The Return of Penguin Greens

 

From the 1930s onwards crime novels published by Penguin had covers using a lot of green ink. This led to a clear distinction between two different kinds of novel – effectively all other novels (orange) and crime novels (green). This had the unintended effect of implying that these were different reading experiences or had different statuses when, of course, some ‘crime’ novels are simply among the best novels of any kind whereas orange novels came to seem more middle- to-upper brow even if they might be in practice be much less well written, ambition and plausible than novels by Dorothy M. Sayers, say, or Raymond Chandler. 

Famously it was on returning from a visit to Agatha Christie that Allen Lane, standing on a platform at Exeter station, had the idea for Penguin paperbacks and in the 1950s he once celebrated Christie’s birthday by printing in one go a million copies of her books (10 different novels x 100,000).

Crime of every description has therefore, from the most horrific to the most genteel, always stood at the heart of the entire Penguin enterprise. For reasons not now clear in the 1980s it was decided to drop the green spine and publish all fiction with an orange spine. Then design moved on again, often restricting the Penguin element to the bird logo itself and only keeping hints of Penguin orange. Around the same time light blue Pelicans were also dropped, with the Penguin colour schemes restricted to the black-spined Penguin Classics or the various shades of eau-de-Nil and grey for Penguin Modern Classics.

I have published various series as a Penguin employee over the years—Great Ideas, Little Black Classics and others—and it is really almost with a sense of embarrassment that it has taken until 2023 to realize that one of the most potent and fun traditional Penguin colour codes was simply lying around waiting to be reused: Green for Crime. I mention this because it is at some level shameful that it should have taken so many years to come up with something so straightforward that it barely qualifies as a concept or an idea: why didn’t we do this a decade ago? Two decades?

Lurking within Penguin Modern Classics we already published some of the greatest crime writers – Dorothy B. Hughes’s sensational In a Lonely Place, Eric Ambler’s great pre-War thrillers, Chester Himes’s wonderful, frenzied fantasies of Harlem, Ross Macdonald’s novels of southern California’s squalor lurking under the pretty surface. I am myself responsible at Penguin for the backlist of two great writers in the genre, John le Carré and Len Deighton, and yet had not noticed until very recently that these could be assembled into a matchless series of the greatest crime writers.

Once, very belatedly, we decided to proceed with the idea it seemed a shame not to add other writers. We already published Georges Simenon’s extraordinary books, of which he wrote so many (and at such a consistent level of excellence) that it would make sense to showcase a couple simply to give readers a way into his enormous oeuvre. Josephine Tey’s novels had just come out of copyright, so this provided the opportunity to publish her superb, unsettling The Franchise Affair and Brat Farrar. We also had C.S. Forester’s wonderfully nasty little shocker Payment Deferred about a murderous South London miser (written long before Forester became famous for the Hornblower novels).

For the series to be fresh though it needed some new discoveries and a lot of time was spent reading sometimes terrible books (please do not read anything by Peter Cheyney!) but also books which had just aged badly. I was particularly sorry that Helen MacInnes now seemed so lacklustre as my parents had loved her novels of international espionage when they were published – but now they seemed to consist predominantly of people endlessly walking around, having meals and checking into hotels, with very occasional outbursts of unengaging and tasteful violence.

Battling through some quite neither-here-nor-there stuff though made it much easier to spot wonderful things. Many recent crime novelists remain in print because of Kindle editions or print-on-demand versions, but it was very exciting to find two giants of British thriller writing from the 1970s and 1980s, Anthony Price and Michael Gilbert, available to be discovered. Both giants in their day, their work still has an ingenuity and excellence which has in no way dated – so Price’s Other Paths to Glory and Gilbert’s Game Without Rules joined the list. And I was tipped off to try Dick Lochte, whose 1985 debut Sleeping Dog is a classic, extremely funny piece of neo-noir with the simple but useful advice: if you are a jaded private investigator in L.A. and a girl on roller-skates asks you to help her find her missing dog, don’t say yes. The other great find was the Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo (real name Tarō Hirai – his pen name derives from the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe). Between the wars he wrote a number of thrilling and disturbing classics, some with a wonderful Tintin-like flavour (Gold Mask and The Black Lizard) and others with the depravity dialled up (Beast in the Shadows). All three of these are in the series. 

We are now finishing work on a third set of ten, including some just wonderfully recommendable stuff! Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love, Anthony Price’s The Labyrinth Makers and John le Carré’s The Night Manager. Best of all (but of course they are all best) is a long forgotten classic of New York City noir, The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin, set in a gloomy wartime Manhattan and Coney Island. The fate of its decent psychiatrist hero as he unwillingly wades deeper and deeper into an inexplicable, surreal and truly horrible urban underbelly has to be experienced to be believed.

Here are the three sets, with the third not published until June 2024:

1. Davis Grubb NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
2. Edogawa Rampo BEAST IN THE SHADOWS
3. Dorothy B. Hughes IN A LONELY PLACE
4. Josephine Tey THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR
5. Eric Ambler JOURNEY INTO FEAR
6. John le Carré CALL FOR THE DEAD
7. Georges Simenon MAIGRET AND THE HEADLESS CORPSE
8. Len Deighton SS-GB
9. Ross Macdonald THE DROWNING POOL
10. Chester Himes COTTON COMES TO HARLEM
11. Dick Lochte SLEEPING DOG
12. Raymond Chandler THE BIG SLEEP & FAREWELL, MY LOVELY
13. Anthony Price OTHER PATHS TO GLORY
14. Michael Gilbert GAME WITHOUT RULES
15. Georges Simenon MAIGRET’S REVOLVER
16. C.S.Forester PAYMENT DEFERRED
17. Edogawa Rampo THE BLACK LIZARD
18. Eric Ambler THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS
19. Josephine Tey BRAT FARRAR
20. John le Carré TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
21. Anthony Price THE LABYRINTH MAKERS
22. Chester Himes A RAGE IN HARLEM
23. John le Carré THE NIGHT MANAGER
24. Edogawa Rampo GOLD MASK
25. Ian Fleming FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
26. Georges Simenon NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS
27. John Franklin Bardin THE DEADLY PERCHERON
28. Ross Macdonald THE UNDERGROUND MAN
29. Shirley Jackson WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
30. Cornell Woolrich I MARRIED A DEAD MAN

Any suggestions anyone might have for unfairly out-of-print crime and espionage classics would be warmly received!

Simon Winder is the Publishing Director at Penguin Press. 

From the Domestic to the Dominant

CALL FOR CHAPTERS
‘From the Domestic to the Dominant: The New Face of Crime Fiction’
Edited Collection 

Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), The Silent Wife (ASA Harrison), The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins), are just three recent novels that have captured the commercial imagination and conceivably shifted the critical perception of what a contemporary crime thriller is and should be doing in the second decade of the 21st Century. The terrain is domestic, the narrative perspective and criminal perpetrator firmly female. However, the political is of course ever present in relation to gender and society. The crime thriller has always been a peculiarly modern form. Its transition to an urgent, necessary and contemporary form of literary expression is arguable, and lies at the core of the discussion within this collection.

Julia Crouch (Cuckoo, The Long Fall, Tarnished and Every Vow You Break) recognised as the originator of the term ‘Domestic Noir’ stated that it ‘takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience.’ 

Domestic Noir is often concerned with crimes of an extremely intimate nature. Renee Knight’s Disclaimer and Claire Kendal’s The Book of You, both deal with unusually invasive forms of stalking. Christobel Kent’s The Crooked House and Erin Kelly’s The Poison Tree both detail the horror of long-buried secrets surfacing. Many of the novels deal explicitly with what Rebecca Whitney (The Liar’s Chair) describes as ‘toxic marriage and its fallout’, such as Emma Chapman’s How to be a Good Wife, and Lucie Whitehouse’s Before we Met. There are also versions of the marriage thriller that present economically or sexually independent women transgressing, such as Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard and Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau. 

Children and adolescents often figure in Domestic Noir as incendiary characters such as in Emma Donoghue’s Room, Kate Hamer’s The Girl in the Red Coat, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin. Adolescent girls occupy centre stage in Megan Abbott’s reinterpretation of Lolita, The End of Everything, her twisted take on cheerleaders, Dare Me, and mass hysteria at a high school, The Fever. Also relevant here are Gillian Flynn’s first two novels Sharp Objects and Dark Places, and Tana French’s The Secret Place. 

Domestic Noir is a particularly crystallised version of crime fiction. These are novels that not only toe a strong narrative line but also address the very real issues of life, death, and how we relate to each other. As there has not yet been a publication that addresses Domestic Noir, we welcome chapters on all aspects of the sub-genre for a volume to be presented to a major UK or international publisher. You may wish to submit on the following topics, though this is by no means an exhaustive list: 

-    Literary antecedents of Domestic Noir (i.e. In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes)
-    Female perpetrators, female gangsters, and women who kill
-    21st century crime fiction and its cultural relevance
-    The genesis of crime sub-genres
-    Gendered and generational readings of Domestic Noir
-    Crime and mental health in the 21st century
-    Location, geographies, and race in Domestic Noir
-    Intimate crimes (stalking, rape etc.)
-    New work and domestic patterns
-    Domestic Noir and the Bluebeard cycle.
-    Suburban Gothic
-    Small and big screen interpretations of Domestic Noir

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Abstracts of 400 – 500 words including up to five keywords should be sent to Laura Ellen Joyce (l.joyce@uea.ac.uk) or Henry Sutton (henry.sutton@uea.ac.uk) by 18 March 2016

Notification of acceptance: 22 April 2016

Full chapters of between 6000 – 8000 words are due by: 16 September 2016

Final versions are due by: 31 December 2016

Sarah Weinman's Book To Die For - The Late Man by James Preston Girard

Sarah Weinman is News Editor for Publishers Marketplace, where she works on Publishers Lunch, the industry’s essential daily read with more than 40,000 subscribers, as well as additional projects.  She also writes the more-or-less monthly “Crimewave” column for the National Post.  Previously she wrote “Dark Passages,” a monthly online mystery & suspense column for the Los Angeles Times, and "The Criminalist", a monthly online for the Barnes & Noble Review. Earlier in her career, she was the Baltimore Sun's crime fiction columnist and an editor for GalleyCat, mediabistro.com’s publishing industry news blog.

Her reviews and articles have appeared in a wide range of print and web publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer to name a few.  Her short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies including Dublin Noir, Baltimore Noir, Damn Near Dead, Expletive Deleted and A Hell of a Woman. 

From October 2003 until January 2011, she ran the influential blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, which was shortlisted for an Anthony Award for Website in 2008 and she was nominated for an Anthony Award for Special Services the same year. 

  

In a perfect world, all talented writers would be around forever, writing books at their own pace, climbing bestseller lists, and acquiring a devoted coterie of fans to worship at their feet. But of course, this world is far from perfect, and wonderful writers fade into the collective conscious with shocking ease. Which is probably why most of you haven’t heard of Kansas writer James Preston Girard. That’s a shame, because more people should.

Some of this lack of recognition is due to Girard’s sparse output. He’s written three novels to date, and one of them – A KILLING IN KANSAS (1991) – was published under the pseudonym Jeffrey Tharp. The two under his own name are separated by a nine-year gap, and SOME SURVIVE (2002) was put out as a paperback original. There’s been nothing since; no wonder his name has fallen off the radar somewhat. 

At his best, Girard expertly combined the elements of a good crime novel with nuanced psychological depth, really getting at the heart of his characters and what makes them tick. The crimes are merely a catalyst for human conflicts, and by showing how people’s individual lives are affected by murder placed in the backdrop, the result is, oddly enough, far more profound and effective.

I first heard of him a few years ago when SOME SURVIVE had a fairly prominent place amongst the special title listings at Partners & Crime. The then-manager was a huge fan, and others spoke very highly of Girard’s earlier work, THE LATE MAN (1993). I knew it was a book I’d get around to reading eventually, but since the later book was more readily available, I read it first. SOME SURVIVE was good. THE LATE MAN, however, was in a whole other class.

There are two books I want to emulate, copy, steal from. One is IN A LONELY PLACE by Dorothy B. Hughes. The other is THE LATE MAN, set in 1980s Wichita. Running in the background of the story is the once-dormant investigation of a BTK-esque serial killer who places roses by each victim’s side that flares up once again when a new victim is discovered. Though there is a resolution, the book is really about the lives and flaws of its three main protagonists: police Captain L.J. Loomis, journalist Sam Haun (the “late man” because he works the overnight shift at the paper) and rising star Stosh Babicki.

Each character wrestles with palpable demons, mostly to do with failing relationships: Loomis has lost his wife to another man and misses her and their children, whom he does not see, terribly. Haun’s wife Claire and younger son are dead, and in its aftermath, he chances upon Claire’s diary, confessing in great detail to an affair with the newspaper’s main boss. Who, at this time, is having his own affair with the intelligent but impressionable Babicki. Is that affair a case of real love, manipulation, or something in between? Babicki doesn’t really know for sure, but, as she discovers, it’s a vise she must ungrip herself from.

THE LATE MAN is ultimately about loss of every kind, and Girard writes of such things with an almost terrible knowledge; even if he didn’t know about it personally, his characters do with unfathomable depths. Though at times uncomfortable, the writing is so beautiful and understated that the emotional heft packs a wallop. What’s also gripping is what is left unspoken and unresolved; Girard doesn’t hit the reader over the head with revelations and conclusions but allows them to find them out of their own accord. The book found a small audience when published nearly 20 years ago, but if anything, it stands up better to time now, and I urge all to track down a copy to discover for themselves.