The Jonathan Cape UK first editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond books are some of the most collected of all modern firsts. Even though Fleming's prose has in places become frankly somewhat dated, in both style and sensibilities (Judi Dench's M would no doubt call Fleming himself a 'sexist, misogynist dinosaur', let alone his creation), the physical books remain beautiful objects, and classics of design, especially the ones with dust jackets by Richard Chopping.
While a mint set of all 14 books as first edition, first state copies in jackets will set you back tens of thousands of pounds, there are slightly more affordable ways of building up a set that will look the same, thanks to later impressions and even modern facsimile editions of the early books.
Anyone entering the dangerously seductive world of Bond collecting will soon become immersed in the mass of arcane trivia which surrounds the first editions, and their all important 'first states': the very first copies off the presses, minus the subtle changes which were often made even during/within a first print run. Got a first edition of You Only Live Twice which says 'May 1964' on the copyright page? Then it's a not a true first. That just says '1964'. If you want a proper, first state edition of Live and Let Die, then you need one where the dust jacket has the illustrator's credit missing. Technically, the Book Club printing of From Russia With Love, not Jonathan Cape's, is the 'first impression' of that novel, because the Book Club actually used a set of sheets printed, and then rejected by Cape for being of too poor quality. They actually have the Cape imprint on the title page, but copies of this Book Club edition are worth a fraction of the 'true' Cape first. 'Go figure', as Bond would certainly not say.
As the popularity of the Bond books increased, so did the first print runs. While the first, 1953's Casino Royale, was only 4,728 copies (many of which went to libraries), the penultimate book The Man With the Golden Gun in 1965 had a whopping 82,000 copy initial printing. It's hardly surprising then that firsts of Golden Gun are still plentiful, and can be had for under £100 in very good nick. If you ever come across a copy in a charity shop or boot fair though, always slip off the dust jacket and check the front board. Like Charlie and his ticket, you're looking for a glint of gold...
While it's the most common of all the Fleming firsts, it has possibly the rarest 'first state'. The first few copies off the presses – and no one knows the exact number, though it's said to be only in the hundreds – had a golden gun stamped onto the front board, like this:
Due to faults in the process, or the fact that it just cost too much (sources differ), the gun was dropped for the rest of the printing. So, if you can find one, you've got one of the rarest Bond books of them all, worth upwards of £10,000 in fine condition. This 'really fine' copyis £15,000! You could buy an actual gun made of actual gold for that, surely...
It's not from the film of Golden Gun, but to finish, this is for my money the best Bond one-liner of them all...
(Strap in folks, as it's a long post this week, but there's a treat at the end...)
In 2014, the name Robert Shaw is remembered, pretty much, for one thing: he's the guy who played Quint in Jaws. You might add in his roles as Red Grant, the double-hard assassin in From Russia With Love, Mr Blue in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Lonnegan, the gangster who gets stung in The Sting, but even movie fans will struggle to name many more of his films: he made loads, but most of them have not lasted the test of time.
The same can be said, sadly, for Shaw's novels. Not through lack of quality: Shaw was a prize-winning 'literary' novelist of some note, but his reputation as a writer – which at one time far outstripped his fame as an actor – has faded into obscurity, not least because all his books are out of print, and have been for years.
Shaw's Wikipedia entry does at least give a summary of this aspect of his career:
In addition to his acting career, Shaw was also an accomplished writer of novels, plays and screenplays. His first novel, The Hiding Place, published in 1960, met with positive reviews. His next, The Sun Doctor, published the following year, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1962.
Shaw then embarked on a trilogy of novels – The Flag (1965), The Man in the Glass Booth (1967) and A Card from Morocco (1969); it was his adaptation for the stage of The Man in the Glass Booth which gained him the most attention for his writing. The book and play present a complex and morally ambiguous tale of a man who, at various times in the story, is either a Jewish businessman pretending to be a Nazi war criminal, or a Nazi war criminal pretending to be a Jewish businessman. The play was quite controversial when performed in the UK and the US, some critics praising Shaw's sly, deft, and complex examination of the moral issues of nationality and identity, others sharply criticising Shaw's treatment of such a sensitive subject. The Man in the Glass Booth was further developed for the screen, but Shaw disapproved of the resulting film and had his name removed from the credits.
Second hand copies of all the novels are all still around in their various UK and US editions for the curious, though some are getting harder to find as first editions in 'collectable' condition – not that Shaw has become a 'collected' author. Presumably there are some signed copies out there somewhere too, though there are none online at present. I can find no evidence that the novel of The Man in the Glass Booth made it into paperback in the UK, or that A Card from Morocco had a paperback edition anywhere (and is thus his scarcest book, apart from perhaps the play text of Cato Street), but the first three novels were all Penguins, with some rather lovely covers, especially The Sun Doctor's Wicker Man-esque one. Here's a cover gallery with images from around the net, ending with those Penguin editions:
Chatto & Windus UK first edition of his first novel, which became a film starring Alec Guinness.
Possibly the US first edition, or a later UK reprint.
Ace US paperback.
Chatto & Windus UK first of the second novel, set in Africa.
US first from Shaw's American publisher, Harcourt, Brace.
UK Reprint Society edition of the third novel, the first of a trilogy.
Chatto & Windus UK first of his most famous work, though it was Shaw's own play adaptation, and subsequent film, which are better known.
UK first of Shaw's final, and scarcest novel.
US first.
Here's the copy of the Chatto and Windus UK first of The Flag that's currently on the shelves at Withnail Books. The press quotes on the back cover show quite how highly he was regarded.
I'm not sure what the linking elements are of the 'trilogy' of novels are, if any, though the blurb of The Flag, which is based on the true story of Conrad Noel, the Red Vicar of Thaxted, announces that the trilogy is called 'The Cure of Souls', so perhaps it is just thematic. I intend to read them all eventually (having just started The Flag) so I'll report back once I've tracked down copies of the others...
But why should anyone wanting to read these well-regarded novels by a still-known 'name' have to be forced to root around second hand shops and online to find them? Why are they out of print? Shaw's chaotic lifestyle may provide a clue. Here's the blurb to The Price of Success, a biography of Shaw (which, ironically, is itself now out of print):
Internationally known for his many film roles, particularly in Jaws, The Sting, and A Man for All Seasons, Robert Shaw was well respected on stage too, working with Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Harold Pinter and the Angry Young Men at the Royal Court. Moreover, he was a writer himself, author of five award-winning novels and a play that ran in the West End and on Broadway. But Shaw was a driven man. Plagued by his father's suicide when Shaw was only eleven, he was almost insanely competitive, with more than a penchant for booze and expensive cars. He was also driven by a need for children of his own: four by his first wife, four by his second, actress Mary Ure, whom he 'stole' from John Osborne, and a ninth by his third wife. His extravagance led him into trouble with the tax man and thence into unwilling exile, living in Orson Welles's house in Spain before it 'accidentally' caught fire, damaging some of the artefacts from Citizen Kane. This biography of a troubled and talented man is made special by the unusual insights of the author - Shaw's friend and agent during the last years of his life. No other biographer is so well equipped to tell the real inside story of the working life of an international star, the deals, the tax fraud, the films that were made, the films that weren't, the parts that were offered and those that were refused - all bound up with moments of frightening intimacy, as when Shaw has to be prevented from overdosing after the death of Mary Ure on the first night of her West End comeback. Against a background of the film and theatre industries, drawn from first hand experience, John French's book offers a vivid and unique insight into the self-destructive life of a man who could have been - and very nearly was - a major talent.
Shaw died suddenly, and unexpectedly, of a heart attack aged only 51, in 1978. Given the picture painted above, it would not surprise me if his affairs were not exactly in order when this happened, and with nine children (ten actually, as he'd adopted one more) and possibly no will... well, good luck to any publisher attempting to do a deal with 'The Estate of Robert Shaw' to bring his writing back into print.
Before he died, Shaw had been working on a new novel, The Ice Floe (a reference to the Inuit tradition of senicide, where people too old to be of use are set adrift on a floe). It was never published, but a few lines were included in an entertaining interview Shaw gave to People magazine in 1977. Here's that excerpt, and the following paragraph from Robin Leach's article:
Mrs. Avery had propped a pillow under the head of her dying elderly friend and looked up through the barred windows of the old peoples' home psychopath ward...Dear God this home is filled with weeping old men and weeping old women ...They are ignored, they are a burden to everyone...Couldn't even children love them? Are they just spectres to be shut up? Dear God, why is it that Jesus Christ did not sanctify old age by living till he was 90?
"These may be the best sentences I have ever written," says author Robert Shaw of this excerpt from his upcoming novel, The Ice Floe. He researched the book between movies and plays by inspecting the squalid conditions in old peoples' homes around New York City. "I want the truth out," he says. "If I never write anything else again, I've asked valid questions in a lovely prayer." (A compulsive writer, Shaw often helps revise his movie scripts: "Most of the material is third-rate. I try to make it second-rate.")
Ah yes, revising movie scripts. According to this obituary, Shaw actually once said, "When they write my obituary I would like them to say, 'He was an author who wrote one book that will last and he was also a remarkable actor'." As it turns out, while he is certainly still known as a remarkable actor, the piece of writing he will be best remembered for is not one his books. Though his exact input is still noisily debated to this day, there's no doubt that Shaw had a large hand in the final draft of this speech. And what a speech, one of the most famous in all of cinema...
UPDATE: The Little Shop now has a complete set of UK first editions of Shaw's novels, and a copy of the supernaturally rare play text Cato Street, for sale (to be sold as a set only). Get in touch if you're interested... UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: This set has now sold.
When Elmore Leonard died last summer, most obits mentioned that he started his writing career as an author of Westerns, before moving on to the crime novels he will be best remembered for.
After his debut The Bounty Hunters in 1953, and 1954's The Law At Randado, the third of these Westerns – Leonard's third novel – was Escape From Five Shadows, a gritty tale of wrongful imprisonment and, well, escape, set in what this enthusiastic reviewcalls a "stinking dead end part of Arizona". The reviewer goes on to praise the "remarkable picture of the old Arizona West that Leonard paints for the reader. The smells of horse, leather and dust get in your nostrils." Sounds great.
Leonard was around long enough, and had/has enough of a dedicated following, to have become a 'collected' writer. While even signed first edition copies of his later novels can be found for reasonable amounts, hardcover firsts of those early Westerns command serious figures. While they did most of their business as paperbacks, short runs of hardcovers were printed, mainly to go into libraries. As a result, most copies that have survived are ex-library, with all the stamps/pockets/missing endpapers that usually entails. Such are their rarity though, and so sky-high are the prices of unadulterated non-library copies, that ex-library copies are nevertheless collected, and even they go for several hundreds of dollars.
A Houghton Mifflin 1956 hardcover first edition of Escape From Five Shadows will currently set you back from $400 for an ex-library copy to $5,000 for a near fine copy with laid-in author signature (ie a signed bit of paper which has been added to the book to enhance value; it's not a book Leonard physically signed himself).
Even rarer than that US first edition is its UK equivalent, again printed in very, very small quantities (probably only a few hundred), mainly for libraries, by Robert Hale in 1957.
The only copy of the Hale edition for sale online anywhere as far as I can see is this one. It is in good shape, it's not ex-library, and it's signed to the title page. A superior copy then. The seller, Royal Books Inc of Boston describes it as:
"A very presentable copy of what is, in our experience, perhaps the author's rarest title, much more difficult than the already-scarce American edition published by Houghton Mifflin. Leonard's third novel, a Western, the only copy we have ever seen."
The asking price? A cool $6,500.
So, how to price the copy of this same edition which has recently arrived at Withnail Books? It was acquired from a collector (along with many other books of which more anon, including a little cache of early Leonard paperbacks, many signed), so it is not a 'charity shop find'. The collector had owned it long enough that he'd forgotten what he paid for it, and anyway, that price would be long out of date.
What's it worth today? Well, as always with 'modern firsts', condition is key. This copy is in what its author would probably describe as 'beat up' condition. It's ex-library. It has stamps, it's missing its front free endpaper (and possibly its half-title, if it had one; it's hard to tell) and the binding has cracked inside. But... it has a pretty much complete unclipped dust jacket (albeit with a library label on the spine and a bit of card reinforcing the back), and it 'displays well' as the bookseller lingo goes. Plus, it's very, very, very rare. This is currently your only choice if you're a Leonard completist without a spare $6,500.
Obviously, this copy is not worth anywhere near $6,500. But again I wonder, what is a fair asking price? At the end of the day, it's worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it. I have an idea of what that might be, but for the next couple of weeks... I'm open to offers. Drop me line at withnailbooks@btinternet.com if you're interested, or would like a list of the other Leonard titles I have for sale, which, like this book, have not been listed anywhere yet. Below are a bunch of photos of the copy, and I have yet more angles should anybody wish to see them.
I should mention that the lighting used to take these photos made everything come out rather yellow: the whites are whiter and the reds redder in 'real life'.
To finish, any excuse to be able to reprint this (thanks to Mashable for the jpeg):
Burton and Taylor in 1964, during the filming of The Sandpiper.
The death of Peter O'Toole this week has seen many describe him as 'the last of the hellraisers', sure to be even now raising a glass upstairs (or down?) with Ollie Reed, Richard Harris and Richard Burton. The last of these was of course the first to die, way back in 1984, and sad to say, there's a danger that Richard Burton is becoming somewhat of a forgotten figure, to recent generations at least. Ask the average person under 30 to name four Richard Burton movies, and they'd struggle, even if they had heard of him. Yes, he's still known as a famous Welshman, a hellraiser, and as part of sentences which contain the words 'Liz Taylor and...', but his actual work, as something which lives on in the public consciousness, is perhaps beginning to fade a bit (with the exception of this, obviously).
A piece of his legacy which has been almost completely forgotten is this book. It was published in 1964, a time when Burton and Taylor were King and Queen of the World, let alone Hollywood.
The copy of the 1965 Heinemann UK first edition of the book in stock at Withnail Books. It was published by William Morrow in the USA the previous year.
The Withnail copy does not have a dustjacket alas, but here's what one looks like.
A Christmas Story is a slim volume, barely over 30 pages, and the 'story' is essentially an autobiographical fragment. It's Christmas Eve, and the eight year-old Rich is taken out of the house by his Uncle 'Mad Dan' to go and sing with the miners round the bonfire, because his sister is upstairs gravely ill... or is she? Perhaps young Rich will be getting an unexpected 'prezzy-wezzy'...
Given the subject matter, it's impossible not to think of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales (which you can hear read by the author in full here). Burton knows the comparisons are inevitable, and also that he's not going to 'win', and so wisely namechecks Thomas in his first sentence: "There were not many white Christmases in our part of Wales in my childhood – perhaps only one or two – but Christmas cards and Dickens and Dylan Thomas and wishful memory have turned them all into white."
Having said that, what follows is rather wonderfully written. Here's an excerpt:
"Can I go home now, Mad Dan?"
"Shut your bloody trap and listen," he said, "or I'll have you apprenticed to a haberdasher."
This was a fate worse than death for a miner's son. There was, you understand, the ambition for the walk of the miners in corduroy trousers, with yorks under the knees to stop the loose coal running down into your boots and rats from running up inside your trousers and biting your belly (or worse), and the lamp in the cap on the head, and the bandy, muscle-bound strut of the lords of the coalface."
'The Lords of the Coalface'. Illustration by Lydia Fruhauf.
It helps of course to imagine the words read by Burton himself, in that dark brown voice of his. The initial printing of the UK edition came with a belly band proclaiming: 'The book to be read by Richard Burton on Christmas Day on the BBC', which would have been Christmas 1965. The recording still exists (its internal BBC reference number, should you need it, is WAC ref. Rcont12 ART file 2) but it never got a commercial release as far as I can tell, and hasn't made its way onto the web, sadly. Indeed, the book itself, though it got a new edition in the late 80s with an Introduction by Burton's widow Sally, is now out of print. Mind you, the same can be said (amazingly, given the rapturous reviews they got and his continuing high profile) of Peter O'Toole's two volumes of non-ghosted autobiography, Loitering With Intent, and Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice, not to mention Richard Harris's book of bonkers (but marvellous) poetry, I, In The Membership Of My Days. There's also Burton's second (and last) book, Meeting Mrs Jenkins, another slim volume reprinting an article which originally appeared in Vogue, about meeting and wooing Liz Taylor. That one is the scarcest of the lot, and will cost you north of $100 for a copy, or indeed $1500 for one signed by both of them. It's got a cracking cover, using a photo taken by the proud husband himself.
It's time to bring all these works back into print... though I bet only an omnibus edition of O'Toole's books is a realistic possibility. Anyway. Happy Christmas to everyone from Withnail Books, and many thanks for all the support in the first few months, from customers in the shop, to long-distance readers of the blog or Facebook page. As a festive treat, here's an entire episode of Lee Major's second-finest hour, The Fall Guy, complete with special guest star, playing himself – yup – Richard Burton...
These days Roald Dahl is
known by all as a children’s author, and remembered by many for his ‘adult’
fiction, the dark, twisted short stories published in various collections over
the years, many of which were famously adapted for TV as the Tales of the Unexpected.
Particular fans of the latter will perhaps have tracked down what its current
synopsis on Amazon describes as ‘Dahl’s first-ever novel’: My Uncle Oswald,
a ribald romp from 1979, which acts as a feature-length prequel for the titular
character, dubbed ‘the greatest fornicator of all time’, introduced in two
previous short stories (‘The Visitor’ and ‘Bitch’ from the collection Switch
Bitch). It’s great fun, but doesn’t read like Dahl was making a serious
attempt to write ‘a novel’; it comes across more like a short story that
outgrew its wordcount, as indeed it was: he later admitted that his original
commission, a request from Playboy for a new Oswald tale, “refused to
stop” and grew into a book.
The thing is (and now
we’re finally getting to the point of this post), My Uncle Oswald is not
Dahl’s ‘first-ever novel’. That distinction belongs to a book called Some
Time Never, published by
Scribners in the US in 1948, with a UK edition (confusingly titled Sometime
Never) from Collins the following year. It has never been reprinted. You’ll
search in vain for a mention of it on roalddahl.com. Its
Wikipedia entry
doesn’t tell you much. Copies are hard to come by: of the few examples on ABE at present,
you’ll have to pay well into three figures for one with a decent dustjacket,
and the UK edition appears to be really scarce,
with only two copies currently for sale (it’s entirely possible that the print
run for that edition was only in the hundreds). Even a reading copy will cost
you a few notes, and that’s what I finally managed to snap up a while back: a
jacketless ex-library copy of the UK edition, which I bought the day
it was listed on ABE, thanks to my wants list alert. I’d been wanting to read
this apparently ‘suppressed’ work by one of my favourite writers for years!
Some Time Never is a
blend of superbly written realism and outrageous fantasy, with an almost
Swiftian quality in its savage wit and subtle humor.
It is the story
of the hitherto little-known Gremlins. It is moreover a piercing commentary on
Man and the qualities in Man which are leading him to his destruction.
The Gremlins were
the original rulers of the earth in ages past, but with the advent of Man and
the spread of his obnoxious activities to every part of the globe, the Gremlins
were forced underground to a subterranean network of tunnels. Out for revenge
and for the restoration of their former dominant position in the world’s
affairs, the Gremlins bent every effort to plotting Man’s annihilation.
During the Battle
of Britain these odd and menacing creatures began an offensive against pilots
in an effort to hasten the eradication of the human race. From the experiences
of three Royal Air Force pilots, Stuffy, Peternip and Progboot, we get an
appalling picture of Gremlin activities, and through the eyes of the Gremlins
themselves we get a portrait of Man that is far from flattering.
After the Battle
of Britain the Gremlins became convinced that Man would effect his own
self-destruction without any help from them – so they ceased their ingenious
offensive and retired underground to wait. The atom bomb appeared, more
devastating weapons followed, World War III took a terrible toll the world over
and finally World War IV finished the job. The Gremlins emerged from their
underground tunnels and took over world in which all human life and all works of
Man had been destroyed.
The theme of this
book is a serious one. Mr Dahl’s implications are the most serious a writer
could suggest. Ironic and witty, Some
Time Never will amuse you, even give you you a few hearty laughs – but it
will also make you think.
As someone who’s written
a few blurbs myself, I can tell you that the above
is a valiant attempt to summarize/'sell to a general readership’ a book that
vehemently resists such things. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad book – far from
it.
By 1948 Dahl had already
had two books published: 1943 saw The Gremlins,an illustrated
children’s story, and his first collection of adult short stories, Over to
You: 10 stories of flyers and flying came out in 1946. Some Time Never is
in some ways a combined offshoot of both: taking the whimsical characters of
the former and putting them into the adult style of the latter. (The story of The
Gremlins book, and the ultimately abandoned Walt Disney movie version of
it, need not detain us here, but thanks to the scene-setting Introduction in
Dark Horse’s still in print 2006 edition of that previously
impossible-to-find-for-less-than-$300 book, it is now easily accessible.)
So why is Some Time
Never out print? Why has it seemingly been airbrushed from the Dahl
timeline? Does it hang together as a novel? No, in all honesty, it doesn’t.
This is a young writer writing his ‘important first novel’ and he’s trying really
hard, but it doesn’t entirely work. Mind you, his chosen theme is about as big
as you can get: the destruction of mankind in a nuclear holocaust. Dahl started
writing the book in 1946, and even in 1948 it was still one of the first
(possibly the first?) novels published post-Hiroshima to address that
looming possibility. There is some very powerful writing though, especially in
the chapter after the bomb has hit London. Stuffy survives the initial blast,
and emerges from a tube station to wander the ruined streets in a daze:
He walked around
a double-decker bus which was standing upright in the middle of the road, and
as he went past it he saw through the open glassless windows that the bus was
full of people, all sitting in their places, silent, immobile, as though they
were waiting for the bus to start again. But their faces were scorched and
seared and half-melted and all of them had had their hats blown off their heads
so that they sat there bald-headed, scorch-skinned, grotesque, but very upright
in their seats. Up in front, the black-faced driver was still sitting with his
hands resting on the wheel, looking straight in front of him though the empty
sockets of his eyes.
It’s a long way from the
BFG doing a whizzpopper in front of the Queen, isn’t it?
And yet, the book also
deals in fascinated detail with the green bowler hat-wearing Gremlins and their
love of snozzberries (a fruit later revived for Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory), so it’s still very much proto-Dahl.
At the risk of making
this already long post stupidly long, I won’t attempt more lit crit here,
though I will agree with Donald Sturrock (whose excellent authorised biography
of Dahl, Storyteller, covers the novel in commendable detail) that Some
Time Never is “extraordinary, undervalued and visionary”.
Its author evidently
thought otherwise. Writing the “bastard book” was a long and wearing process,
and though Dahl had high hopes for it, Scribner’s respected editor Maxwell
Perkins (who had discovered Hemingway and Fitzgerald) died before he’d had a
chance to read it, it didn’t get any illustrations (Dahl had wanted Mervyn
Peake), the reviews were lukewarm and the sales were negligible. Sturrock
recounts how Dahl refused a publisher’s request to print a paperback edition
after his later success: “Why in God’s world anybody should want to paperback
that ghastly book I don’t know.” A signed copy of the US hardback currently for sale contains a typed note dated 1973 from Dahl to the recipient that says, ''I have had a few of them lying around for a long time and it seems to be the one book of mine that nobody wants. I am not sure I blame them.'' He later told a fan who’d written asking where
she could get a copy that “It’s not worth reading.”
I’d have to disagree with
Mr Dahl: it’s well worth tracking down. It’s a shame that it will probably
never be reprinted, but then why would the massive Dahl industry machine bother
with bringing back a flawed, untypical and adult novel just to potentially sell
a few thousand copies, and get a few eyebrow-raised reviews in the broadsheets,
especially if Dahl himself had ended up being embarrassed by it? Better to
protect the brand. That’s perfectly understandable, but still a shame. What’s
more, Sturrock’s biography reveals the existence of several unpublished short
stories in the author’s files, and indeed the manuscript of something called Fifty
Thousand Frogskins, a novel that Dahl wrote directly after Some Time
Never, which never got properly published at all…
Meanwhile, that copy of the UK edition has now joined the shelves at Withnail Books, should anyone be interested...
Just a quick post this time, to show off this new arrival: a large old album full of handmade postcards (handmade in that they appear to be photos from another publication stuck onto blank cards).
E.M.W., whoever he was, was evidently a big lighthouse fan. After a few pages of Lightvessels (ships which act as lighthouses), there is page after page of lighthouse photos, all, as far as I can tell, from the Eastern coast of the US; lots of wonderful names, like 'Seven Foot Knoll', 'Greenbury Point Shoal', 'Stingray Point' and 'Wolf Trap'. There's no Amity Island, alas.
Bruce Robinson (centre). Photo by Murray Close. www.murrayclose.com
It'll come as no big surprise that round these parts we're interested in whatever Bruce Robinson, best known as the writer and director of Withnail and I, is up to. For many years, the answer has been, at least in public, 'not much'. He resurfaced in 2011 with The Rum Diary, a film of Hunter S. Thompson's novel which its producer/star Johnny Depp persuaded Bruce to adapt and direct, and one suspects he still works as an uncredited script doctor on various films, but the lion's share of his time for the past decade and more has been taken up with a massive research project. Bruce Robinson has discovered the identity of Jack the Ripper, and he's been busy writing the Ripper book to end all Ripper books. As long ago as 2003, he was telling the Daily Express: "The 'mystery' is complete rubbish. They knew and I know exactly who the killer was.By 1892 they knew his name unequivocally.My book has taken four years and it will burst the mystery open once and for all.It's the dirtiest political story I've ever come across.The whole thing is a juggernaut of lies. The mystery is a complete invention – there isn't one.When my book comes out people will either think I'm completely barmy or be appalled at how craven and cynical people could be." Fast forward to 2011, and Robinson started mentioning the project in interviews to tie in with the release of The Rum Diary, including this one:"I’ve been working for 14 years on the same book, about the Whitechapel murderer, which is kind of an obsessive passion of mine at the moment. But the problem is, I spent half a million pounds on the research of this book and it’s unbelievably expensive because you can’t just walk into the Metropolitan Police and say: “Okay, get it all out, come on I want to see it…” Because all of those, we remember very well the dodgy dossier over Iraq… well, exactly the same thing applies to Jack the Ripper, all the Metropolitan Police files are all completely faked, they’re all complete bollocks all of them, so it’s a difficult area to be working in. But it’ll take me another two years to finish that." Around the same time, Will Self visited Robinson's home, and reported that an entire converted barn had been given over to a 'Ripper Research Unit', "complete with groaning shelves, bursting filing cabinets and a brace of desks." Though the manuscript had reached 800 pages, Bruce was not ready to publish: "I need it locked down. I don’t want there to be any doubts expressed at all, and for that I need to do more research — and that costs." Since then, there has been no sign of the book. The nearest thing to an announced publication date was this mention in his Random House author bio here: 'For a dozen years he's been working on a history of the Whitechapel Murders which he hopes to publish in 2013 to coincide with the centenary of 'Jack the Ripper's' death...' Evidently, his hopes to publish in 2013 have been dashed, unless there's a Morrissey-style last-minute reveal to come in the next month. Somehow I doubt it. But wait, that little mention is actually a very tantalising sentence: 'to coincide with the centenary of Jack the Ripper's death'. The murders took place in 1888, and of course the Ripper has never been identified... but Bruce's candidate evidently lived on until 1913. So who is it, who has Bruce Robinson unmasked, and how did a jobbing film writer/director get caught up in Ripperology in the first place? From what I can piece together, the chronology goes something like this. Back in 1993, The Diary of Jack the Ripper was published, in a flurry of worldwide publicity. The story of the diary, purported to be by Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick, its discovery, and the vehement arguments about its veracity which ensued could (and have) take up several books. The bottom line is that even the Ripperologists who think it's a fake don't believe the guy who 'discovered' it, and later claimed he wrote it, actually had anything to do with its creation, but they don't have an answer for who did fake it. (It's a long and tortuous tale, brilliantly told in this book.) But back to Bruce Robinson. UK copies of The Diary of Jack the Ripper are prefaced by this quote: "If this Diary is a modern forgery — which I am sure that it is not — and if I were the faker, then I would consider it to have been the summit of my literary achievement." — Bruce Robinson, Oscar nominee and scriptwriter of The Killing Fields and Withnail and I. So, Bruce was evidently impressed by the diary (though you'll note that he leaves open the possibility that it is an old forgery), enough to lend his name to a nice puff quote. Not surprising then that he was soon reportedly attached to a film version of the book, called Battlecrease (the name of Maybrick's Liverpool house). The diary movie was hot property for a while, and there was talk of Anthony Hopkins playing Maybrick, but after several years in development, the Johnny Depp Ripper film From Hell came along, and killed off any chance Battlecrease had of reaching the screen. By this time however, we are to assume, Robinson had uncovered something in his research for the film which he wanted to continue pursuing, even if it was going to take him a decade or more, not to mention half a million quid of his own money. Working with the veteran Ripper writer Keith Skinner, his attention turned (according to a poster on the thread here) to James Maybrick's brother, Michael, a popular singer and composerof the day who also went by the name Stephen Adams. In 1893, at the peak of his success, Michael married his housekeeper, and retired to the Isle of Wight. "By 1892 they knew his name unequivocally," Robinson said. Hmmm. Add in the facts that Michael was a very high-up Freemason, and that he died in 1913 (when Robinson has already revealed his candidate died) then it's hardly proof if proof be need be... but could this be the face of Jack the Ripper?
Here's hoping that one day soon, Bruce Robinson's book is finally published. Whatever his conclusions, one thing's for certain: it'll be brilliantly written. It's also going to be very, very long. In 2008, I attended a recording of Radio 4's The Reunion, celebrating Withnail, at the NFT. Afterwards, I took the opportunity to get the great man's autograph, and ask him when we were going to see his Jack the Ripper magnum opus. "Few more years yet," he said with a big grin, holding up his thumb and forefinger several inches apart. "The fucker's this thick!" UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2014: Well, a book called The Name of the Ripper: One Man's Obsessive Quest to Discover the Identity of History's Most Notorious Serial Killer has appeared for preorder on Amazon. It's coming out in April 2015. Bated breath doesn't cover it.
UPDATE FEBRUARY 2015: No doubt to avoid confusion with the similarly titled 2014 release Naming Jack the Ripper, Robinson's book appears to have undergone a name-change to They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper. The publication date has also slipped to September 2015... UPDATE JUNE 2015: Confirmation that Michael Maybrick *is* Robinson's suspect: read more here.
... and the blurb for the book has been released. It just makes me even more intrigued...
The iconoclastic writer and director of the revered classic Withnail & I—"The funniest British film of all time" (Esquire)—returns to London in a decade-long examination of the most provocative murder investigation in British history, and finally solves the identity of the killer known as "Jack the Ripper."
In a literary high-wire act reminiscent of both Hunter S. Thompson and Errol Morris, Bruce Robinson offers a radical reinterpretation of Jack the Ripper, contending that he was not the madman of common legend, but the vile manifestation of the Victorian Age's moral bankruptcy.
In exploring the case of Jack the Ripper, Robison goes beyond the who that has obsessed countless others and focuses on the why. He asserts that any "gentlemen" that walked above the fetid gutters of London, the nineteenth century's most depraved city, often harbored proclivities both violent and taboo—yearnings that went entirely unpunished, especially if he also bore royal connections. The story of Jack the Ripper hinges on accounts that were printed and distributed throughout history by the same murderous miscreants who frequented the East End of her Majesty's London, wiping the fetid muck from their boots when they once again reached the marble floors of society's finest homes.
Supported by primary sources and illustrated with 75 to 100 black and white photographs, this breathtaking work of cultural history dismisses the theories of previous "Ripperologists." A Robinson persuasively makes clear with his unique brilliance, The Ripper was far from a poor resident of Whitechapel . . . he was a way of life.
And here's another version from the Harper UK site...
For over a hundred years, ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists, and endless volumes purporting finally to reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorised Victorian England.
But what if there was never really any ‘mystery’ at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice?
In THEY ALL LOVE JACK, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history’s most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is much more than a radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend, and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption.
Polemic, forensic investigation, panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson’s inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, THEY ALL LOVE JACK is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts – the so-called ‘Ripperologists’ – to make clear, at last, who really did it; and more importantly, how he managed to get away with it for so long.
