The Injured Party

Title: The Injured Party

Author: Elaine Dundy

Year of publication: 1974, Quartet edition 1976

Back cover blurb: 'AND YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT PROBLEMS
   Rita's parents are snobs who don't want to know her.  Her best friend is gay, arrogant and mischevious.  Her husband is a smarmy, two-dimensional sadist.  Or was, until she killed him.
   And Rita?  She's naive, impetuous, well-meaning, fun-loving and good-looking: qualities which land her in big trouble every time - at work, at parties, in bed and in jail.
   That's where she is now, a women's reformatory where she's in bigger trouble than ever.  First there was the affair with the muscular lady dressed like a lumberjack, then with the schizophrenic junkie, and now she's flirting with the warden himself...'

Quick flick reveals: Elaine Dundy was the author of The Dud Avocado, a bestseller inspired by her time living in post-war Paris, and which is now considered something of a classic.  She was also the wife of Kenneth Tynan.  Wikipedia happily informs me of the role 'flagellation' played in their relationship (See below).
   The Injured Party is her third and last novel.  Seems to be a comic story set in that most hilarious of locations, a women's prison. I couldn't spot any actual jokes, however, and just a brief look at it took me to a dark chamber of the soul.

Random paragraph: '"Why don't you stop fooling around with words like 'icing' and face it that the only way you can get any pleasure from sex with me is to administer pain upon me; to see me being tortured; and to stare at the marks you made on me by my being tortured."'


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The Searing

Title: The Searing

Author: John Coyne

Year of publication: 1980, Fontana edition 1981.

Back cover blurb: 'The village was new, modern, an architect's dream.  The people were young, affluent and successful.  But the creeping horror that tore the community apart was as old as the hills around them.'

Quick flick reveals: John Coyne had a number of hit horror novels in the late 70s/early 80s, before turning his back on the genre and writing about golf instead.  His work is generally compared to Stephen King, but this seems to also have something of a John Wyndham/Ira Levin flavour to it.  I can't quite get my head around the concept but it seems to involve killer orgasms.

Random paragraph: 'The girl stopped, shocked by Cindy's behaviour, and shouted out, asked if Cindy was okay, and then she headed towards Cindy, saying she would get help.  She reached out, as if to touch Cindy, and then she was stuck.  Her head felt the crushing attack, the whacking across the back of her skull, and she fell into the thick leaves, her blond head ricocheting off the huge stones, her brains spilling out onto the forest floor.'


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Prehistoric Germ Warfare

Title: Prehistoric Germ Warfare

Author: Robin Collyns

Year of publication: 1980

Back cover blurb: EARTH - The Test-Tube Planet
  'I believe that mankind did not evolve from ape-like creatures but that we were brought to this planet billions of years after our bodies had been altered by genetic engineering on other planets.'
   Were the dinosaurs annihilated by nuclear weapons?
   Is ginseng literally manna from heaven?
   Are we the descendants of clones from outer space, the offshoots of ancient interplanetary experiments?
   These are just some of the amazing questions posed by Robin Collyns in amassing evidence for his mind-bending thesis: that cholera, cancer, smallpox and human life itself are the results of prehistoric DNA manipulation and germ warfare.

Quick flick reveals: A fantastically wide-ranging bag of bonkers theories that sadly never caught on.  I am, however, willing to embrace all of Collyns's claims, and start a religion built around them.  Will cost $5,000 to join.

Random paragraph: From my own research I have concluded that 'Adam' was not the first man on Earth, divinely created by God.  But as the story of Adam is allegorical it appears to relate, at least in part, to the first race of spacemen to visit and being to 'seed' the Earth.  In other words, this first race to visit the Earth may have been the Titans.


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The Girls

Title: The Girls

Author: John Bowen


Year of publication: 1986, Grafton edition 1987

Back cover blurb: WHAT HAVE THE GIRLS PUT IN THEIR SEPTIC TANK?
   Janet and Susan shared everything.  They stocked the rural Gift Shop they ran with hand-stitched smocks, goats' milk cheese, and their own celebrated elderflower wine. They slept in the same bed.  They were contented.
   But when an escaped boar wrecked their shop, the event was a harbinger of worse to come.  For some reason, the outside world seemed determined to undermine the delicate equilibirum of hteir unothordox domestic happiness.
   And when Susan showed signs of restlessness and Jan had it off in the back of a Transit with an early musical instrument salesman, the seeds of much future trouble were sown.  But just how far would hte Girls go in defence of their private world?

Quick flick reveals: There aren't many writing careers that can incorporate writing for Hetty Wainthrop Investigates and earning praise from Gore Vidal, but John Bowen has managed just that.  This looks like a highly readable, highly eccentric gem, full of quirky details and possibly the odd murder.

Random paragraph: '"I've brought a urine sample."  It was in a wine bottle, carefully corked.  Usually the girls recycled bottles for their own wine-making, but Jan was disposed to be generous.  "You can keep the bottle."


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The Fate of Mary Rose

Title: The Fate of Mary Rose

Author: Caroline Blackwood

Year of publication: 1981, Penguin edition 1988

Back cover blurb: Raped and horribly murdered, the body of ten-year-old Maureen Sutton is eventually discovered in woods near a sleepy commuter village in Kent.
   With nerve, inspiration and deadpan brilliance Caroline Blackwood draws us into the village to witness the macabre and devastating effects of this story on a local family: the historian Rowan Anderson, his wife Cressida and their sickly daughter, Mary Rose.

Reading reveals: Much of this book by hard-drinking journalist and Lucian Freud wife/muse Blackwood (she is the girl with enormous eyes who stares out from much of his early work) is remarkable.  The protagonist's misanthropy is unflinchingly presented to the reader, while his wife is a quietly terrifying model of obsessive selfishness.  The hysteria that grips the village is also unnerving, with previously sane characters whipped up into a frenzy of bloodlust.
   Unfortunately, Blackwood ballses it all up spectacularly at the conclusion, with plot threads she'd taken pains to establish just chapters before completely ignored, and events rushing to an unsatisfyingly limp finish.  Deadlines, eh?

Random paragraphs: 'I took her to a Greek restaurant in Soho.  She wouldn't drink anything except water.  She chose to eat only the cheapest things she saw on the menu.  "Why don't you have something more exciting?" I asked her.
   "I don't need excitement," she said.'

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Term of Trial

Title: Term of Trial

Author: James Barlow

Year of publication: 1961, Penguin edition 1973

Back cover blurb: Graham Wier, a timid, middle-aged teacher, drinks to ignore the jibes of his discontented wife and to forget the taunts of his rough pupils at the Railway Street Secondary School.
   Filled with self-disgust, he is ready to respond with affection and professional interest when fifteen-year old Shirley Taylor falls in love with him.
   Only to find himself facing trial on a charge of indecent assault.
   In the dock, deserted by his friends and despised by his wife, Graham Weir suddenly recovers the courage of his ideals to fight the small-minded prejudice that surrounds him.

Quick flick reveals: This book is just like that Police song, 'Walking on the Moon'.  From just a brief look it seems to be a superior exploration of a well-trodden theme.  You can almost feel the pre-swinging sixties grimness wafting off the page like coal dust.  One definitely for the 'to read' pile.  (There's a film version from 1962 starring Laurence Olivier.  Also stars Thora Hird, and therefore surely a must-see.)

Random paragraph: 'Then he heard the well-remembered, shrieky, detestable voice of Riley.  And what Riley was shouting was "Hit her in the tits!  Hit her in the tits!"  They like, Sylvan-Jones had said, to boast of their affairs, and this was Riley encouraging someone else's amours, no doubt.'


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Barometer Man

Title: Barometer Man

Author: John Vaizey

Year of publication: 1966, Panther edition 1971

Back cover blurb: POWER STRUGGLE - OR OUTRAGEOUS FARCE?

   When the Wardenship of an illustrious Cambridge college falls vacant, the jostling for power begins.  But the background to the struggle is a good deal less than sedate.  Donnish cocktail gatherings turn into small-scale riots... a lesbian hotel manageress is accidentally raped by a visiting group of African dignitaries... sexual romps take place between the lady governess of a men's prison and a timid young scientist... a clergyman goes slightly off his rocker wooing another man's wife... a sophisticated London dinner party is busted by the Vice Squad - this is a glimpse behind the sober facade of university life like nothing you'll ever find in C.P. Snow!

Quick flick reveals: John Vaizey was a distinguished economist and academic, with appointments at both Oxford and Cambridge and was ultimately made a baron in recognition of his services.  Who better then, to write a saucy swinging sixties-sex romp set in the world of university politics?  The inclusion of a 'funny rape' dates it badly and means that there's little chance of the work ever finding a significant audience again.  There's also a lingering sense that the cover rather sexes up the staid-looking contents, something that Panther Books got down to a fine art in the early seventies.

Random paragraph: 'Then mouthing, 'lavatory', I left the room.  I could hear my sister-in-law just coming in the front door with our screaming children.  I went into the downstairs lavatory, used it and decided to leave.  I opened the door and peeped out.  Iris's sister seemed to have got the pram wedged in the door.  It sounded as thought the children were being beaten.  There was so much noise that the people in the study came out to look.  Then the hall stand fell down with all the coats and hats on it.  Evidently it fell on a child, for after a muffled pause there was renewed screaming.'

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Eclipse

Title: Eclipse

Author: Margaret Tabor

Year of publication: 1980, Hamlyn edition 1982

Back cover blurb: 'I am Unity, held back in exile - haunted by my own life on the other side of an invisible screen'
   Unity Penfold returns home one afternoon... and finds it isn't there.
   - Her house has vanished.
   - No one has heard of her husband.
   - At the local school they know nothing of her children.
   - Unity's whole existence seems to have been wiped out.
  Then a clash with hooligans puts her in hospital with severe concussion.  She wakes to a world of nightmare and uncertainty - and a lonely, desperate fight to cling on to her identity.
   As the weeks pass, her struggle toughens and changes Unity so much that she becomes a new person.  Or does she?

Quick flick reveals: First-person narrative from the perspective of a fantastically boring-sounding woman in an extraordinary situation, which she narrates in the style of someone giving a Powerpoint presentation to Head Office.  Good to see that old chestnut of a plot development 'beaten up by hooligans' employed here.  I hadn't seen it for a while and was beginning to miss it.  If I had a time machine, I'd go back to 1980, get a film version of this book made on a low budget in Australia featuring David Hemmings, then in his drinking years (probably playing a doctor of some type),  and then travel forward to the present day, just so I could watch it at 12.50 a.m. on BBC2 at the weekend. (Obviously, this wouldn't be my first choice of destination, just something I'd get around to if I had an infinite number of goes...)

Random paragraph: 'We were also involved in rounding up rival gangs of children aged about 8, black and white respectively, for an American film being shot in the Cotswolds, and this was proving difficult, costly and a logistical nightmare.  And, in our spare moments, we were casting but not servicing a series of educational films to be shown in the States only.'


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The Harry Secombe Diet Book

Title: The Harry Secombe Diet Book

Author: Harry Secombe

Year of publication: 1983

Back cover blurb: After warnings from a doctor, and with his wife Myra's encouragement, Sir Harry Secombe has lost almost four stone in six months.  Here - in what is more than just a diet book - he shares the secrets of his success, giving all the information you need to lose weight and improve your health.
   As well as presenting a meal-by-meal 16-week medically-approved diet which will help you shed those superfluous pounds, he recounts how he has transformed his eating habits by learning to 'think healthy'.  There are food and health facts, and advice on exercise; hints on coping away from home, whether flying abroad or travelling up the motorway...
   And Sir Harry hasn't lost his sense of humour - this is probably the first seriously diet book that makes you laugh as well!

Quick flick reveals: These days celebrity diet and exercise plans are the domain of glamourous soap stars who temporarily let themselves go a bit as a career move.  In the 80s, however, there was more than enough room in that arena for Sir Harry Secombe.
   This book made me think.  Specifically, it made me think, 'yes, Harry Secombe was a lot fatter in the 70s than the 80s, I have never noticed that before'.  Here he explains exactly how he did it, in a friendly, approachable way filled with facts useful for anybody who wants to make that leap from 'morbidly obese' to merely 'clinically overweight'.  Actually looks a lot more sensible (and realistic) than a lot of the faddy nonsense that circulates today, blinding people with dubious science.

Random paragraph: 'When I hit it big in my career at last, I also hit it big on my belly.  There was a whole new world out there - and it all had food in it.  If I was working abroad, I had to fly and that meant whiling away the airborne hours with all the drinks and juices and snacks and meals they cared to wheel in my direction.  I had to have a special extension put on my seatbelt, though there was little risk of my being hurled out of my seat in a touch of turbulence.  On the contrary, when we landed, I  had to wait till the other passengers had got off before someone had time to come and lever me out.


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Hunting Tigers Under Glass

Title: Hunting Tigers Under Glass

Author: Mordecai Richler

Year of publication: 1969, Panther edition 1971

Back cover blurb: Mordecai Richler's deflations of human absurdities and pretensions in Hunting Tigers Under Glass are as merciless and hilarious as one would expect from the bestselling author of that scandalously funny novel Cocksure.  Above all, though, it is his unique ability to entertain that makes this book pure joy to read.

Quick flick reveals: Hunting Tigers Under Glass is the first collection of essays by celebrated Canadian author Richler, the contents of which originally appeared in such publications as The New York Review of Books and The New Statesman.  Subjects include Norman Mailer, super-heroes and 'jews in sport'.  Gives the impression of being somewhere in-between Tom Wolfe and Roland Barthes.  Looks very interesting indeed and the fact that it has been out-of-print for 41 years seems puzzling.

Random paragraph: 'Item: When Whiteman, one of the many Superman derivatives, this one published by the American Nazi Party, is asked whatever became one of the original Superman, her replied: "Old Supey succumbed to the influence of Jew pornography. . . . It seems Superman was putting his X-ray vision to immoral use and was picked up by the vice squad as a Peeping Tom."'

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