Acquisitions (131): Spies

Graham & Hugh Greene, ed. The Spy's Bedside Book (2006)

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Graham Greene (1904-1991)

Hugh Greene (1910-1987)


Graham & Hugh Greene: The Spy's Bedside Book (2006)
[Hard-to-Find Bookshop, Auckland - 17/5/25]:

Graham & Hugh Greene, ed. The Spy's Bedside Book. 1957. Introduction by Stella Rimington. Illustrated by Nick Hardcastle. London: The Folio Society, 2006.

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Graham & Hugh Greene, ed. The Spy's Bedside Book (1957)

Moscow Rules

There's a wonderful moment at the beginning of the BBC adaptation of the John le Carré thriller Smiley's People when a young British intelligence officer is rung by an old, off-the-books agent who has some important information to impart. They agree to meet. "Moscow Rules," mutters the old man, before hanging up the payphone.

Moscow Rules, it turns out, means assuming that you're in a maximally hostile environment, and that therefore all precautions must be observed - even in the heart of London. Alas, this time they're insufficient. The old Russian general Vladimir is killed before he can pass on his vital tip, and it takes George Smiley another six episodes to disentangle the mystery he's left behind.

"I lost my first Joe," the young intelligence operative laments. "He was my Joe, and I failed him." Fade-out.

There's something intensely atmospheric about the spy game, as authors such as Graham Greene and John le Carré are well aware. Both had worked in British intelligence (as did many of the other authors discussed below), and they knew what an boring, interminable, pettifogging business it could be.

Up at the Smiley level, though, small details can bring about the fall of Empires. The Russian arch-spy Karla is seen walking into exile at the end of the series solely as a result of Smiley's hunches and intuition.

Simon Langton, dir. Smiley's People (UK, 1982)

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Graham Greene, ed. The Old School (1934)

The other day I bought a handsome copy of the Folio Society edition of the Greene brothers', Graham & Hugh's classic anthology The Spy's Bedside Book from the Hard-to-Find bookshop in Benedict Street."Barabbas was a bookseller," as fellow-bibliophile Smiley complains in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

I'd been looking for the book for quite some time. Not so much because I'm obsessed with spies, real or fictional, but because it's the second of two very influential anthologies Graham Greene edited at vital stages of his life, pre-war and post-war. And I am interested in him.

Graham Greene, ed. The Old School (1984)

The first of these anthologies, The Old School, was an important expression of the disillusionment of the postwar generation in Britain.

Graham Greene, ed. The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands. 1934. Oxford Paperbacks. London: Oxford University Press, 1984.

W. H. Auden's contribution begins with the much-quoted sentence: “The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.” As I commented in a previous post on the subject:

For Auden, the Honour system that dominated the minor Public School he attended – the oath that he and all the other children were forced to take to inform on any of their companions they saw doing anything “beastly” or dishonourable – was the essence of Fascism.
Auden was homosexual, and so this did entail, in his case, literally living a lie – a life of deception and false façades, since nothing in his most basic instincts was regarded as “natural” by the potential spies who surrounded him (despite the obvious prevalence of homosexual attitudes and activities in most large British Public Schools).

Marek Kanievska, dir. Another Country (1984)

This equation between public schools and espionage, in particular, finds perhaps its most potent expression in the film Another Country, written by Julian Mitchell and based (very loosely) on the early life of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, which argues that it was the rigid intolerance of their school which led its two young lovers to a life of warfare against the establishment:

An epilogue reveals that Bennett [Rupert Everett] later became a Soviet spy and defected to Russia, while Judd [Colin Firth] died fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Let's take it as read, then, that the British version of spying, at any rate, emanates - albeit by a somewhat circuitous route - from the playing-fields of Eton. One of John le Carré's thrillers is even called The Honourable Schoolboy.

Or, as the poet Gray put it in his eighteenth-century "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College":

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murth'rous band!
Ah, tell them they are men!

Tim Fywell, dir.: Cambridge Spies (2003)

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Stella Rimington (1935- )

The introduction to the Folio edition of the Greene brothers' spy anthology was supplied by a certain Stella Rimington. At first I couldn't work out why, as the piece is poorly written and not particularly well-researched. As an example of just one of her howlers, Rimington has somehow decided that the first edition of the book appeared in 1967, rather than 1957.

This leads her to connect old Etonian Ian Fleming's creation James Bond with the tongue-in-cheek absurdities of the film series (which began in 1962, with Dr. No), rather than the far grittier set of four hard-bitten, Raymond Chandler-inspired novels which contained all that was then known about the already famous OO7.

Terence Young, dir.: Dr. No (1962)

I assumed that she must be a thriller-writer in her own right - and she is. What I didn't guess was that she was also the "former Director General of MI5, a position she held from 1992 to 1996." As well as the first female head of the agency, she was, apparently, "the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment."

Say no more. She must have been some kind of mini-celebrity at the time, 2006, when the new fiftieth anniversary edition of the Greenes' book was issued. And she can, I suppose, be forgiven for being less well-read in the field than mere armchair spooks like me when you consider that she was once a spy-master for real!

The actual date of the anthology, 1957, places it in the intermediate era between 1951, "after the sudden flight of Donald Maclean ... and Guy Burgess ... to the Soviet Union", and 1963, when KGB Colonel and Intelligence mole Kim Philby fled to the Soviet Union. Graham Greene himself eventually provided a preface for Philby's 1968 autobiography My Invisible War.

Given the suspicions already surrounding consummate insider Philby after Burgess and Maclean's escape, even in 1957 Greene must have known that there were more revelations to come in this immensely damaging spy saga.

Following Philby's flight, British intelligence obtained confessions from Anthony Blunt ... and then John Cairncross ... who have come to be seen as the last two of a group of five. Their involvement was kept secret for many years: until 1979 for Blunt, and 1990 for Cairncross. The moniker "Cambridge Four" evolved to become the Cambridge Five after Cairncross was added.

Anthony Blunt (1907-1983)

Given that Sir Anthony Blunt was - as is now notorious - Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures from 1945 to 1972, the degree to which this set of "moles" had been embedded in the English establishment seems quite absurd. Despite their obvious guilt and numerous indiscretions, not one of them was ever arrested or prosecuted - nor were their efforts to convey sensitive information to the Soviet Union seriously curtailed at any point until 1951. Even then Philby stayed active for another decade.

No wonder their old friends in the CIA found it impossible to believe that the British could be regarded any longer as trustworthy allies, when the Old School tie and the fact of being "one of us" seemed to render these ruthless and destructive spies untouchable by any outsider.

More to the point, the British spy story was forced to change tack from the "Clubland heroes" (in Richard Usborne's phrase) who had hitherto prevailed, to the seedy, faceless world of betrayal and compromise familiar to us from the works of Graham Greene (The Third Man) and John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold).

Soviet Postage Stamp: Kim Philby (1990)

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James Fenimore Cooper: The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821)

So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?

- Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick (1972)

The origins of the spy genre are not really easy to pinpoint.

The oldest known classified document was a report made by a spy disguised as a diplomatic envoy in the court of King Hammurabi, who died in around 1750 BC. The ancient Egyptians had a developed secret service, and espionage is mentioned in the Iliad, the Bible, and the Amarna letters. Espionage was also prevalent in the Greco-Roman world, when spies employed illiterate subjects in civil services.

- Wikipedia: Espionage

Sun-Tzu's Art of War "identifies five types of spies that are essential for gathering intelligence and achieving victory":

1. local spies (citizen informants within the enemy's territory)
2. inward spies (recruited double agents within the enemy ranks)
3. converted spies (recruited defectors converted to serve your side)
4. doomed spies (expendable fabricators used to spread disinformation)
5. surviving spies (spies that provide accurate intelligence from the enemy)

Of these, I guess only no. 5 would fit the brief of the contemporary spy novel. They're the secret agents - the others are simply informants, willing or unwilling. I'm by no means sure of the fact, but the first major novel to be concerned directly with espionage would probably be Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, set during the American Revolutionary War.

Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved (1903)

The genre received a definite leg-up in the UK during the period of the German invasion scares, which can be roughly dated from the appearance of George Tomkyns Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) to Saki's just-under-the-wire satire When William Came (1913).

Irish revolutionary Erskine Childers's brilliant thriller The Riddle of the Sands is one of the select few among these books which can really be called spy novels, though - as well as (probably) the only one still worth reading all these years later.

Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907)

Despite its title, is Conrad's The Secret Agent really a spy story? It's a considerable work of literature, and it does concern a spy - although he's more of an anarchist than an information-gatherer. Under Western Eyes (1911) is probably closer to our modern sense of the genre. It, too, is a great novel - sophisticated both in its grasp of Central European politics and of human psychology in general.

The same could not be said of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1913). Written on the eve of the First World War, it set the template for the breakneck thrillers of the future, as I mention in my brief biographical note on its author below.

Peter Hopkirk: The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (1990)

Both befoe and after the Great War, British spy stories tended to play variations on the "Great Game" narrative familiar from Kipling's Kim (1900-01). Peter Hopkirk's succession of books on the subject have outlined the dramatic facts behind these fictions. A whole series of Clubland heroes - Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay, Berry & Co. - had to be dreamed up to engage with the sinister Arabs, Chinks, and Teutons variously conspiring to take over the world.

Eric Ambler: The Mask of Dimitrios (1939)

Eventually, by the later 1930s, writers such as Eric Ambler were getting tired of these unrealistic free-for-alls:

In contrast to most other spy novels published before his, the protagonists in Ambler's novels are rarely professional spies, policemen or counterintelligence operatives. They are usually amateurs who find themselves unwillingly in the company of hardened criminals, revolutionaries or spies. The protagonist usually begins out of his depth, but nonetheless eventually manages to surprise himself as well as the professionals with decisive actions that outwit his far more experienced opponents.

Another, perhaps even more prescient "recurring plot element in his thrillers":

is statelessness and exile: characters who are exiled from their homelands or who face the danger of being exiled and not granted residence in any country.

The Four Suspects
John Irvin, dir.: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979)

Poor luvs. Trained to rule the empire; trained to rule the world. Englishmen could be proud then. They could, George. All gone. Taken away. Bye bye world.

- Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs in John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as dramatised by Arthur Hopcraft for BBC TV (1979)

The quote above is taken not from any online TV website, but from p.107 of Jon Savage's great state-of-the nation book England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991). Savage detects, with icy precision, the relationship between punk bands such as the Pistols and the Establishment icons they set out to deconstruct in such songs as "God Save the Queen", "Anarchy in the UK" and "Pretty Vacant."

Jon Savage: England's Dreaming (1991)

It might seem a bit of a leap to connect this to the spirit of national decline and retrenchment chronicled in the progress from Bulldog Drummond to James Bond to George Smiley and on to Len Deighton's bespectacled nerd Harry Palmer, culminating (for the moment) in disgusting - albeit brilliant - slob Jackson Lamb in the TV adaptation of Mick Herron's Slough House novels.

I don't think it's difficult to argue that the true measure of a nation's morale is to be found in its popular culture, though - and detective and spy stories has been integral to Britain's sense of identity for over a century now. On the one hand, Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey - Establishment through and through, but with a humanising critical edge. On the other hand, Jack the Ripper and Jackson Lamb - they're a long way from pretty, but they get the job done.

Slow Horses: Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb (2023)

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James Bonds (1962-2021)
l-to-r: Sean Connery / George Lazenby / Roger Moore / Timothy Dalton / Pierce Brosnan / Daniel Craig

Authors:

1. John Buchan (1875-1940)
2. Ian Fleming (1908-1964)
3. Frederick Forsyth (1938-2025)
4. Graham Greene (1904-1991)
5. Hugh Greene (1910-1987)
6. Geoffrey Household (1900-1988)
7. John le Carré (1931-2020)
8. Secondary & Miscellaneous

Books I own are marked in bold:

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John Buchan

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir
(1875-1940)

I've already had a few things to say about grim old Scotsman John Buchan here: particularly the immense success of his Richard Hannay books.
The adventures of sinister aristocrat Sir Edward Leithen and gormless Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn also gave rise to large numbers of sequels (and their own omnibus volumes), but they can't compare with Hannay for sheer insane derring-do.
The Thirty-Nine Steps is seen by many as the proto-thriller which set the standard for all that was to come afterwards. Its sequel Greenmantle (1916) - inspired by the exploits of Buchan's friend Aubrey Herbert (rather than Lawrence of Arabia, not yet known to any but a few close associates) - outdoes it, though.
Whatever one thinks of Buchan's reactionary politics, it's impossible to deny the sheer readability of his work: his early work, at any rate - roughly from Prester John (1910) to The Courts of the Morning (1929) - before the dreary maunderings of The Island of Sheep (1936) and Sick Heart River (1941)

[Bibliography]

John Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

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Ian Fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming
(1908-1964)

Ian Fleming has now become almost as iconic a character in his own right as his brainchild James Bond: witness the large number of films which continue to be made about him and his life. It's a bit hard to say why, but certainly he comes across as quite a sympathetic correspondent in the collection of answers to fan letters collected by his nephew Fergus Fleming in The Man with the Golden Typewriter (2015).
As for the ideological assumptions behind the Bond books themselves, in his structuralist analysis "Narrative Structures in Fleming"" (2003), Umberto Eco remarks:

the Bond villains tend to come from Central Europe or from Slavic or Mediterranean countries and have a mixed heritage and "complex and obscure origins". Eco found that the villains were generally asexual or homosexual, inventive, organisationally astute, and wealthy.

Jeremy Black, in his 2005 book The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen, makes essentially the same point:

Fleming did not use class enemies for his villains, instead relying on physical distortion or ethnic identity ... Furthermore, in Britain foreign villains used foreign servants and employees ... This racism reflected not only a pronounced theme of interwar adventure writing, such as the novels of Buchan, but also wider literary culture.

The Bond books certainly portray a state of national decline: traitors and moles abound on all sides; the simple certainties of the Second World War have dissolved into a Cold War haze. All that really remains is the "special relationship" between Bond and his CIA counterpart Felix Leitner, as well as an assortment of Bond girls, roughly one per novel (the ratio in the films is, of course, much higher).
As far as their status as literature goes:

Fleming said of his work, "while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as 'thrillers designed to be read as literature'". He named Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene as influences. William Cook in the New Statesman considered James Bond to be "the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel H. C. McNeile (aka "Sapper") and the Richard Hannay stories of John Buchan. His genius was to repackage these antiquated adventures to fit the fashion of postwar Britain ... In Bond, he created a Bulldog Drummond for the jet age."

While he may lack the cultural gravitas of Chandler, Greene, or Hammett, Fleming is increasingly difficult to dismiss as a mere concocter of thrillers. His Bond, as written, has many real-life echoes and subtleties that the film caricatures lack.

Bibliography

Novels:


1. Casino Royale (1953)
   • Casino Royale. 1953. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.
2. Live and Let Die (1954)
   • Live and Let Die. 1954. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
3. Moonraker (1955)
   • Moonraker. 1955. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1963.
4. Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
   • Diamonds Are Forever. 1956. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
5. From Russia, with Love (1957)
   • From Russia with Love. 1957. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
6. Dr. No (1958)
   • Dr. No. 1958. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1963.
7. Goldfinger (1959)
   • Goldfinger. 1959. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.
8. Thunderball (1961)
   • Thunderball. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
9. The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
   • [with Vivienne Michel]. The Spy Who Loved Me. 1962. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
10. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)
    • On Her Majesty's Secret Service. 1963. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
11. You Only Live Twice (1964)
    • You Only Live Twice. 1964. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
12. The Man with the Golden Gun (1965)
    • The Man with the Golden Gun. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.

Short Stories:


13. For Your Eyes Only (1960)
    • For Your Eyes Only: Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond. 1960. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
14. Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966)
    • Octopussy. 1966. [with 'The Property of a Lady']. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968.

Non-fiction:


15. The Diamond Smugglers (1957)
    • The Diamond Smugglers. 1957. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
16. Thrilling Cities (1963)
    • Thrilling Cities. 1963. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.

Children's Books:


17. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (1964)
    • Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Illustrated by John Burningham. 1964 & 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1968.

Letters:


18. The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming's James Bond Letters. Ed. Fergus Fleming. London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Secondary:


19. Amis, Kingsley. The James Bond Dossier. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
20. Amis, Kingsley [as ‘Robert Markham’]. Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure. 1968. London: Pan Books Ltd., n.d.
21. Pearson, John. The Life of Ian Fleming. 1966. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
22. Pearson, John. The Authorized Biography of 007: James Bond. A Fictional Biography. 1973. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1975.

Biographical films:


23. Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming - with Charles Dance - (UK, 1989)
24. Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming - with Jason Connery - (UK, 1990)
25. Ian Fleming: Bondmaker - with Ben Daniels - (BBC, 2005)
26. Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began - with Joanna Lumley (BBC, 2008)
27. Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond - with Dominic Cooper - (BBC mini-series, 2014)
28. Operation Mincemeat - with Johnny Flynn - (UK / USA, 2021)

Ian Fleming: Casino Royale (1953)

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Frederick Forsyth

Frederick McCarthy Forsyth
(1938-2025)

I first read The Day of the Jackal many years ago, as a teenager, and found it an unforgettable experience. None of the various dramatisations and feature films have really come close to capturing its clockwork perfection, I think.
It wasn't till many years later that I read Forsyth's autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, and found out how much of his work had a firm basis in fact.
Wikipedia sums up this aspect of his career as follows:

According to Forsyth, his turn to writing fiction was born of financial need; he did not think himself cut out to be a novelist. As a boy, he said, he wanted to be "a fighter jock," and when he traded his career in the RAF for journalism, it was "to see the world" as a foreign and war correspondent. As for becoming a novelist, he confessed "I never wanted to be a writer," but wrote his first full-length novel, The Day of the Jackal, because he was "skint, stony broke." He applied similar research techniques to those used in journalism. Published in 1971, the book became an international bestseller and gained its author the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel.

Was he a good writer? Yes, indeed. His brass-tacks, no-nonsense approach to narrative has been influential on most subsequent thriller writers - particularly in the USA. He wasn't a literary writer, mind you, but there are plenty of other places to go if that's your bag.

Bibliography

Novels:


1. The Day of the Jackal (1971)
2. The Odessa File (1972)
3. The Dogs of War (1974)
4. The Devil's Alternative (1979)
5. The Fourth Protocol (1984)
6. The Negotiator (1989)
7. The Deceiver (1991)
8. The Fist of God (1994)
9. Icon (1996)
10. The Phantom of Manhattan (1999)
11. Avenger (2003)
12. The Afghan (2006)
13. The Cobra (2010)
14. The Kill List (2013)
15. The Fox (2018)
16. [with Tony Kent] Revenge of Odessa (2025)

Short Stories:


17. The Shepherd. Illustrated by Chris Foss (UK); Lou Feck (US) (1975 / 1976)
18. No Comebacks (1982)
19. Sharp Practice [audiobook read by Edward de Souza] (1992)
20. The Veteran (2001)

Non-fiction:


21. The Biafra Story [aka "The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend", 1977] (1969)
22. Emeka [Biography of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, President of Biafra] (1982)
23. The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (2015)
    • The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015.

Edited:


24. Great Flying Stories (1991)

Filmscripts:


25. The Day of the Jackal (1973)
26. The Odessa File (1974)
27. The Dogs of War (1980)
28. The Fourth Protocol (1987)
29. The Jackal (1997)
30. The Shepherd (2023)

Television:


31. Money with Menaces (1973)
32. Cry of the Innocent (1980)
33. Two by Forsyth [2 episodes] (1984)
34. Soldiers [13 episodes: as presenter] (1985)
35. Frederick Forsyth Presents [6 episodes: as writer & presenter] (1989-90)
36. Code Name: Wolverine (1996)
37. Icon (2005)
38. Avenger (2006)
39. The Day of the Jackal (2024)

Theatre:


40. Love Never Dies [adapted from "The Phantom of Manhattan"] (2010)

Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal (1971)

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Graham Greene (1935)

Henry Graham Greene
(1904-1991)

I've already had a good deal to say about Greeneland, "the seedy, despair-filled imaginary of his novels," in a previous post.
When it comes to spies in particular, his attitudes varied. Sometimes, as in The Heart of the Matter (1948) or The Human Factor (1978), they're simply overworked bureaucrats, variously plagued by their own personal demons.
At other times, as in Our Man in Havana (1958), the absurdity of the whole subject is played for laughs. This is very much the approach of The Spy's Bedside Book (1957), also.
Perhaps the most interesting of all of these takes on the demon profession of espionage and backstairs intrigue is The Quiet American (1955). The book has been praised for its prescience about the implications of American involvement in Vietnam, but it's really much more than that: Greene shows the tragedy of naïve good intentions combined with colossal ignorance and self-assurance: a blueprint for the past half century or so of failure on the part of the West to give up on its arrogant colonial assumptions.
If you combine this with the atmospheric magic of that quintessential post-war film noir The Third Man (1949), it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Greene is the most considerable author since Joseph Conrad to concern himself with this field.

[Bibliography]

Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana (1958)

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Hugh Greene

Sir Hugh Carleton Greene
(1910-1987)

Hugh Greene may seem an anomalous inclusion in this list. He was, after all, a journalist rather than a writer in the usual sense of the word, and his main area of influence was in broadcast journalism:

After working for newspapers in the 1930s, Greene spent most of his later career with the BBC, rising through the managerial ranks of overseas broadcasting and then news for the main domestic channels.

He served as director-general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969 and, while encountering opposition from some politicians and activists opposed to his modernising agenda:

under his leadership the BBC was recognised to be outperforming its commercial rival, ITV, and was awarded a second television channel (BBC 2) by the British government and authorised to introduce colour television to Britain.

He's here for two reasons: 1/ because he was the co-editor of The Spy's Bedside Book, alongside his older brother Graham; and 2/ because in his later years, after retiring from the BBC, he made something of a specialty of editing anthologies and series of "Golden Age" thrillers and detective stories, which I've listed below.
While he may have been very go-ahead as a broadcaster, as a reader his taste was clearly formed by the pre-war canon of writers represented by his "Bow Street Library," or his even more famous series of "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes."
This is something he shared with his brother, who wrote a play about the "amateur cracksman" Raffles, and made no secret of his admiration of Rider Haggard and Kipling. It's a point-of-view which the two brothers did a good deal to revive during the greyest days of British imperial decline.

Bibliography

1. The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the Sixties (1969)

Edited:


2. [with Graham Greene] The Spy's Bedside Book (1957)
3. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories (1970)
4. Cosmopolitan Crimes: More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes [aka "Foreign Rivals of Sherlock Holmes"] (1971)
5. The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1973)
6. The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1976)
7. The Pirate of the Round Pond and Other Strange Adventure Stories (1977)
8. [with Graham Greene] Victorian Villainies (1984)

The Bow Street Library (The Bodley Head, 1974-75):

James Owen Hannay ["George A. Birmingham"] (1865–1950)
1. George Birmingham: The Search Party (1909)
2. George Birmingham: Spanish Gold (1908)
Joseph Storer Clouston (1870–1944)
3. J. Storer Clouston: The Lunatic at Large (1899)
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863-1933)
4. Anthony Hope: Sophy of Kravonia (1906)
   • Sophy of Kravonia. 1906. Introduction by Hugh Greene. The Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1975.
William Wymark Jacobs (1863-1943)
5. W. W. Jacobs: Selected Short Stories (1896-1926)
   • Selected Short Stories. Ed. with an introduction by Hugh Greene. The Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head, 1975.
John Edward Masefield (1878-1967)
6. John Masefield: Captain Margaret (1908)
   • Captain Margaret: A Romance. 1908. Introduction by Hugh Greene. The Bow Street Library. London: The Bodley Head, 1974.
Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (1865–1948)
7. A. E. W. Mason: At the Villa Rose (1910)
Stanley John Weyman (1855–1928)
8. Stanley Weyman: A Gentleman of France (1893)

Hugh Greene, ed.: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

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Geoffrey Household

Geoffrey Edward West Household
(1900-1988)

My main association with Geoffrey Household's work is watching Peter O'Toole in the movie Rogue Male on television sometime in the late 1970s. It was pretty electrifying stuff. I'd never seen anything quite so visceral as the film's defining scene, where our unnamed hero manages to escape from the burrow he's been trapped in.
Wikipedia says of his writing in general:

Many of his stories have scenes set in caves, and there is a science-fiction or supernatural element in some, although this is restrained. The typical Household hero was a strong, capable Englishman with a high sense of honour which bound him to a certain course of action. He described himself, in terms of his writing, as "sort of a bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad ... Style is enormously important to me and I do try to develop my hero as a human being in trouble."

After pre-war periods spent selling bananas in Spain, exporting printers' ink to the Middle East and South America, and writing children's encyclopedias and radio plays in the USA, he worked for British Intelligence during World War II.
After the war, according (again) to Wikipedia, "he lived the life of a country gentleman and wrote."
It's Rogue Male that really sets him apart, though.

Bibliography

Novels:


1. The Third Hour (1937)
2. Rogue Male (1939)
   • Rogue Male. 1939. Illustrated by Richard Willson. The New Windmill Series, 74. Ed. Anne & Ian Serraillier. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1965.
3. Arabesque (1948)
4. The High Place (1950)
5. A Rough Shoot [aka "Shoot First"] (1951)
6. A Time to Kill (1951)
7. Fellow Passenger [aka "Hang the Moon High"] (1955)
8. Watcher in the Shadows (1960)
9. Thing to Love (1963)
10. Olura (1965)
11. The Courtesy of Death (1967)
12. Dance of the Dwarfs (1968)
13. Doom's Caravan (1971)
14. The Three Sentinels (1972)
15. The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (1973)
16. Red Anger (1975)
17. Hostage London: The Diary of Julian Despard (1977)
18. The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (1978)
19. The Sending (1980)
20. Summon the Bright Water (1981)
21. Rogue Justice [sequel to "Rogue Male"] (1982)
22. Arrows of Desire (1985)
23. Face to the Sun (1988)

YA Novels:


24. The Terror of Villadonga [aka "The Spanish Cave"] (1936)
    • The Spanish Cave. 1936. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
25. The Exploits of Xenophon [aka "Xenophon's Adventure"] (1955)
26. Prisoner of the Indies (1967)
27. Escape into Daylight (1976)

Short stories:


28. The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (1938)
29. Tales of Adventurers (1952)
30. The Brides of Solomon and Other Stories (1958)
31. Sabres on the Sand (1966)
32. The Cats to Come [novella] (1975)
33. The Europe That Was (1979)
34. Capricorn and Cancer (1981)
35. The Days of Your Fathers (1987)

Autobiography:


36. Against the Wind (1958)

Films:


37. Man Hunt [based on "Rogue Male", 1939] (1941)
38. Rough Shoot [based on "A Rough Shoot", 1951] (1953)
39. Deadly Harvest [based on "Watcher in the Shadows", 1960] (1972)
40. Rogue Male [based on "Rogue Male", 1939] (1976)
41. Dance of the Dwarfs [based on "Dance of the Dwarfs", 1968] (1983)

Geoffrey Household: Rogue Male (1939)

•

John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell
['John le Carré']
(1931-2020)

If you ever got David Cornwell onto the subject of himself (and, by implication, his alter-ego 'John le Carré') you'd hear a whole lot of rather pretentious pyschological blather about his confidence trickster father - and how the life of deceit the whole family was forced to lead made David (or was it John?) the perfect candidate to end up as a spy.
This is the central conceit of Errol Morris's documentary The Pigeon Tunnel (2023), as well as the 2016 memoir it's based on. It was also the idea behind le Carré's 1986 novel A Perfect Spy, filmed (in its turn) as a BBC miniseries in 1987.
Rather more significant to any dispassionate account of le Carré, I would say, is his unfortunate contribution to the debate over Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses - and the Ayatollah Khomeini's subsequent fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. While most Western authors and governments thought this an indefensible act of aggression, this view was, alas, not universal:

John le Carré thought the death sentence to be outrageous, but he also criticised Rushdie's action: "I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity"

A few years later, in 1997, there was a rather acrimonious correspondence between Rushdie and le Carré, after the latter complained about being labelled an "anti-Semite" for his refusal to condemn Islamic fundamentalists. Rushdie wrote:

In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, le Carré wrote an article ... in which he eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants.
It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at least in his own opinion, he's the one in the line of fire.

To this le Carré replied:

Rushdie's way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming him to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.
I wrote that there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society. I wrote that tolerance does not come at the same time, and in the same form, to all religions and cultures, and that Christian society too, until very recently, defined the limits of freedom by what was sacred [my italics]. I wrote, and would write again today, that when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie's work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie's royalties.

Strangely enough, this failed to defuse the argument. It's hard not to sympathise with Rushdie's response:

I'm grateful to John le Carré for refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be. He claims not to have joined in the attack against me but also states that "there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity."
A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an "insult," and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.
So, if John le Carré upsets Jews, all he needs to do is fill a page of The Guardian with his muddled bombast, but if I am accused of thought crimes, John le Carré will demand that I suppress my paperback edition.
John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn't absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don't defend. I'd always thought George Smiley knew that. His creator appears to have forgotten.

At this point that old windbag Christopher Hitchens jumped in to add some fuel to the flames, accusing le Carré of "open solicitation of murder". Le Carré complained that:

Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which The Guardian saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job.

After this the last word was left to Rushdie:

If he wants to win an argument, John le Carré could begin by learning how to read. It's true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. "Ignorant" and "semi-literate" are dunces' caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn't dream of removing them. Le Carré's habit of giving himself good reviews ("my thoughtful and well-received speech") was no doubt developed because, well, somebody has to write them. He accuses me of not having done the same for myself. "Rushdie," says the dunce, "does not deny he insulted a great world religion." I have no intention of repeating yet again my many explications of The Satanic Verses, a novel of which I remain extremely proud. A novel, Mr. le Carré, not a gibe. You know what a novel is, don't you, John?

While the exchange as a whole is rather unedifying, it's also immensely revealing. Le Carré simply can't grasp the incongruity of comparing his discomfort at being accused of anti-semitism with the immense apparatus of safe houses and police escorts required to preserve Rushdie's life from fanatical zealots determined to kill him at all costs. One of the latter finally managed to stab him multiple times with a knife as he was about to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm on the 12th of August, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State.
But it's actually far sadder than that. His line about "my thoughtful and well-received speech" is so embarrassing that it makes you squirm. It's almost merciful of Rushdie to mock it directly rather than leaving it hanging there as final proof of the poor mutt's desire to be seen as a "serious thinker" and a "real author" - not just a writer of thrillers.
It's sad because le Carré really is one of the great thriller writers - and possibly the greatest spy novelist - of our time. But he can't be content with that. He wants to be up there in the Senior Common Room, trading gibes with the big boys - the Salman Rushdies, the Günter Grasses, the Graham Greenes - and showing off yet again just how smart he really is.
Sad, too, because most of those "great writers" probably secretly envy him: they'd rather have invented George Smiley and the Circus than created all those elaborate works which so many praise and so few read. When you hear him squaring off with Graham Greene about Kim Philby, or with Salman Rushdie about who can show off the biggest battle-scars, they do try to take him seriously - after all, he did invent Karla - but it's difficult for them. They are smart. They don't have to pretend to be.
I think that must be what went wrong with his work. The Cold War stuff is great: atmospheric, hard-bitten, intelligent, and suspenseful to a fault - and the theme spoke for itself. But after that the fatal propensity to preach and attitudinise gradually possessed him more and more. He - rather than his own fictional creations - became the story.
It's all a bit of a shame. But now that he's dead, I think we can just forget about trying to force our way through those later books, and instead go back to the beginning: to the Berlin wall, and Leamas [Richard Burton] reaching down to hold out a hand to his lover when he could so easily have made it back from the cold to safety.

Bibliography

Novels:


1. Call for the Dead (1961)
   • Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
2. A Murder of Quality (1962)
   • Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
3. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
   • Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
4. The Looking Glass War (1965)
   • Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
5. A Small Town in Germany (1968)
   • Included in: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / Call for the Dead / A Murder of Quality / The Looking-Glass War / A Small Town in Germany. 1963, 1961, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1979. London: William Heinemann Limited / Octopus Books Limited, 1983.
6. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)

Smiley Versus Karla:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

Smiley's People (1979)

7. The Little Drummer Girl (1983)
8. A Perfect Spy (1986)
9. The Russia House (1989)
10. The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
11. The Night Manager (1993)
12. Our Game (1995)
13. The Tailor of Panama (1996)
14. Single & Single (1999)
15. The Constant Gardener (2001)
16. Absolute Friends (2003)
17. The Mission Song (2006)
18. A Most Wanted Man (2008)
19. Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
20. A Delicate Truth (2013)
21. A Legacy of Spies (2017)
22. Agent Running in the Field (2019)
23. Silverview (2021)


Memoir:


24. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016)
    • The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Viking. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2016.

Letters:


25. A Private Spy: The Letters of John Le Carré. Ed. Tim Cornwell. Viking. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2022.

Secondary:


26. Sisman, Adam. John Le Carré: The Biography. London & New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

John Le Carré: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)

•

Richard Usborne: Clubland Heroes (1953)

Secondary & Miscellaneous

Perhaps the easiest way to sum up the themes I've touched on so lightly in the course of this post might be to provide you with a link to a recording of my 1998 poem "God's Spies." That gives a better sense of how I see the interplay between "ordinary" life and how we shape it into fictions than I could in any other way.

Bibliography

Codes:


1. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. 1983. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.
2. Kahn, David. The Code-Breakers: The Story of Secret Writing. 1967. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
3. Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh. Enigma: The Battle for the Code. 2000. Cassell Militrary Paperbacks. London: Orion Books Limited, 2004.
4. Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking. 1999. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.
5. Singh, Simon. The Cracking Codebook: How to Make it, Break It, Hack It, Crack It. 2002. HarperCollins Children's Books. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2004.
6. Urban, Mark. The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes: The Story of George Scovell. London: Faber, 2001.

Deceivers:


7. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain. 2018. William Collins. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.
8. Garfield, Brian. The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books Inc., 2007.
9. Holt, Thaddeus. The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. 2004. Rev. ed. 2007. Introduction by Michael Howard. 2 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2008.
10. Montague, Ewen. The Man Who Never Was: The Story of Operation Mincemeat. Foreword by Lord Ismay. London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1953.
11. Steiner, George. "The Cleric of Treason" [Anthony Blunt]. In George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 178-204.
12. Wright, Peter, with Paul Greengrass. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. 1987. Richmond, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1987.

The Great Game:


13. Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia. 1990. John Murray (Publishers). London: Hodder Headline, 2006.
14. Hopkirk, Peter. On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire. 1994. John Murray (Publishers). London: Hodder Headline, 2006.
15. Hopkirk, Peter. Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Illustrations by Janina Slater. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996.
16. Maclean, Fitzroy. Eastern Approaches. 1949. London: the Reprint Society, by arrangement with Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1952.

General:


17. Morrell, David & Hank Wagner, ed. Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. Longboat Key, Florida: Oceanview Publishing, 2010.
18. Usborne, Richard. Clubland Heroes: A Nostalgic Study of Some Recurrent Characters in the Romantic Fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper. 1953. Hutchinson. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.
19. Watson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience. 1971. Preface by H. R. Keating. A Methuen Paperback. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1987.

David Morrell & Hank Wagner: Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (2010)

•

• category - Mystery & Occult: Fiction

•

Acquisitions (62): A Baker's Dozen of Omnibuses

1930s Vintage Library

•

1930s Bookshelves

A Baker's Dozen of Omnibuses

[Classified during the fourth Auckland COVID-19 lockdown:
August 18-December 3, 2021]:

H. de Vere Stacpoole: The Blue Lagoon Omnibus (1930)


The Golden Age of the Omnibus Edition

Look at that ridiculous list of omnibuses on the dustjacket above - all of them available from the same publisher, Hutchinson!

Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, yes - I have them in my listings below. But as for the rest ... I've read Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood, I think (as well as seeing the Errol Flynn movie), but I wouldn't really know what to say about Gilbert Frankau, Talbot Mundy, Eden Philpotts, or H. A Vachell. And yet they must have been sufficiently famous in their day to merit this kind of star treatment.

There's no doubt that the thirties were the great age of the omnibus edition. I suppose that the need to keep on selling books in the midst of the misery of the Great Depression must have encouraged publishers to adopt this thrifty way of providing the maximum bang-for-your-buck.

The list that I've provided below is purely personal. It consists solely of books I happen to have to hand at home. I think there are enough of them here for you to see the clear outlines of the trend, though:

• There are the standout successes in the field - John Buchan, Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse.
• Then there are the more prestige assemblages of the works of classic authors - Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy.
• Then, a few rungs further down the ladder, there are the 'guilty pleasures' collections of popular contemporary authors.

All three categories are, now, of considerable interest: the last group in particular, funnily enough.

I guess that I've always appreciated the compactness and solidity of these books: my particular favourites are short story collections such as the Sherlock Holmes Short Stories omnibus (1928) or The Stories of H. G. Wells (1927). One thing's for certain, though: the idea of paying once for each series of books rather than individually for every title was clearly a winner at the time, and that has continued to be the case ever since.

The first ten (or first 100) Penguin Books have long been a collectors' fetish. I'd say that a complementary collection for the post-WWI era would be a set of the numerous omnibuses listed on dustjackets such as the one above!

•

This is the third in a series of 'sets' of books chosen by me according to fairly arbitrarily selected rules. They date, respectively, from 2019, 2020, and 2021.

1. F. Anstey. Humour & Fantasy ['Vice Versa', 1882; 'The Tinted Venus', 1885; 'A Fallen Idol', 1886; 'The Talking Horse', 1892; 'Salted Almonds', 1906; 'The Brass Bottle', 1900]. London: John Murray, 1931. [1180 pp.]
2. John Buchan. The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay ['The Thirty-Nine Steps', 1915; 'Greenmantle', 1916; 'Mr Standfast', 1919; 'The Three Hostages', 1924]. 1930. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1953. [1214 pp.]
3. Lewis Carroll. The Complete Works. ['Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', 1865; 'Phantasmagoria', 1869; 'Through the Looking Glass', 1871; 'The Hunting of the Snark', 1876; 'Sylvie and Bruno', 1889; 'Sylvie and Bruno Concluded', 1893; All the Early and Late Verse, Short Stories, Essays, Games, Puzzles, Problems, Acrostics, and Miscellaneous Writings]. Illustrated by John Tenniel. Introduction by Alexander Woollcott. 1939. Modern Library Giant. New York: The Modern Library, n.d. [1310 pp.]
4. Joseph Conrad. The Complete Short Stories ['To-morrow' (1902); 'Amy Foster' (1901); 'Karain: A Memory' (1897); 'The Idiots' (1896); 'An Outpost of Progress' (1896); 'The Return' (1897); 'The Lagoon' (1896); 'Youth: A Narrative' (1898); 'Heart of Darkness' (1898-99); 'The End of the Tether' (1902); 'Gaspar Ruiz' (1904-5); 'The Informer' (1906); 'The Brute' (1906); 'An Anarchist' (1905); 'The Duel' (1908); 'Il Conde' (1908); 'A Smile of Fortune' (1910); 'The Secret Sharer' (1909); 'Freya of the Seven Isles' (1910-11); 'The Planter of Malata' (1914); 'The Partner' (1911); 'The Inn of the Two Witches' (1913); 'Because of the Dollars' (1914); 'The Warrior's Soul' (1915-16); 'Prince Roman' (1910); 'The Tale' (1916); 'The Black Mate' (1886)]. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd., 1933. [1007 pp.]
5. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Conan Doyle Stories [Tales of the Ring & the Camp; Tales of Pirates & Blue Water; Tales of Terror & Mystery; Tales of Twilight & the Unseen; Tales of Adventure & Medical Life; Tales of Long Ago]. 1929. London: John Murray, 1951. [1216 pp.]
6. Kenneth Grahame. The Kenneth Grahame Book ['The Golden Age', 1895; 'Dream Days', 1898; 'The Wind in the Willows', 1908]. 1932. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1933. [412 pp.]
7. Thomas Hardy. The Short Stories ['Wessex Tales', 1888; 'Life's Little Ironies', 1894; 'A Group of Noble Dames', 1891; 'A Changed Man and Other Tales', 1913]. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1928. [1084 pp.]
8. E. W. Hornung. The Collected Raffles ['The Amateur Cracksman', 1899; 'The Black Mask' (1901); 'A Thief in the Night', 1905]. Introduction by Jeremy Lewis. Classic Thrillers. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985. [448 pp.]
9. M. R. James. The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. ['Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', 1904; 'More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', 1911; 'A Thin Ghost and Others', 1919; 'A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories'; 1925]. 1931. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., [1975]. [656 pp.]
10. H. G. Wells. The Short Stories of H. G. Wells. 1927. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1952. [1038 pp.]
11. Oscar Wilde. The Works. ['The Picture of Dorian Gray', 1890; 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories', 1891; 'A House of Pomegranates', 1891; 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales', 1888; 'Lady Windermere's Fan', 1892; 'A Woman of No Importance', 1893; 'An Ideal Husband', 1895; 'The Importance of Being Earnest', 1895; Poems; 'Intentions', 1891]. With Fifteen Original Drawings by Donia Nachshen. 1931. London: Collins, n.d. [1247 pp.]
12. P. G. Wodehouse. Week-End Wodehouse. Introduction by Hilaire Belloc. Decorations by Kerr. 1939. London: Pimlico / Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1992. [512 pp.]
13. P. C. Wren. Stories of the Foreign Legion: A P. C. Wren Omnibus ['Stepsons of France', 1917; 'Good Gestes: Stories of Beau Geste, His Brothers, and Certain of Their Comrades in the French Foreign Legion', 1929; 'Flawed Blades: Tales from the Foreign Legion', 1933; 'Port o' Missing Men: Strange Tales of the Stranger Regiment', 1934]. 1947. London: John Murray, 1953. [655 pp.]

•

A Baker's Dozen of 6-volume Sets
[Classified during the first COVID-19 lockdown:
Auckland, March 25-May 14, 2020]:

1. Joseph Addison. The Works. Ed. Richard Hurd. Rev. Henry Bohn. 6 vols. Bohn’s Standard Library. London: George Bell and Sons, 1901-06.
2. Jane Austen. The Works: The Text Based on Collation of the Early Editions. With Notes, Indexes and Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 5 vols. 1923. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948-1954. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.
3. Richard Barber. Legends. ['Legends of King Arthur', 1998; 'British Myths and Legends', 2000]. Illustrated by Roman Pisarev & John Vernon Lord. 6 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2001 & 2002.
4. William Blake. The Illuminated Books. 6 vols. London: The William Blake Trust & The Tate Gallery / Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991-95.
5. Sir Thomas Browne. The Works. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. 6 vols. London: Faber & Gwyer / New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1928-31.
6. Emily Dickinson. Poems / Letters. ['The Poems of Emily Dickinson', 1955; 'The Letters of Emily Dickinson', 1958]. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson et al. 6 vols. Cambridge, Mass & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998 & 1979.
7. F. Scott Fitgerald. The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald. 6 vols. London: The Bodley Head, 1958-63.
8. Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. Oliphant Smeaton. 6 vols. Everyman’s Library. 1910. London: J. M. Dent / New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928.
9. Henry James. The Novels. Ed. William T. Stafford, Daniel Mark Fogel, Myra Jehlen, Leo Bersani & Ross Posnock. 6 vols. The Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983-2011.
10. Polybius. The Histories. Trans. W. R. Paton. Introduction by Col. H. J. Edwards. 6 vols. 1922, 1922, 1923, 1925, 1926, 1927. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, 1968, 1972.
11. Rainer Maria Rilke. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Rilke Archive, with Ruth Sieber-Rilke & Ernst Zinn. 6 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955-1966.
12. William Robertson. The Works: To Which is Prefaced an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. Ed. Dugald Stewart. 6 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, et al., 1851.
13. Virginia Woolf. The Letters. Ed. Nigel Nicolson, with Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975-80.

•

A Baker's Dozen of 12-volume sets
[Acquired: Paeroa, Monday, September 2, 2019]:

1. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. The Works. Illustrations by A. S. Greig. Ornaments by T. C. Tilney. 9 vols of 12. 1893. London: J. M. Dent, 1895-96.
2. George Gordon, Lord Byron. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 12 vols. London: John Murray, 1973-1982.
3. Giacomo Casanova di Seingalt. The Memoirs: Translated into English by Arthur Machen. Privately Printed for Subscribers Only. 1894. Limited Edition of 1,000 numbered sets. + The Twelfth Volume of the Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova; Containing Chapters VII. and VIII. Never Before Printed; Discovered and Translated by Mr. Arthur Symons; and Complete with an Index and Maps by Mr. Thomas Wright. 12 vols. London: The Casanova Society, 1922-1923.
4. Daniel Defoe. The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings. [The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and other pamphlets (1702); A Plan of the English Commerce (1728); The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, 3 vols (1719); A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); The Fortunate Mistress, 2 vols (1724); Captain Singleton (1720);Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720); Moll Flanders, 2 vols (1722); Colonel Jack, 2 vols (1722)]. 1927-28. 14 vols. [The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, 3 vols (1719); A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); The Fortunate Mistress, 2 vols (1724)]. 6 vols of 12. Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press / London: William Clowes & Sons Limited, 1974.
5. Diodorus Siculus. The Library of History. 12 vols. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935-67.
6. Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Novels. Trans. Constance Garnett. 12 vols. 1912. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1912-1920.
7. Henry James. The Complete Tales. Ed. Leon Edel. 12 vols. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962-1964.
8. Andrew Lang. The Fairy Books. Illustrated by H. J. Ford. 12 vols. 1889-1910.
9. Enno Littmann. Die Erzählungen aus den Tausendundein Nächten: Vollständige deutsche Ausgabe in zwölf Teilbänden zum ersten mal nach dem arabischen Urtext der Calcuttaer Ausgabe aus dem Jahre 1839 übertragen von Enno Littmann. 1921-28. 2nd ed. 1953. 6 vols in 12. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1976.
10. Edward Powys Mathers. The Anthology of Eastern Love. Engravings by Hester Sainsbury. 12 vols in 4. London: John Rodker, 1927-30.
11. Alexander Pope. The Poems: Twickenham Edition. Ed. John Butt et al. 12 vols. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. / New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940-69.
12. Arthur Ransome. The Swallows and Amazons Series. 12 vols. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930-47.
13. William Makepeace Thackeray. The Works. 12 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1881-1882.

Books I own are marked in bold:

•

F. Anstey: Humour & Fantasy (1931)


1. F. Anstey. Humour & Fantasy

['Vice Versa', 1882; 'The Tinted Venus', 1885; 'A Fallen Idol', 1886; 'The Talking Horse and Other Tales', 1892; 'Salted Almonds', 1906; 'The Brass Bottle', 1900]. London: John Murray, 1931. [1180 pp.]


It it weren't for Vice Versa - once described by C. S. Lewis as the only truthful school story in existence - I think it's fairly safe to say that few would now remember anything much about F. Anstey.

Which is a shame, really. Some of his other fantasies (The Brass Bottle, for instance) are almost equally amusing. It's pointless to pretend that they haven't dated somewhat, but then, what does that matter? Why else would one read the work of such late-Victorian, early-Edwardian humourists, whether it be Three Men in a Boat (1889) or The Diary of a Nobody (1892)?

But Vice Versa keeps on going from strength to strength, whether you call it that or Freaky Friday instead!

This book is a good example of the classic thirties omnibus edition: over 1000 pages in length, with a gaudy dust jacket (generally discarded quite early in the piece, unfortunately), and an implicit promise of cheaply-priced riches within.



Thomas Anstey Guthrie ['F. Anstey'] (1856-1934)




•

John Buchan: The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay (1930)


2. John Buchan. The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay

['The Thirty-Nine Steps', 1915; 'Greenmantle', 1916; 'Mr Standfast', 1919; 'The Three Hostages', 1924]. 1930. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1953. [1214 pp.]


John Buchan is undoubtedly one of the three kings of the omnibus edition. Here's a chronological list of those I'm aware of (the ones I have copies of are marked in bold):

The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1930:

1. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
2. Greenmantle (1916)
3. Mr Standfast (1918)
4. The Three Hostages (1924)

The Adventures of Sir Edward Leithen. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1935:

1. The Power-House (1916)
2. John Macnab (1925)
3. The Dancing Floor (1926)
4. The Gap in the Curtain (1932)

Four Tales. 1936. Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1936:

1. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
2. The Power-House (1916)
3. The Watcher by the Threshold, and Other Tales (1902)
4. The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies (1912)

The Adventures of Dickson McCunn. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1937:

1. Huntingtower (1922)
2. Castle Gay (1930)
3. The House of the Four Winds (1935)

A Five-Fold Salute to Adventure. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1939:

1. The Blanket of the Dark (1931)
2. Witch Wood (1927)
3. Salute to Adventurers (1915)
4. Midwinter (1923)
5. The Free Fishers (1934)

They're all 1,000 pages (or so) in length. All of them appeared during the 1930s.

By far the most successful must be the Richard Hannay volume. It's the one you see most often in second-hand shops, and the first two novels (at least) are extremely entertaining. Some have lamented the fact that it appeared before the publication of the last in the series, The Island of Sheep (1936). Others would see that as not much of a loss.



John Buchan (1875-1940)




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Lewis Carroll: The Complete Works (1939)


3. Lewis Carroll. The Complete Works

['Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', 1865; 'Phantasmagoria', 1869; 'Through the Looking Glass', 1871; 'The Hunting of the Snark', 1876; 'Sylvie and Bruno', 1889; 'Sylvie and Bruno Concluded', 1893; All the Early and Late Verse, Short Stories, Essays, Games, Puzzles, Problems, Acrostics, and Miscellaneous Writings]. Illustrated by John Tenniel. Introduction by Alexander Woollcott. 1939. Modern Library Giant. New York: The Modern Library, n.d. [1310 pp.]


This is the first, but by no means the most comprehensive, attempt at a single-volume collected works of Lewis Carroll. Taken as such, it's quite impressive. It's a pity about that Complete Works misnomer, though.

It's important to stress, however, that several alternative approaches to his oeuvre have appeared since 1939:

1. The Works of Lewis Carroll. Ed. Roger Lancelyn Green. Illustrations by John Tenniel. Spring Books. London: Paul Hamlyn Ltd., 1965.
2. The Illustrated Lewis Carroll. ['Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', 1865; 'Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There', 1871; 'The Hunting of the Snark', 1876; A Carroll Selection; Appendix: The "Alice Verses" and their Originals]. Ed. Roy Gasson. 1978. Poole, Dorset: New Orchard Editions Ltd., n.d.
3. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. ['Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland', 1865; 'Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There', 1871; 'The Hunting of the Snark', 1876; 'Rhyme? and Reason?', 1883; 'A Tangled Tale', 1885; 'Alice’s Adventures Underground', 1886; 'Sylvie and Bruno', 1889; 'Sylvie and Bruno Concluded', 1893; 'Three Sunsets and Other Poems', 1898]. Ed. Edward Giuliano. Illustrated by John Tenniel, Lewis Carroll, Arthur B. Frost, Henry Holiday, Harry Furniss, & E. Gertrude Thomson. Avenel Books. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1982.
Of these, Roger Lancelyn Green's is undoubtedly the most capacious, but for logic and ease of use, Edward Giuliano's is perhaps superior. The truth of the matter is that the road of the Carroll collector is beset by pitfalls, partial reprints, revised editions, and oddly themed compilations. That doesn't make it any the less beguiling, however:


Oh, see you not yon narrow road
So thick beset with thorn and briars
That is the path of righteousness
Though after it but few enquire.

And see you not that broad, broad road
That lies across that lily leven
That is the path of wickedness
Though some call it the road to Heaven.

And see you not that bonnie road
That winds about the fernie brae
That is the road to fair Elfland
Where thou and I this night maun gae.


Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ['Lewis Carroll'] (1832-1898)




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Joseph Conrad: The Complete Short Stories (1935)


4. Joseph Conrad. The Complete Short Stories

['To-morrow' (1902); 'Amy Foster' (1901); 'Karain: A Memory' (1897); 'The Idiots' (1896); 'An Outpost of Progress' (1896); 'The Return' (1897); 'The Lagoon' (1896); 'Youth: A Narrative' (1898); 'Heart of Darkness' (1898-99); 'The End of the Tether' (1902); 'Gaspar Ruiz' (1904-5); 'The Informer' (1906); 'The Brute' (1906); 'An Anarchist' (1905); 'The Duel' (1908); 'Il Conde' (1908); 'A Smile of Fortune' (1910); 'The Secret Sharer' (1909); 'Freya of the Seven Isles' (1910-11); 'The Planter of Malata' (1914); 'The Partner' (1911); 'The Inn of the Two Witches' (1913); 'Because of the Dollars' (1914); 'The Warrior's Soul' (1915-16); 'Prince Roman' (1910); 'The Tale' (1916); 'The Black Mate' (1886)]. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd., 1933. [1007 pp.]


Not to keep you in suspense, there's one interesting feature about this very attractive reprint of the short stories of Joseph Conrad. It consists of the omission of one particular story.

And which one is that? Give up? It's 'Falk' (1901), first published in the third of his collections of short fiction, Typhoon and Other Stories (1903).

1. Tales of Unrest [The Idiots; The Lagoon; An Outpost of Progress; The Return; Karain: A Memory]. 1898. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
2. Youth; Heart of Darkness; The End of the Tether: Three Stories. 1902. Joseph Conrad’s Works: Collected Edition. 1946. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1961.
3. Typhoon and Other Stories [Typhoon; Amy Foster; Falk; Tomorrow]. 1903. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
4. A Set of Six [Gaspar Ruiz; The Informer; The Brute; An Anarchist; The Duel; Il Conde]. 1908. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1927.
5. ’Twixt Land and Sea: Three Tales [A Smile of Fortune; The Secret Sharer; Freya of the Seven Isles]. 1912. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
6. Within the Tides [The Planter of Malata; The Partner; The Inn of the Two Witches; Because of the Dollars]. 1915. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
7. Tales of Hearsay [The Warrior's Soul; Prince Roman; The Tale; The Black Mate]. 1925 & 1926. Joseph Conrad’s Works: Collected Edition. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1955.
And why this particular story? I presume that it must be because it involves a mention of cannibalism, and that was considered just a bit too risqué for readers in 1933 (though not, it appears, thirty years earlier, in 1903).

That's only a guess, mind you. It may have been sheer inadvertence. It does seem a rather considered choice of a story to leave out, however. Needless to say, more recent compilations of Conrad's stories have not perpetuated this act of censorship (if that's what it was):


The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Ed. Samuel Hynes. 4 vols. New York: The Ecco Press, 1991-1992.

1. The Stories I [The Idiots (1896); The Lagoon (1896); An Outpost of Progress (1896); Karain: A Memory (1897); The Return (1897); Youth: A Narrative (1898); Amy Foster (1901); To-morrow (1902); Gaspar Ruiz: A Romantic Tale (1904-5)] (1991)
2. The Stories II [An Anarchist: A Desperate Tale (1905); The Informer: An Ironic Tale (1906); The Brute: An Indignant Tale (1906); The Black Mate (1886); Il Conde: A Pathetic Tale (1908); The Secret Sharer: An Episode from the Coast (1909); Prince Roman (1910); The Partner (1911); The Inn of the Two Witches: A Find (1913); Because of the Dollars (1914); The Warrior's Soul (1915-16); The Tale (1916); Appendix: The Sisters (1895)] (1992)
3. The Tales I [Heart of Darkness (1898-99); Typhoon (1899-1901]; The End of the Tether (1902)] (1992)
4. The Tales II [Falk: A Reminiscence (1901); The Duel (1908); A Smile of Fortune (1910); Freya of the Seven Isles: A Story of Shallow Waters (1910-11); The Planter of Malata (1914)] (1992)


George Charles Beresford: Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski ['Joseph Conrad'] (1857-1924)




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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Conan Doyle Stories (1929)


5. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Conan Doyle Stories

['Tales of the Ring & the Camp'; 'Tales of Pirates & Blue Water'; 'Tales of Terror & Mystery'; 'Tales of Twilight & the Unseen'; 'Tales of Adventure & Medical Life'; 'Tales of Long Ago']. 1929. London: John Murray, 1951. [1216 pp.]


Conan Doyle is ahead even of John Buchan in the omnibus stakes. Here are all seven of his best, in chronological order:


The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. London: John Murray, 1928:

1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
2. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
3. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
4. His Last Bow (1917)
5. The The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories. London: John Murray, 1929:

1. A Study in Scarlet (1887)
2. The Sign of Four (1890)
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
4. The Valley of Fear (1915)

The Conan Doyle Stories. London: John Murray, 1929.

1. Tales of the Ring & the Camp
2. Tales of Pirates & Blue Water
3. Tales of Terror & Mystery
4. Tales of Twilight & the Unseen
5. Tales of Adventure & Medical Life
6. Tales of Long Ago

The Conan Doyle Historical Romances. Vol. 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1931.

1. The White Company (1891)
2. Sir Nigel (1906)
3. Micah Clarke (1888)
4. The Refugees (1893)

The Conan Doyle Historical Romances. Vol. 2 of 2. London: John Murray, 1932.

1. Rodney Stone (1896)
2. Uncle Bernac (1897)
3. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
4. The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard (1903)

The Complete Professor Challenger Stories. London: John Murray, 1952.

1. The Lost World (1912)
2. The Poison Belt (1913)
3. The Land of Mist (1926)
4. The Disintegration Machine (1928)
5. When the World Screamed (1929)

The Complete Napoleonic Stories. London: John Murray, 1956.

1. Uncle Bernac (1897)
2. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896)
3. The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard (1903)
4. The Great Shadow (1892)

You'll note that the last two didn't appear till the 1950s, and that the second of them is largely a rehash of the second volume of the Conan Doyle Historical Romances. After that, a number of facsimile editions of the original publications of both Sherlock Holmes and the other stories started to appear:

1. The Original Illustrated 'Strand' Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Facsimile Edition. 1989. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1990.
2. The Original Illustrated Arthur Conan Doyle. Castle Books. Secausus, New Jersey: Book Sales, Inc., 1980.
There were also some even more useful supplementary volumes - mostly edited by the late, lamented Richard Lancelyn Green - in the 1980s:

1. The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories. Ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. 1982. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983.
2. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
3. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. Richard Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Don't even get me started on the subject of annotated editions of Holmes, or annotated editions in general, though. I fear I've had far too much to say on that subject already.



Henry L. Gates: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)




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Kenneth Grahame: The Kenneth Grahame Book (1932)


6. Kenneth Grahame. The Kenneth Grahame Book

['The Golden Age', 1895; 'Dream Days', 1898; 'The Wind in the Willows', 1908]. 1932. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1933. [412 pp.]


While a pretty enough book, this is in some ways a rather frustrating volume. The 'Prefatory Note' (by the publisher, not the author, who had recently died) reads as follows:


It would have been possible to include in this collection Kenneth Grahame's book of essays, Pagan Papers, which appeared in the National Observer under W. E. Henley's editorship and won for him many warm admirers; and also his fantasy, The Headswoman; but on careful consideration it was decided that these two works were in a key so different from The Golden Age, Dream Days, and The Wind in the Willows that their presence here would be a mistake.

That's all very well. But it means that the assiduous collector is forced to hunt down one of the rare-as-hen's-teeth remaining copies of these two books in order to own the whole of Kenneth Grahame's work, so the omission seems to me an even more glaring 'mistake'.

Still, I'm not the one who had to sell the book, and perhaps they were right in judging that the inclusion of a collection of luke-warm essays from the 1890s and a rather macabre fantasy would not have assisted them in reaching a target audience of children and their doting parents.



John Singer Sargent: Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932)




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Thomas Hardy: The Short Stories (1928)


7. Thomas Hardy. The Short Stories

['Wessex Tales', 1888; 'Life's Little Ironies', 1894; 'A Group of Noble Dames', 1891; 'A Changed Man and Other Tales', 1913]. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1928. [1084 pp.]


Apparently the main point of interest for collectors is the varying states of the dustjacket.

[In the first impression, t]he un-cropped portrait of the author (after E.O. Hoppes) is framed and is facing left. [In] the equally scarce second impression, published in March 1928, the same month as the first, ... the portrait of Hardy is now facing to the right, unframed and has been cropped. . ... The first impression is ... uncommon in the wrapper. Collectible.

I'm sorry to report that my own copy appears to be of the second impression, with the portrait unframed and cropped - not that such matters make much difference to me, I'm relieved to say.

There are a few extra stories which escaped the net of Hardy's various collections, and are therefore not included here. For a serviceable set of these, readers were forced to wait for the advent of The New Wessex Edition in the 1970s:

Old Mrs Chundle and Other Stories, with The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. Ed. F. B. Pinion. The New Wessex Edition of the Stories of Thomas Hardy, vol. 3. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1977.

For the most part, though, the volume above remains very useful.



William Strang: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)




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E. W. Hornung: Raffles (1918)


8. E. W. Hornung. The Collected Raffles

['The Amateur Cracksman', 1899; 'The Black Mask' (1901); 'A Thief in the Night', 1905]. Introduction by Jeremy Lewis. Classic Thrillers. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985. [448 pp.]


This one is interesting because, even though the notion of collecting all the 'Raffles' short stories into one volume is such an obvious one - when it was finally done in the 1980s, Graham Greene, who based his 1975 play The Return of A. J. Raffles on Hornung's stories, called it "a splendid idea" - there doesn't appear to have been an omnibus of that type back in the era when such things were in vogue.

There was a book called Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1906), which included "stories taken from The Amateur Cracksman and The Black Mask," but no bona fide collected edition that I can find a mention of before the one listed above, which dates from 1985.

I'd love to know more, though, so if any of you have any more information on the subject, I'm all ears.



Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921)




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M. R. James: Collected Ghost Stories (1931)


9. M. R. James. The Ghost Stories of M. R. James

['Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', 1904; 'More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', 1911; 'A Thin Ghost and Others', 1919; 'A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories'; 1925]. 1931. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., [1975]. [656 pp.]


Once again, I've had a great deal to say on the subject of M. R. James already, and don't feel any need to rehash that here. I guess the main reason for including his classic ghost story collection in this list comes down to one remark in his preface:

In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover, and appending to them some matter of the same kind.

'A fashion which has recently become common' - quite so. He adds that 'a preface is demanded by my publishers, and it may as well be devoted to answering questions which I have been asked', and concludes by saying:

Since we are nothing if not bibliographical nowadays, I add a paragraph or two setting forth the facts about the several collections and their contents.

That pretty much puts it in a nutshell. The omnibus fashion was certainly already strongly in vogue by 1931, when his collection first came out - and the prefaces did tend to be fairly short and sweet - sometimes, in fact (as in the case of Kenneth Grahame above), written by the publisher instead of the author.



Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936)




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H. G. Wells: Short Stories (1960)


10. H. G. Wells. The Short Stories of H. G. Wells

['The Time Machine and Other Stories', 1895; 'The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents', 1895; 'The Plattner Story and Others', 1897; 'Tales of Space and Time, 1899; 'Twelve Stories and a Dream', 1903]. 1927. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1952. [1038 pp.]


Recently I rewrote my Advanced Fiction Writing course at Massey to include a new module called Utopia / Dystopia.

The main text we looked at was H. G. Wells's classic story "The Country of the Blind", though this was supplemented by a number of more contemporary writers, such as Ursula Le Guin and Tina Shaw.

Doing the background reading for this revision reminded me of just how cogent and clear Wells' writing is. And this single volume of collected short stories is really the summit of his art. It's hard to think of any other writer who could match it with an equally varied, innovative and elegant set of stories.

Wells can do it all: slice-of-life social dramas, fantasy and ghost stories, as well as straight SF. If you haven't ever read the book above, all I can do is urge you to remedy that as fast as possible. It's no accident that his stories still continue to be adapted for films and TV after all these years.



Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)




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Oscar Wilde: The Works (1931)


11. Oscar Wilde. The Works

['The Picture of Dorian Gray', 1890; 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories', 1891; 'A House of Pomegranates', 1891; 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales', 1888; 'Lady Windermere's Fan', 1892; 'A Woman of No Importance', 1893; 'An Ideal Husband', 1895; 'The Importance of Being Earnest', 1895; Poems; 'Intentions', 1891]. With Fifteen Original Drawings by Donia Nachshen. 1931. London: Collins, n.d. [1247 pp.]


The fact that there are now much more inclusive single-volume editions of Wilde on the market cannot detract from the charm of this early attempt to put him back in the public eye.

Oscar Wilde. Complete Works. 1948. Ed. J. B. Foreman. Introduction by Vyvyan Holland. 1966. London & Glasgow: Collins, 1971.

Wilde was as thoroughly shamed and erased as a public figure could be, due to his failed libel action against the Marquis of Queensberry, who had accused him of corrupting his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, by "posing as [a] somdomite [sic.]".

But as a writer, his works simply refused to die. For all the denunciations of his writings as decadent froth or pointless assemblages of epigrams, they continued to live in the public imagination, and it's impossible now to ignore his status as one of the truly titanic figures of the fin-de-siècle.

It's interesting to see that he, too, benefitted from the thirties craze for omnibus editions. This one lacks a number of the essays and poems, but otherwise gives a pretty good coverage of his genius.



Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900)




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P. G. Wodehouse: Week-End Wodehouse (1939)


12. P. G. Wodehouse. Week-End Wodehouse

Introduction by Hilaire Belloc. Decorations by Kerr. 1939. London: Pimlico / Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1992. [512 pp.]

This trackless desert of print which we see before us, winding on and on into the purple distance, represents my first Omnibus Book: and I must confess that, as I contemplate it, I cannot overcome a slight feeling of chestiness, just the faint beginning of that offensive conceit against which we authors have to guard so carefully. I mean to say, it isn't everyone ... I mean to say, an Omnibus Book ... Well, dash it, you can't say that it doesn't mark an epoch in a fellow's career and put him just a bit above the common herd. P. G. Wodehouse, O.B. Not such a very distant step from P. G. Wodehouse, O.M.

So begins the introduction to Wodehouse's Jeeves omnibus in 1931, the first in a long line of such which would adorn his great career. One has to admit that he sums up there most succinctly the parameters of what might, in that most Freudian of ages, have been referred to as 'omnibus anxiety':

There is, of course, this to be said for the Omnibus Book in general and this one in particular. When you buy it, you have got something. The bulk of this volume makes it almost the ideal paperweight. The number of its pages assures its possessor of plenty of shaving paper on his vacation ...

A sudden thought comes to me at this point and causes me a little anxiety. Never having been mixed up in this Omnibus Book business before, I am ignorant of the rules of the game. And what is worrying me is this - Does the publication of an Omnibus Book impose a moral obligation on the author, a sort of gentleman's agreement that he will not write any more about the characters included in it? I hope not ...

Before we go any further, I must have it distinctly understood that the end is not yet.

When Wodehouse came to revisit this preface, written some "thirty-five years ago come Lammas Eve", for the reissue of what was now to be called The World of Jeeves (1967), he seemed a bit surprised at the lofty moral attitudes struck by him at the time, particularly the reference to "selling one's artistic soul for gold":

It is true that Jeeves has not yet appeared in a comic strip, but ... one tends to lose one's austerity, and today I should not object very strongly if someone wanted to do JEEVES ON ICE.

And certainly the long list of omnibuses assembled below gives substance to this assertion:

1. The World of Jeeves ['The Inimitable Jeeves', 1923; 'Carry On, Jeeves', 1929; 'Very Good, Jeeves', 1930]. 1931. London: Herbert Jenkins Ltd., 1967.
2. The World of Mr Mulliner ['Meet Mr Mulliner', 1927; 'Mr Mulliner Speaking', 1929; 'Mulliner Nights', 1933]. 1935. London: Barrie & Jenkins Limited, 1972.
3. The Golf Omnibus ['The Clicking of Cuthbert', 1922; 'The Heart of a Goof', 1926]. London: Barrie & Jenkins Limited, 1973.
4. The World of Psmith ['Mike and Psmith', 1908; 'Psmith in the City', 1910; 'Psmith, Journalist', 1915; 'Leave It to Psmith', 1923]. London: Barrie & Jenkins Limited, 1974.
5. Wodehouse on Wodehouse [{with Guy Bolton} 'Bring on the Girls: The Improbable Story of Our Life in Musical Comedy', 1951; 'Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters. With an Introduction and Additional Notes by W. Townend', 1951; 'Over Seventy: An Autobiography With Digressions, 1956]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
6. The Jeeves Omnibus 1 ['Thank You, Jeeves', 1934; 'The Code of the Woosters', 1938; 'The Inimitable Jeeves', 1923]. Hutchinson. London: Random House Group Ltd., 1989.
7. The Jeeves Omnibus 2 ['Right Ho, Jeeves', 1934; 'Joy in the Morning', 1946; 'Carry on, Jeeves', 1925]. Hutchinson. London: Random House Group Ltd., 1990.
8. The Jeeves Omnibus 3 ['The Mating Season', 1949; 'Ring for Jeeves', 1953; 'Very Good, Jeeves', 1930]. Hutchinson. London: Random House Group Ltd., 1991.
9. The Jeeves Omnibus 4 ['Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit', 1954; 'Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves', 1963; 'Jeeves in the Offing', 1960]. 1991. Hutchinson. London: Random House Group Ltd., 1992.
10. The Jeeves Omnibus 5 ['Much Obliged, Jeeves', 1971; 'Aunts Aren't Gentlemen', 1974; 'Extricating Young Gussie', 1915; 'Jeeves Makes An Omelette', 1959; 'Jeeves and the Greasy Bird', 1966]. Hutchinson. London: Random House Group Ltd., 1993.
11. The Clergy Omnibus. Hutchinson. London: Random House Group Ltd., 1992.



P. G. Wodehouse, ed. A Century of Humour (1935)


Furthermore, as well as all of the originals listed above, Wodehouse also found time in the 1930s to edit the 1024-page Century of Humour collection above for those omnibus-aficionados Hutchinson's of London.



Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975)




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P. C. Wren: Stories of the Foreign Legion (1947)


13. P. C. Wren. Stories of the Foreign Legion: A P. C. Wren Omnibus

['Stepsons of France', 1917; 'Good Gestes: Stories of Beau Geste, His Brothers, and Certain of Their Comrades in the French Foreign Legion', 1929; 'Flawed Blades: Tales from the Foreign Legion', 1933; 'Port o' Missing Men: Strange Tales of the Stranger Regiment', 1934]. 1947. London: John Murray, 1953. [655 pp.]

I suppose that it's a question of timing, above all. If you happen to have had the good fortune to chance on Beau Geste or one of Wren's other Foreign Legion novels at an impressionable age, they retain a strange charm, despite their obvious deficiencies as social history.

In any case, that's what happened to me. I had an abridged children's edition of Beau Geste, which I greatly enjoyed, but it was actually Beau Sabreur which really impressed me. The details of barracks life, the saucy love story - it had everything I required in a book at the time, and while I haven't reread it for many years, I suspect I would still find it just as entertaining now.

P. C. Wren: Foreign Legion Omnibus (1928)

P. C. Wren. Foreign Legion Omnibus. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1928.

1. Beau Geste (1924)
2. Beau Sabreur (1926)
3. Beau Ideal (1928)

Like E. W. Hornung, Wren came late to the field of the omnibus edition. His trilogy appeared in that format in the US in 1928, it seems, but the two collections of Foreign Legion stories did not appear till the late 1940s, after the war.

P. C. Wren: Dead Men's Boots: A Second Omnibus (1949)

P. C. Wren. Dead Men's Boots and Other Tales from the Foreign Legion: A Second P. C. Wren Omnibus. ['These tales were originally published in book form in "Stepsons of France" (1917), "Good Gestes" (1929), "Flawed Blades" (1933), and "Port o' Missing Men" (1934) and are here collected in one volume']. London: Gryphon Books Limited, 1949.

Would contemporary teenagers still find them entertaining, I wonder? Possibly not. They're not exactly enlightened in their implicit endorsement of colonial attitudes. But then they're not really recruiting tracts for the French Foreign Legion. On the contrary, they paint it as brutal, oppressive, and the last resort of the desperate. I guess that's why these books provided a myth which has fuelled movie thrillers for much of the past century.

Percival Christopher Wren (1875-1941)

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Aldous Huxley: Rotunda (1932)

Clearly there are many other examples I could have chosen: There's a thousand-plus page omnibus called Rotunda: A Selection from the Works of Aldous Huxley, which appeared in 1932, possibly as a companion volume to his Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology with Commentaries, published in the same year.

W. Somerset Maugham: The World Over (1951)

There are also later compilations such as Somerset Maugham's The World Over: The Collected Stories (1951). That came out in a set of two - or, retitled The Complete Short Stories, three - volumes, however. Including multi-volume collections seems to me to negate the spirit of the exercise, much though I'd like to count them in for their own sake.

1930s Bookcase

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• category - English Prose (post-1900): Alphabetical

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