I FOUND IT ON A CHARITY BOOKSTALL
... and in an op shop, book fair, garage sale, junk yard. All the places where people leave their unwanted books--and I find weird and wonderful treasures. Come and join me in appreciating these literary marvels!
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!
A celebrity and rake confesses--fifty years of high-pressure living recalled by a rebel who became a legend in his lifetime.
a wild youth in New Guinea and the South Seas
--circling the globe on a wilder chase to London, arriving broke and unabashed at the Berkeley Hotel
--for two decades a cinema idol--to millions he was a symbol of masculine virility while his own sex life became an endless orgy
--fighting the celebrated rape case that changed the course of his life.
Errol Flynn has never pulled a punch in his life, nor has he done so in this book--a rogue male's blistering self-portrait.
One of the first tell-all autobiographies--or was it? Rumour has it that besides bedding countless women, Flynn occasionally, er, "crossed swords" with male actors. True or not, this book comes across as a remarkably frank memoir by a man who lived a wild, hedonistic life. In the end one is left wondering what Flynn left out of his book, and how many of the stories about him are true!
Found at one of the Lifeline Bookfairs, complete with shabby dust-jacket:
Hector Ross, studio dress designer, disappears following a tiff with glamorous movie star, Mona Harrison. A few days later, Ross's body, dumped into a packing case, is delivered C.O.D. to Mona's house. How her boyfriend Joe Medford, ace crime reporter, sets about the task of finding the murderer, provides a story packed with thrills and suspense.
What do you call a fictional character who likes to name-drop real people's names?
George Burns and Gracie Allen were across the way. They waved at Mona, who returned the greeting. Edgar Bergen, without Charlie McCarthy, sat in a corner booth.
(Page 43)
As I strolled in, I noticed Fred Astaire over in a corner with his producer, David Hempstead. Carole Landis was at the bar, telling stories of her army tour in Africa... Dorothy Lamour and Paulette Goddard, still in studio make-up, were gabbing about clothes in a far booth.
(Page 113)
I looked around the room. Janet Gaynor and Adrian, the famous stylist, were sitting in the next booth.
(Page 115)
Jimmy Starr (his real name, evidently!) was a screenwriter and Hollywood gossip columnist in the 1930s and 1940s, so this novel really is a case of "writing what you know". It was made into a movie starring George Brent and Joan Blondell in 1947.
He's a cyborg. He's half man, half machine. He's Superagent Steve Austin.
And he's back--in a new novel combining breathtaking suspense and high adventure in the remote Andes. Austin, the 'Bionics Man', confronts the most awesome challenge of his career in a race to track down the hidden source of a mysterious laser energy inextricably bound to the centuries-old secret behind the 'chariots of the gods'.
High in the rugged fastness of the Peruvian interior, a lone parachutist, plummeting to survival, makes a remarkable discovery--an unsegmented 'impossible highway', smooth as marble, more than two miles above sea level. Who built it? How were such huge rocks lifted by prehistoric peoples? How could such technology have been possible? Austin is assigned to uncover the secret behind the highway in the clouds.
High Crystal goes beyond and behind legend, dramatically creating new and scientifically plausible reasons for the myths that seem ever closer to reality than man has dared to dream.
"Bionics man" is not a typo--it's spelt that way on the book!
Many people around my age have memories of watching Lee Majors as Steve Austin, running in v-e-r-y s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n after the bad guys in The Six Million Dollar Man:
It was meant to show he had super speed or something.
Books, on the other hand, can't do special effects (even the fairly limited kind available to 1970s TV shows), so the author of High Crystal has to stop every once in a while to remind us that Steve Austin is a cyborg. It's a pity these scenes aren't better integrated into the story. Then again Steve's superpowers aren't particularly relevant to the plot, which is a sort of mash-up of Indiana Jones and Erich Von Däniken. Indy didn't make his screen debut until the next decade, but Von Däniken was very, very trendy in the 1970s!
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!)
CARL CARSON'S CRIME WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT--IN A DIFFERENT NEIGHBORHOOD
Carl Carson has a prosperous business, a dotty wife, and a fictitious son. When financial ruin threatens, he puts all these resources to use: he simply stages an elaborate "kidnapping" and liquidates his assets to pay the ransom. It might have worked, if Sir John Appleby hadn't been his neighbor. Appleby, lately retired from the Metropolitan Police, is intrigued by the rumors spreading through the neighborhood. But even he can't stop the conspiracy from turning into murder...
This is a bit newer than the books I usually blog about, but I couldn't resist simply because of the way the author describes Carson's favourite toy:
Of this particular telephone he was rather proud. It didn't trail a cord. (In this it was probably like the red one habitually toted around by the President of the United States.) He could carry it, or it could be brought to him anywhere in the house, or even within the nearer reaches of the garden, and put into operation straight away.
--Page 37
Sometimes even the relatively recent past seems a strange and primitive place!
In his latest thriller, George Bellairs takes us back to the lovely and haunting Isle of Man.
It is holiday time in Douglas, and a carnival crowd engulfs a solitary, elderly man, who is peacefully gazing out to sea. When the procession passes, the old man quietly dies. He is found to have a knife wound in his back. He is, at first, merely an anonymous victim, known casually to a few locals as Uncle Fred. Superintendent Littlejohn, called to visit his old friend the Rev. Caesar Kinrade, Archdeacon of Man, on his way home from a police conference in Dublin, is asked by his comrade Inspector Knell, of the Manx C.I.D., to give him a hand in the case, unofficially.
As the inquiry progresses, Uncle Fred is virtually brought to life again by Littlejohn. The lost years of his past are found again, his friends and his foes appear, the events leading up to his strange death fall in line and, gradually, the picture of the murderer appears.
