I had mentioned earlier that I had seen
this “stall selling really old crime fiction with those sensational covers that
were published in the 50s and 60s …” and “he was selling them for 50 rupees
each …” I looked at them and was tempted … wanted to buy a few for posterity at
least … anyway, at that point I didn’t want to pay the price quoted … and then
I went on to buy the books I mentioned in Part 2 … I completed the purchase and
moved ahead … by this time Vinod, Uma, and Srikanth had left … as I moved
towards the end of the road, I saw another spread on the pavement … and all
these books were there … I hunkered down and started eagerly putting together
my bundle … I asked the price and the chap said “some 20 Rupees and some 30
Rupees” … this was great and I was glad that I didn’t purchase similar books
from the other chap at a higher cost … I wanted to pick up a representative
haul from there … I picked up each book and saw the name of the author, read
the blurb, saw the covers, looked inside … and curiously almost all the books
spread were from the collection of one Capt
D B Parthasarathi and he had presented these books to one Pasha Educational Training Institute,
Hyderabad … anyway, I picked up five books from the spread …
I had read about Mickey Spillane and his detective Mike Hammer while doing some google research on the Macdonalds and discovered
that Mike Hammer also belongs to the hardboiled detective brigade … it was negatively
commented during Spillane’s time that the Mike Hammer novels contained a high
dose of sex and violence … there were both supporters and detractors for Spillane’s
novels … and the Signet editions were especially noted for their ‘dramatic
front cover illustrations’ … the cover of the Spillane novel I bought last Sunday
looks largely tame, but look at the crosshairs and you’ll see the ‘dramatic’ effect
… and incidentally this is a 1963 edition …
I hadn’t heard about the authors of the
next two books I picked up … I liked the name of the detective, Mike Shayne, in one and the name of the
author, Dan Marlowe, in the other … from
what I read, Brett Halliday’s Mike
Shayne series was very popular, went into many editions, and was also
translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Japanese and Hebrew ... oh wow!! The novels were also made into radio shows and movies ... I don't know if Shayne too is hardboiled ... must read and find out ... Dolls are Deadly is a 1961 edition ...
Dan Marlowe also wrote in the 1960s,
going on till 1986 … and he had two series-es, sort of … one with Johnny
Killain as the detective and the other with Drake … the one I bought that day
is the first Johnny Killain mystery … the Doorway
to Death copy that I got is a first edition, published in 1959!! Isn’t that great … ha ha …
and incidentally, both have ‘dramatic’ covers!!
I also picked up a June 1957 issue of Argosy … the magazine began as a
children’s magazine and ‘graduated’ into a pulp short story magazine … it was
published from 1881 through 1978 … a number of famous American writers have
been featured in its pages … as I flipped through the book, I saw some old
advertisements for tobacco, tools, and curiously, writing schools!!
Then there was this collection of stories
presented by the Master of Suspense and Horror … Alfred Hitchcock … Bar the Door … I was never a fan of the
horror and macabre genre … and this book is subtitled, 13 great tales of terror by masters of the macabre … eew … but I like
watching Hitchcock movies, and picked this book as a fan of the presenter … the
anthology contains stories by H G Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Peter Fleming, and
others … this book is a 1962 edition …
And this nicely full-stopped my trip to
Abids … very satisfying trip and haul … he he … and thanks to Capt D B Parthasarathi ...
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