The Restless Bones - a bit of nostalgia

Back in the day, when I was at Junior school, we had a thing called The Bookworm Club.  It must have been a nationwide organisation (I vaguely remember a catalogue, though I can’t find any info about it on the Net) but what happened at Rothwell Juniors was that a stall was set up in the hall and you went in and bought any books that took your fancy (there was also something with collecting vouchers and saving them on a card).  I enjoyed it because it was aimed towards me (bookshops in those days weren’t, particularly, kid friendly), I could pick what I wanted and they had some great titles to choose from.

One of my first purchases was The Restless Bones, edited by the great Peter Haining.

cover scan of my copy

The Restless Bones & Other True Mysteries, edited by Peter Haining, is a slim Armada paperback that has no copyright/publishers information in it at all, though I believe it was published in 1978.  The cover was painted by Alun Hood, whilst the interior illustrations were the work of Ellis Nadler.

(left - "The Restless Bones" are discovered - right - "The Thing From Outer Space")

Peter Haining (1940-2007) was a journalist, author and anthologist from Suffolk, who was Editorial Director at New English Library before becoming a full-time writer in the early 70s.  He edited a large number of anthologies, predominantly of horror and fantasy short stories and wrote non-fiction books on a variety of topics, sometimes using the pen names ‘Ric Alexander’ and ‘Richard Peyton’ for crime anthologies.  He won the British Fantasy Society Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2001.

The Restless Bones contains ten stories:
The Restless Bones, The Winged Monster of the Desert, The Terror Of The Dragon, The Mystery of the Loup-Garou, Old Roger’s Vengeance, The Witch’s Familiars, The Call of Darke’s Drum, The Trail of the Devil’s Fooprints, The Thing From Outer Space and The Voice In The Graveyward.  “I have drawn on the large file of material I have collected over the years about events and experiences which are fantastic - but factual” is Haining’s comment on their origins, as he writes in his introduction.

The killer story for me was “The Voice in the Graveyard”, wherein teenaged Richard, in 1964 Wisconsin, accepts a challenge to spend the night in a graveyard, all on his own.  As I write this - a grown man far removed from the nine-year-old me reading it over the 1978 summer holidays, I can still remember the frisson of fear that ran through me when Richard hears a whispering voice plead, “…help us…”

Well presented, with a good range of mysteries, this kept my attention well and steered me further into the path of horror and the supernatural (the devil's footprints being backed up by Arthur C. Clarke, of course).

I'm also proud to say that this book still stands on my bookshelf - it looks a little beaten up around the edges, but it's holdings its own.

Nostalgic For My Childhood - A Formative Read

I’ve written on the blog before about books that had a major impact on my formative reading years (from The Restless Bones, which I wrote about here to my enduring love for The Three Investigators series) and one of them, which I hadn’t seen in ages, was re-published last year.

 This book is for anyone who has shivered at shadowy figures in the dark, heard strange sounds in the night, or felt the presence of a mysterious ‘something’ from the unknown. 

You will meet haunting spirits, screaming skulls, phantom ships, demon dogs, white ladies, gallows ghosts and many more. This book also explains the techniques and equipment of ghost hunting and tells how lots of ‘ghosts’ have been exposed as fakes or explained away as natural events. 

I loved spooky things as a kid and this slim paperback, originally published by Usborne in 1977 and written by Christopher Maynard, was the perfect book for ghost-mad kids like me back in the day.  At that time, as with The Three Investigators, I was the only person I knew who read the book (taking it out of the library, time after time) but through the wonder of social media, I now realise I wasn’t alone.

The book is well illustrated and covers everything from explaining what a ghost is and how they’ve appeared in history, where they’re likely to gather and how literature has presented them, through to a helpful map of a haunted village.  Everything, in fact, for a would-be ghost hunter and this includes a helpful guide for the equipment you’d need to do that too!  There’s a healthy scepticism (it debunks several myths) but it also presents the photographs that terrified me as a child, including the old lady in the back seat of a car (and you can tell me a million times her scarf is over part of the car frame, I still won’t believe you).

The re-print (which is identical to the original, other than the foreword from Reece Shearsmith, another fan) came about when people started discussing the book online.  Anna Howarth, who works for Usborne and was a fan, tells the company website she’d been “banging on” about bringing it back into print for most of the fifteen years she’d worked for the company.  When Shearsmith tweeted his love for the book, she wrote to him and he agreed to write the foreword for any reprints.

Buoyed by public reaction, Anna set up an online petition that quickly sailed past the target of 1,000 signatures and the book was reprinted in time for Halloween 2019, going to number one on Amazon when it was put up for pre-order.

To those of us who remember it from the first time around, it’s a wonderful blast of nostalgia that reads as well as you would hope.  For everyone else with even the vaguest interest in the supernatural, I’d say it’s essential reading.

Enjoy - and beware the things that go bump in the night…

Ten Favourite Covers: More Childhood Terrors

Following on from last years collection of books that caused some gleeful childhood terror, here's another selection.  I hope you find an old favourite here too...

1968

Originally published in 1968 (this is the fifth edition, from 1974), the Fontana series began in 1966 and ran through seventeen volumes until 1984 (1976 was skipped for some reason).  Christine Barnard edited the first four, Mary Danby took over for the rest.

1970

The third in the series, edited by the wonderful Mary Danby (who I was lucky enough to meet in 2012 at FantasyCon in Brighton, when Johnny Mains introduced us), this features cover art by Peter Archer and twelve stories, including work by M. R. James, Christine Campbell Thomson,  R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Danby herself.

1971

Features eight stories (including a Sherlock Holmes adventure,  The Red-Headed League, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), with the Master Of Suspense lending his name (though there's no note on the editor since, sadly, Hitchcock's regular collaborator Robert Arthur had already passed away).

1973

A selection of true-life ghost stories

1973

With cover art by Tom Chantrell, who created my favourite Star Wars poster, this excellent volume by Denis Gifford is beloved by fans of a certain age...

1975

Originally published by Gollancz in 1975 (this is the 1978 Puffin edition) and ably edited by the excellent Peter Haining (who also edited the fantastic The Restless Bones, which I wrote about here), this features a veritable who's-who of horror fiction, including M. R. James, O. Henry, Algernon Blackwood, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Machen, Daphne du Maurier, Fritz Leiber, Joan Aiken, Ray Bradbury and others.

1979

Edited by the prolific Richard Davis (though Pertwee contributed the introduction and epilogue), this contains nine original short stories.

1979

Hardback edition from Hamlyn, originally published in 1977 as a Beaver paperback (see the last Childhood Terrors) as the Beaver Book Of Horror.

1980

Another selection of true-life mysteries.

1980

I was a huge fan of the TV show as a kid (some of it was scary and it was always fascinating) and I have the BCA edition of this, which is the first place I ever read of the Devil's footprints, a story I still find very creepy.



Puffin Books is the long-standing childrens imprint of Penguin Books and was formed in 1940.

Piccolo Books is the children's imprint of Pan Macmillan.

Armada Books was set up by Gordon Landsborough in 1962 as a paperback imprint of Mayfair Books Ltd, focussing exclusively on books for children to buy with the pocket money.  Collins bought it in 1966 as an imprint to publish books for 10-15 year olds under their Fontana Books paperback arm.  Armada ceased in 1995 but I will always love it because it published The Three Investigators.

Beaver was the children's imprint of Hamlyn which is now part of the Octopus Publishing Group, owned by Hachette Livre.

Fontana was the paperback imprint of William Collins & Sons and is now part of Harper Collins.

Magnet Books was the children's imprint of Methuen

See other Ten Favourite Cover posts here...

Ten Favourite Covers: Childhood Terrors

Thanks to my Australian chum Imelda Evans, I was looking at Annabel Smith’s website recently and noticed she did a regular Top Tens feature.  I thought it was a great idea and decided to adapt it for my own blog but rather than show (for example) my Top Ten Travel Books, I’d skew it slightly differently.  My only rule is that the bulk of the covers must come from my own library.

This first entry looks at books which caused a bit of (gleeful) childhood terror.  I hope you see an old favourite here too…

1962

Published by Puffin in 1967, mine is the 1968 edition.  Alfred Hitchcock had little involvement with the anthologies that bore his name and one of his frequent editors, as is the case here, was Robert Arthur (who created the Three Investigators series) whose credit appears in the acknowledgements - "the editor gratefully acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Robert Arthur".

1971

I have the 1978 edition (as pictured), which I got - along with The Restless Bones - from the Rothwell Juniors Book Club.  A collection of true-life tales, this was my first introduction to the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

1972

A fantastic entry in the long-running series, this 1984 edition features cover art by Peter Archer who also produced the cover for the 'a' and 'b' format Three Investigator paperbacks.  I was lucky enough to meet Mary Danby in 2012 at FantasyCon in Brighton, when Johnny Mains introduced us and she was as lovely as I'd always hoped she would be.

1975

This was originally published by Pan in 1971.

1977

Another true stories collection (though it does look at the likes of Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde and Frankenstein), this takes in historical figures like Vlad the Impaler, Countess Bathory, wolf children, Rasputin and The Elephant Man.  I loved it.  It was re-printed in 1979 as The Hamlyn Book Of Horror.  Daniel Farson, who led a very interesting life, was the grand-nephew of Bram Stoker.

1978

One of my favourite childhood books (I wrote about it before here), this also featured true stories and the last - The Voice In The Graveyard - used to scare the living daylights out of me.  Even now, 40 years later and far removed from the nine-year-old me reading it over the 1978 summer holidays, I can still remember the frisson of fear as a whispering voice pleaded, “…help us…”

1978

More from Daniel Farson and more true stories to terrify nine-year-old me.  Fantastic fun!

1979

More from the wonderful Ms Danby, with another great cover by Peter Archer.

1979

Originally published by Gollancz in 1977, this is another sterling anthology from Peter Haining complete with stories by M. R. James (Lost Hearts), Algernon Blackwood (The Attic), Joan Aiken (The Looking Glass Tree), Robert Bloch (Sweets To The Sweet) and Ray Bradbury (The October Game) amongst others.

1983

Not part of my library unfortunately (I found out about it through 'Dem Bones' at the excellent Vault Of Evil), though I plan to rectify that in the near future not only for the stories but because I love the combination of that incredible cover art with the warning 'These stories are NOT to be read by the very young'.



Puffin Books is the long-standing childrens imprint of Penguin Books and was formed in 1940.

Piccolo Books is the children's imprint of Pan Macmillan.

Armada Books was set up by Gordon Landsborough in 1962 as a paperback imprint of Mayfair Books Ltd, focussing exclusively on books for children to buy with the pocket money.  Collins bought it in 1966 as an imprint to publish books for 10-15 year olds under their Fontana Books paperback arm.  Armada ceased in 1995 but I will always love it because it published The Three Investigators.

Beaver was the children's imprint of Hamlyn which is now part of the Octopus Publishing Group, owned by Hachette Livre.


There will be more Ten Favourite Cover posts...

Star Wars released (36 years ago today)

1977: Star Wars fever hits Britain
Thousands of people are flocking to cinemas in the UK to watch the long-awaited blockbuster, Star Wars - a movie which is already setting US box offices alight.  Bracing the cold weather, young and old queued from 0700 GMT in London at the Dominion, and Leicester Square cinemas, to snatch up non-reserved tickets which are otherwise booked until March.

Star Wars, which was first released in America seven months ago, has taken audiences by storm and outstripped last year's blockbuster Jaws to gross $156m (£108m) at the box office.

Carrie Fisher, Sir Alec Guiness and little known Harrison Ford star in this fairytale set in space.

Produced by Gary Kurtz, written and directed by George Lucas who directed American Graffitti, the U-classified sci-fi film is a classic epic of good versus evil.

It has enthralled audiences under a dazzle of special effects with wizards, heroes, monsters in "a galaxy far, far away".

This is part of an article originally published by the BBC on December 27th 1977 (full article on this link)

photo by Klaus Hiltscher, printed under creative commons from his Flickr 

It is impossible today to over-state just how big a deal "Star Wars" was back then.  I didn't see the film until early 1978 (you literally couldn't get a ticket when it first opened), but it absolutely blew me away and remains my favourite film of all time.

I was 8 in 1977 and I'd seen enough in my comics (Look-In especially) and on the TV that I knew this was a film I had to see.  During the summer I collected the trading cards (which always came in wax packets with bubble-gum that lost its taste within a minute or so of chewing), I got the comics, I got the making-of magazine and I read the novelisation.

In 1977, my "Star Wars" experience therefore consisted pretty much of my imagination, spurred on by stills and clips (Clapperboard was another good source of these), with even the Palitoy figures not appearing until summer of the following year.

And with that in mind, here's a trawl through stuff that meant a lot to me, before I got to see the film that would go on to mean much more to me.

The Star Wars novelisation was published in the UK by Sphere Books on September 8th 1977 as "by George Lucas" (though it was actually written by Alan Dean Foster).  The artwork was by John Berkey, who apparently never saw the film.

I read the novel eagerly, though I doubt I understood a lot of it and I certainly didn't envisage it in my head as it played out for me much later on the cinema screen.

The "16 pages of fabulous colour" photos were great though!

The novel follows the shooting script - Luke is Blue 5, rather than Red 5 - and therefore includes scenes that were never in the film, including Biggs, Camie & Deak at Tosche Station and Jabba meeting Solo at Docking Bay 94.  Jabba is described as being 'a great mobile tub of muscle and suet topped by a shaggy scarred skull'.






The trading cards, produced by Topps, were launched in 1977.  Each waxed pack contained seven cards (all of which had blue borders with stars) and a stick of chewing gum, with 66 cards in the set.  Some of the card backs had movie info, some related the story, some had other images which made up a bigger, jigsaw-style picture.  I loved the cards and still have my 'almost-complete' collection today.

1978 would bring much more - so much more - but I was a happy kid in 1977.  And as an equally happy, young-at-heart 44 year-old, I'm going to sit down today with Dude (who's 8) and re-watch the film.

May The Force Be With You!

The Latchkey Children, by Eric Allen

Another book review and an unusual one this, since the short novel in question is 50 years old this year, not horror and is probably best classed as a childrens book (there was no YA then!).  It was purchased after spotting it (and vaguely recognising the title) when I was browsing on ebay.

The Latchkey Children of the title are a gang of kids (who are around 11 years old or so), most of whom live on the St Justins Estate on the Thames Embankment and meet in the park after school.  Their focal point is an old tree so when the council decides to get rid of it - and replace it with a concrete railway engine (“but that’s for kids!”) - the children decide to mount a protest.  The story follows them on this protest - and in various adventures along the way.

Although this was originally published in 1963, it hasn’t really dated at all (aside from some phrases the kids use - “I say!” - and the currency) and could easily apply to the childhoods of 70s and 80s kids (ie, me).  It treats social issues head-on - Mr Jellinek, the Estate Manager, was in a prison camp before escaping to this country - and there are kids of various races and religions about, most of them treated fairly normally, though the kids do overhear racist comments.  Initially, the gang consists of four friends - Janette Stone (known as Etty), William Benjamin (known as Billandben), Gordon Frogley (known as Froggy) and J. J. Greavy (known as Goggles) - with Goggles the unofficial leader (though he lives across the river, with his aunt and is very conscious of his loner status).  The group later expands to five with the arrival of Duke Ellington Binns, who helps Froggy escape from bullies and slowly becomes his friend - Binns likes England well enough but misses - and talks often of - his hometown Port Of Spain, in Trinidad.  The group has a rival gang, the kids from the Peabody Estate, led by Bletchley who does his best to cause as much trouble as possible (he’s currently on probation for putting a box on a railway line).

When the kids go into London to start the protest, Goggles goes to see his MP whilst Etty and Billandben, failing at seeing the local council, take a trip up to Hampstead Heath.  Which attempting to rescue a cat there, they are helped by Malcolm McCrae, a TV reporter and they get him involved in the fight too.  Things soon escalate, until Duke’s Dad gets involved and the resulting industrial action which spreads across London highlights the fight for the tree and the novel ends on a hopeful note.  It also ends with a sense of melancholy too, as they all realise that the end of the summer holidays means them going to new schools and making new friends, thus having everything they know change.  The last exchange, between Goggles and Froggy, is at once funny and touching and it’s the perfect way to leave the story.

This is a terrific book which, even though it’s clearly for children (my edition is the 1982 Heinemann hardback), it has a refreshing attitude both in terms of how the kids are with each other (they make friends and fall-out and none of it feels contrived) and also that it doesn’t treat the adults are complete idiots.  Certainly, the kids are in control of the story but most of them make the philosophical connection that they can’t really engender change until they’re older as most adults won’t listen to them.  The dialogue has a natural pace to it, the amusing moments are played well but so are the more poignant ones, especially those of Goggles and Etty, the two characters who seem to have more of the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Briskly written, whilst never short-changing dialogue or description, this has a good pace throughout and several brilliant set pieces and you really feel for the kids and their plight.  The book also contains plenty of line drawings from Charles Keeping (he also did the cover art), though some of the illustrations make the characters look quite grotesque.  Overall, this is a great read and I’m really glad that I not only found it but also that I took a chance on it.  Well worth a read.

nb - The title comes from the term given to children who go home from school to an empty house (wearing the keys on a chain around their neck) because their parent or parents are at work.  Whilst it was originated during the Second World War, it came of age in the 60s and beyond.

As a kid who went to the Saturday morning pictures in the 70s, there were parts that I thought would have made an excellent Childrens Film Foundation movie but it actually appeared in two incarnations on ITV.  The first was as a two-parter under the “Books To Enjoy” adaptions series in 1970 and then again, as a six-part series, in 1980.  I only have vague memories of the latter (none of them enough for situations in the book to ring any bells) aand whilst researching this on Google, I think some of that might come from the Look-In cover I found.  Interesting to see that the series started the careers of Indra Ove and Kwame Kwei-Armah.

Nostalgic for my childhood - The Restless Bones

Reading has played an important part in my life for as long as I can remember and when I was at Junior school, we had a thing called The Bookworm Club.  It must have been a nationwide organisation (I vaguely remember a catalogue, though I can’t find any info about it on the Net) but what happened at Rothwell Juniors was that a stall was set up in the hall and you went in and bought any books that took your fancy (there was also something with collecting vouchers and saving them on a card).  I enjoyed it because it was aimed towards me (bookshops in those days weren’t, particularly, kid friendly), I could pick what I wanted and they had some great titles to choose from.

I have several books I want to discuss and I will do so over the coming weeks (though the thought of quite how I’m going to condense my love - and the history - of The Three Investigators into a single post is slowly and quietly driving me insane).  Each one will be included because, in their own way, they shaded not only my future reading habits but also my future writing habits and they often have fantastic covers.

“The Restless Bones & Other True Mysteries”, edited by Peter Haining, is a slim Armada paperback that has no copyright/publishers information in it at all, though I believe it was published in 1978.  The cover was painted by Alun Hood, whilst the interior illustrations were the work of Ellis Nadler.

(left - "The Restless Bones" are disovered - right - "The Thing From Outer Space")

Peter Haining (1940-2007) was a journalist, author and anthologist from Suffolk, who was Editorial Director at New English Library before becoming a full-time writer in the early 70s.  He edited a large number of anthologies, predominantly of horror and fantasy short stories and wrote non-fiction books on a variety of topics, sometimes using the pen names ‘Ric Alexander’ and ‘Richard Peyton’ for crime anthologies.  He won the British Fantasy Society Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2001.

“The Restless Bones” contains ten stories:
The Restless Bones, The Winged Monster of the Desert, The Terror Of The Dragon, The Mystery of the Loup-Garou, Old Roger’s Vengeance, The Witch’s Familiars, The Call of Darke’s Drum, The Trail of the Devil’s Fooprints, The Thing From Outer Space and The Voice In The Graveyward.  “I have drawn on the large file of material I have collected over the years about events and experiences which are fantastic - but factual” is Haining’s comment on their origins, as he writes in his introduction.

The killer story for me was “The Voice in the Graveyard”, wherein teenaged Richard, in 1964 Wisconsin, accepts a challenge to spend the night in a graveyard, all on his own.  As I write this, on a sunny afternoon in July 2013, far removed from the nine-year-old me reading it over the 1978 summer holidays, I can still remember the frisson of fear that ran through me when Richard hears a whispering voice plead, “…help us…”

Well presented, with a good range of mysteries, this kept my attention well and steered me further into the path of horror and the supernatural (the devil's footprints being backed up by Arthur C. Clarke, of course).

I'm also proud to say that this 35 year old book still stands on my bookshelf - it looks a little beaten up around the edges, but it's holdings its own.

Thanks to Ben at Breakfast In The Ruins for some of the images, plus Wikipedia for the basis of the Haining biography

Disney Buys Lucasfilm

The news broke yesterday that Disney has bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas for $4.05bn (roughly £2.5bn), taking on all of the related companies such as Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), LucasArts and Skywalker Sound.  Lucas was already planning to step down from the company and had positioned Kathleen Kennedy (who produced a lot of Steven Spielberg films through the 80s and 90s, including the Indiana Jones films) to take over and she will continue to run Lucasfilm, with George taking on a creative consultant role for new Star Wars films.

Yes, new Star Wars films.  The plan is for a new one, episode seven, to be released in 2015 which will be followed by episodes eight and nine, than a new movie every two or three years.

Lucas was quoted as saying “It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of film-makers”.  A treatment for episode seven has already been written by Lucas, with outlines in place for episodes eight and nine.

In Skywalking, Dale Pollock’s excellent biography of George Lucas, the evolution of the Star Wars saga is thoroughly detailed and my understanding of it was that seven, eight and nine would deal with the heroes of the original trilogy, after the Empire had been vanquished.  I can’t really see them rounding up the original cast and the “expanded universe” has worked on events after “Return Of The Jedi” (including the Timothy Zahn novels that kicked everything back off in the early 90s), so I’m not sure what they’ll be about but I imagine that there’ll be a lot of CGI bangs, bashes and crashes.

I should state that I’m a fan of the original trilogy.  It opened in this country in December 1977, so I would have probably seen it in early 1978 making me eight or nine, the perfect age to fall in love with this spectacular space saga.  And I did fall for it, in a big way, to the extent that I still rank “Star Wars” as my favourite film and I’m now busy collecting vintage toys to share with my own little boy.

Does this news worry me?  When I saw the article yesterday, that thought did cross my mind.  I wasn’t a fan of the prequels (I didn’t like Jar Jar Binks, I wasn’t overly impressed with the CGI onslaught) but then, was I really the target audience?  Did George owe it to me and my generation to make a film that we wanted, rather than a film that would appeal to everyone including kids who weren’t even thought of when the original films came out?  At the time, I did feel like that, I felt like he’d sold out the whole saga, filling it with stupid characters and events that almost derided the quality of the original trilogy.  But did it?  Of course, the answer is no - I still love the first three films, the first three films still exist (in various different formats) and nothing can remove that.  Does it worry me that people associate Star Wars with Darth Maul or the Clone Troopers now (well, the latter does because I love the look of the Stormtroopers, but hey…)?  Not any more because the prequels were there for other people, the kids who’d missed out the first time and could buy into the hoopla this time around.

I will admit to a vague worry that since Disney now has it, the film will become more of a testing ground for merchandising opportunities and that is a concern, but all they’ll do is exploit what’s there.  Imagine “Return Of The Jedi” being made today, the gallery of grotesques in Jabba’s Palace would be a goldmine for soft toy manufacturers (whereas at the time, we had the Palitoy figures to collect - and collect them we did).

My love for “Star Wars” hasn’t been diminished by the prequel trilogy, the expanded universe or the Clone Wars cartoon and so it won’t be diminished by whatever comes in the future.  But how about, for a change, a fan of the original trilogy looks for the positive?  This news means that there will be at least three more Star Wars films made and I’ll watch them, even if they don’t touch me in the same way.  But I’ll be able to take Dude to the cinema to see them, we’ll be able to share that universe together (and he will obviously know the history of it all too) and if it opens up a whole new generation of fans, then my beloved Original Trilogy will live on even longer - and that can’t be a bad thing.

source - BBC News

Nostalgia alert - An 80s comic, found!

As regular readers of this blog might have noticed, I am something of a nostalgic (for further evidence, why not check here, here or here) and even though I very much live in the present (my 6-year-old son sees to that), I do like looking back. With eBay, 2nd hand bookshops and some terrific retro-shops that are springing up, it’s now easier than ever to put your hands on stuff you had through your childhood but have long-since-lost. This blog post is about one such item.

Years back (I now know it to have been 1980, when I was 11), I read a comic/magazine (a full version of a story) and really enjoyed it. I’ve been trying to remember key details for the last ten years or more, but all I had to go on was that it featured an octopus, in a skyscraper in New York and a character called Dum-Dum Dabroda. I knew that the artist was the same craftsman who drew “The Hitman” in Bullet, but that was as far as I got (I didn’t know his name).

Every now and again, I’d get inspired to investigate and search with what I remembered but nothing ever came up. Then, one day last week, I was looking up something about Bullet, a terrific comic from my early childhood and saw the phrase Red Dagger Books. Intrigued, I clicked the link and vague memories were stirred. I scanned down the titles and there, issue number nine, was my quest.

Terror In The Tall Tower was published in 1980, a compilation of the adventure which first appeared in Wizard Comics from issue 28, 28th September 1974 through to 28th January 1975. The artwork was by Denis McLoughlin and the cover art was by Ian Kennedy.

This is the Ballard Building, situated in Downtown Manhattan, New York, USA. It looked alright but what nameless terror lurks behind its walls? A terror that has kept the building empty for years! Young Don Ballard must find out what brings fear to its rooms and corridors - for Don has become the owner of The Ballard Building.

I got the octopus and the skyscraper right, I remembered some of the images as I saw them but I got the villain’s name wrong - he’s Dum- Dum Taborda, not Dum-Dum Dabroda.

Cover art from the October 26th 1974 issue of Wizard, by Denis McLoughlin

All excited, I immediately checked eBay and there was a copy on there, so I put in my bid and spent an anxious few days waiting to see if I’d won. I had, it was delivered to me earlier this week and I’m reading it now. I’m not going to lie and say it’s great literature but blimey, it’s bloody good fun!

(with thanks to Kelly’s Comics and the British Comics Art blog, for background information)

About books (childhood edition)

I’ve been remiss in not posting to this blog more often - we went on holiday, to Caister, the week after the riots (re: lawless opportunism) and I found two terrific bookshops that I intend to blog about (18 books purchased over the course of a week, I loved it), but time hasn’t been on my side.

However, to distract from work issues and to further procrastinate from writing anything, I’ve decided to update my Goodreads.com account. Up until now, for the most part, I only posted books I’d read and/or reviewed over the past 9 years (when I started recording my reading habits). Now, I’ve decided to go back and add books on my shelves (that I’ve read) because, hey, it seemed like a good idea when I started it.

Two things have struck me. One is that the availability of Penguin cover scans, from the 80s and 90s, is dire. I appear to be the only person in the whole world who’s read Reynold Dodson’s “Urban Renewal” (I liked it a lot), because it has no reads/reviews/stars on Goodreads and I can’t find the cover image of the edition I have anywhere.

The second is that books from my childhood are slipping away. As a massive Three Investigator fan, I discovered - in the late 70s - a series of books about Roger Moore and The Crimefighters (published by Everest Books through 1977), but when I read them, I wasn’t overly impressed and gradually lost my copies as the years went by. I found one - “The Siege” - on eBay and bought it a couple of years ago, though I haven’t re-read it yet. There were no covers on Goodreads and only the most basic of information, so I checked around, found out some info and beefed the profiles a bit.

Sadly, I also had to do that for “The Restless Bones” (Armada Books, 1978), by Peter Haining, a collection - the cover of which drew me in immediately - of ten true-life tales that was one of the first spooky books I ever owned (purchased, for 50p, from the school Bookworm club). I’m writing this 33 or so years after I first read them - though I went back through the book constantly as a kid - and yet some of them, especially the title story, still stick vividly in my mind. Re-reading the contents page (the book’s been on my shelves forever, but it’s not something I often take out to look at), I saw there’s also "The Trail Of The Devil's Footprints", based around the same incidents that haunted me so badly from the Arthur C Clarke series.

But reading the title of the last story sent a delicious chill down my back because the kid-version-of-me, nine years old and laying in bed, reading by torchlight, was forever terrified by “The Voice In The Graveyard” and its plaintive cries of “please help us…” I like to think that maybe it’d still be quite chilling to read, even now, even after all the horror novels I’ve read since.

I’m a little sad that the book is dropping out of sight, but re-assured also that - in some small way, by updating info of it online - I can try and keep it visible for a little longer. It’s also very heartening to hold it, proud of my 9-year-old self for keeping his once-favourite book in such immaculate condition after 33 years. I’ll bet eBook editions don’t last that long!

Long live the paperback!

(just in case you're interested, all of my reviews are here - http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/640719.Mark_West)