  Let's hope the potential buyers of this publication found the front cover more intriguing than they found the back cover off-putting.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Five Go Down to the Sea by Enid Blyton (Hodder & Stoughton, 1955)


The
Famous Five

Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the Dog

in their
twelfth exciting adventure

Summer at Tremannon Farm, the mystery of the deserted tower by the sea, the forgotten secret of the Wreckers' Way
Now here's a book I really did love as a child--in fact I pinched and saved to buy all twenty-one books in the Famous Five series!  In Five Go Down to the Sea Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timmy the dog explore secret tunnels and thwart a gang of drug smugglers between consuming mountains of buns and sandwiches and drinking lashings of ginger beer.  What more could a child want in an adventure?

(This copy predates me by several years.  My own copy as a child was one of the paperback Knight editions published in the 1970s.  The Famous Five adventure stories are still in print, though when I flicked through one in my local library recently it saddened me to see that an editor had "updated" the text to make it more accessible.  There are also now some very tongue-in-cheek Famous Five adventures available for "grown-ups" with titles like Five on Brexit Island and Five Go Gluten Free.  Clearly I'm not the only adult who remembers the series with affection!)

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The Golden Hades by Edgar Wallace (Hodder, 1962)

Another book acquired during my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree.  This one I definitely bought for its cover:


The banknotes marked with the sinister little yellow sign of the Golden Hades were not just state money. 

Wilbur Smith of the F.B.I. had seen the sign twice before--

The first time they involved a masked gang; the second time, they meant murder.

Edgar Wallace is one of those authors whose life is more interesting than his books.  Born into poverty as the illegitimate child of actors, he became a war correspondent during the Boer War, then took to writing thrillers to make money.  In the 1920s his publishers Hodder and Stoughton began promoting him aggressively, and he pretty much became a one-man fiction factory, eventually churning out around 170 novels:


Needless to say, the quality was NOT high.  This particular example of his work concerns a Satanic cult in New York.  To be fair, a book on a similar theme today would probably have more graphic violence and a lot more sex, but the characters might be equally cardboard.

Wallace eventually died in 1933 of untreated diabetes, and few of his books are in print today.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Out of the Past by Patricia Wentworth (Hodder, 1959)

I went to the Lifeline Bookfair this weekend, where I turned to crime.  Fortunately it was of the paperback kind:


A huge ugly old house, hordes of friends and relations--and a young man with information to sell and suppress.

A perfect setting for a murder--and for

MISS SILVER.
With a cover like this you'd certainly expect your detective to be more than a little hard boiled--drinking neat whiskey in his lonely office between romancing dangerous dames and fighting it out with toughs on the waterfront.  Instead the detective in this story is a retired Victorian governess with a fondness for knitting and Lord Tennyson.

Ah well, at least there's blackmail and murder to liven things up!

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

The House of the Seven Flies by Victor Canning (Hodder and Stoughton, 1958)

Another book from the Lifeline Bookfair:


A sunken launch.  It couldn't be much more than a couple of fathoms near the island ... one could dive without any elaborate outfit ... a steel deed-box, small enough to lift.  It sounded too easy ... Perhaps it was.
 (Page 111)
World War II and its aftermath inspired a whole generation of thrillers.  This one sees a gaggle of rival crooks searching the Netherlands for lost Nazi loot.  The good guys (such as the are) eventually wind up with it, but not without a lot of plot twists and turns along the way.