Thu 28 Mar 2013
Three by JOHN WELCOME: Reviews by George Kelley.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[6] Comments
Reviews by George Kelley
JOHN WELCOME – Run for Cover. Faber, UK, hardcover, 1958. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1959. Harper Perennial, paperback reprint, 1983.
I have nothing but praise for the Perennial Library series: their selections are high quality fiction attractively packaged and priced. John Welcome’s Run for Cover is fun reading: light as cotton candy. Former intelligence agent Richard Graham is drawn into a tangled plot when the manuscript he is reviewing is stolen.
The haunting aspect: the manuscript was written by a man Graham knew was dead, Rupert Rawle. But the dead man has come alive and Graham is back on the trail of the man be once idolized, only to have Raw}e leave him for dead during a WWII commando mission. The writing is slick, cultured, and professional. The plotting is fast-paced, wild, and unpredictable. Perfect for vacation reading.
JOHN WELCOME – Stop at Nothing. Faber, UK, hardcover, 1959. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1960. Harper Perennial, paperback reprint, 1983.
Stop at Nothing is John Welcome’s best book. Simon Herald, former racing car star, faces 40 and a bitter divorce when he falls in love with a younger woman whose brother is hunted by vicious men in order to gain the secret of a formula that makes horses run faster.
Forget about the corny plot; Welcome fires away from page one and doesn’t let up on the action until a couple hundred pages later. Hairbreadth escape follows hairbreadth escape as Herald faces overwhelming odds, brutal beatings, a psychopathic killer, and an obsessed millionaire. What more could you ask for? This is seat-of-your-pants escapism at its best.
JOHN WELCOME – Go for Broke. Faber, UK, hardcover, 1972. Walker, US, hardcover, 1972. Harper Perennial, paperback reprint, 1983.
Go for Broke is one of John Welcome’s lesser works, but it still provides more excitement than most thrillers. Eric Vaughan, wealthy financier, accuses Richard Graham of.cheating at cards. Graham is mystified by the false charges, but finds himself drawn into a web of international intrigue where the seeds of treachery and double-cross in the past haunt the present.
Graham finds himself a social outcast, discharged from his part-time espionage position, and forced to sell his meager land holdings to pay for his legal defense. But he falls in love with a mysterious American woman and finds an unexpected clue to the frame he’s been put in.
The flaw in Go for Broke is the boring courtroom proceedings that take up too much of the book; once outside the stuffy legal chambers, the pages fly by. The conclusion will surprise no one, but it’s curiously satisfying.
Editorial Note: A criminous bibliography for John Welcome can be found here on LibraryThing, along with a brief biography, which concludes: “He [John Needham Huggard Brennan] took up writing, under the pen name of John Welcome, to relieve the tedium of the country solicitor’s life.”
March 28th, 2013 at 12:04 am
George praises the books released as part of Harper’s Perennial Library series, and I agree, 100%. Their crime fiction output ranged from old-fashioned classic mysteries not easily found anywhere else (e.g., Henry Wade), hard-boiled PI fiction (e.g., Wade Miller) to 1960s and 70s suspense and espionage fiction (e.g., John Welcome), all with covers designed to fit the stories perfectly.
March 28th, 2013 at 3:53 am
Coincidentally, I was looking for a list of the Harper Perennial Classics of Crime just the other day. I was surprised that there wasn’t a list somewhere on the other pages of the immense Mystery*File website. Or is there and was I careless in my scrolling and searching?
I know that Harper reprinted a bunch of titles that Jacques Barzun called his “Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction but I wanted to know which ones were actually published. I know it wasn’t all fifty or else — among others — we would have a paperback of Murder on the Moor (which I am trying to get reprinted, BTW). And did Harper reprint any of the other fifty? The first set runs from 1900 to 1950, the second set from 1950 to 1975. Website searches turned up the lists themselves all over the place, but not a list of which titles Harper released under their Perennial imprint. Anyone have this info?
March 28th, 2013 at 9:40 am
John
Coming up with a list of all of the Perennial Library series (the crime-related ones) has been in the back of my mind for quite a while, but it’s never gone beyond the “thinking about it stage.”
Even though I think it would be great to put together a complete set, I don’t believe the books are considered to be collectible by anyone but you and I, and maybe a small handful of others. I bought most of them as they came out, if I saw them in stores, but at the time there were I wasn’t interested in — such as the John Welcome books, unfortunately. I wasn’t a big fan of spy fiction back then, but George’s reviews make me regret passing them by.
March 29th, 2013 at 7:28 am
I commented yesterday but it never posted.
Anyway, I’d love to see a complete list if you get one. Perennial published a lot of interesting stuff, including Ross Thomas’s Oliver Bleeck books and C. W. Grafton’s BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT. I used to get review copies from them but I disposed of a lot of them over the years.
March 29th, 2013 at 10:13 am
Thanks for getting in touch with me directly, Jeff. The comments you’d left over the past couple of weeks had gone straight to the spam folder, from where I’ve just rescued them.
I don’t know why something like this happens, but it does once in a while. If it ever happens to anyone else, shoot me off an email.
March 30th, 2013 at 12:57 pm
The best spy-stories are Len Deighton’s .
Now, decades after the end of the Cold War, they are not really topical, and seem a bit dusty, but quality-wise, they still hold up as a witness of times gone by .
The Doc