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.

Ten Favourite Covers: Alfred Hitchcock

In the second entry of my occasional series highlighting ten of my favourite covers (you can read the Childhood Terrors one here), I thought I'd mark the 120th birthday of Sir Alfred Hitchcock by looking at some of his fantastic anthologies.

As before (and perhaps to explain the eclectic choice), the only rule is that the bulk of the covers must come from my own library.

1960

Edited, as a lot of his anthologies were, by Robert Arthur who went on to create my beloved the Three Investigators series (also using the Hitchcock name).  His credit appears in the acknowledgements - "the editor gratefully acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Robert Arthur".

1963

This is the 1977 Mayflower edition and I wish I could remember now where I bought it from.

1963

Part One (which I don't own) includes Daphne Du Maurier's novelette The Birds.

1964

1964

1964

1967

Edited by Peter Haining, who also compiled one of my favourite childhood books The Restless Bones.

1969

1972

1980

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, England on August 13, 1899, to William and Emma, the youngest of their three children.  After attending technical school at 15, Hitchcock worked as a draftsman, advertising designer and writer until his interest in photography led to him to London’s nascent film industry.  He started as title card designer and began directing with Number 13 (1922) which was unfinished and is now a lost film.  After making some films in Germany, he came back to London for his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927).

He quickly gained a reputation as a craftsman skilled in delivering suspense (often laced with dark humour) and though he made films in a variety of genres, he specialised in the thriller.  After moving to Hollywood in 1939, he produced his most recognised works and also became a household name with his penchant for self-promotion and a nice line in gallows humour.  He introduced two television anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955 to 1965) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962 to 1965), directing seventeen episodes of the former and one of the latter and also ‘edited’ a series of popular horror and suspense anthologies.

During his sixty year career, he directed 54 features and pioneered a lot of cinematic techniques that are still applied to film today.  Among these ‘Hitchcockian’ (as they came to be known) touches was the use of the camera to mimic a person’s gaze (making viewers into voyeurs) while critic Murray Pomerance wrote his shots displayed “the full expression of a character's attitude, feeling, knowledge, position, history, and understanding ... in a single brilliant coup”.  By 1960 he’d directed four films often ranked among the greatest of all time: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) (which I wrote about here), and Psycho (1960), while in  2012 Vertigo replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute's best film.

In recognition of his body of work, he won the BAFTA Fellowship Award, the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the Directors Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award.  He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and, in December 1979, received his knighthood.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock, who married his assistant director and close collaborator Alma Reville in 1926 (they had one daughter, Patricia), died of renal failure on 29th April 1980.

me, with the Madame Tussauds model of Hitchcock, London 2003

See other Ten Favourite Cover posts here...

sources:
Wikipedia
The Hitchcock Zone
The Dark Side of Genius, by Donald Spoto

Nostalgic for my childhood (a round-up)

This year I posted a few blogs about things from my childhood with this leader:

Reading has played an important part in my life for as long as I can remember and I want to use this ‘thread’ to discuss books that, in their own way, shaped not only my future reading habits but also my future writing habits. 

This is a round-up of those posts, just in case you missed any of them.

My Three Investigators collection
Seth Smolinske, a fellow Three Investigators fan, has pointed out that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the series first being published - he has correspondence dating from August 1963 between Robert Arthur (the series creator) and Walter Retan (the series editor) discussing the series - and with that in mind I think I’ll hold off until next year my planned “Nostalgic For My Childhood” post about the Three Investigators and also the remainder of my Top 10 re-read - hey, you have to celebrate these things.  In the meantime, this is my collection.

Roger Moore and the Crimefighters, by various
Roger Moore and the Crimefighters was a series of six slim paperbacks, published by Alpine/Everest in the UK through 1977.  A clear attempt to try and cash in on The Three Investigator market, Roger Moore is the Alfred Hitchcock equivalent here, his name a prominent part of the cover whilst he has only has a cameo (as himself) at the end, when the Crimefighters explain their latest adventure to him.

The Adventures Of The Black Hand Gang, by H. J. Press
The stories are great fun and the illustrations still have the power to transport me back in time, making it lovely to revisit them as an adult (whilst trying hard not to guide Dude into finding the clues, but letting him have as much fun with finding them as I did at his age).  My copy, 35 years old this year, still stands proudly on my bookshelf, a little beaten up (at one point, we used it as an initiation to the investigators group Claire Gibson and I were going to set up during the summer of ’78) but still much loved.

The Restless Bones, by Peter Haining
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…”

Bullet Comic
I loved Bullet at the time and treasured my pendant, though it has long since been lost to the sands of time.  I did pick up a few copies of the comic through eBay (where they are sold for considerably more than their 7p cover price) and it was a really nice, nostalgic blast reading through them (and I was amazed at how much of the artwork I could remember).  I have noticed that certain comics lines are having old strips re-published in large format editions and I’d love to see something similar happen for Bullet.

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

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)